Category: Central Asia

Turning Up In Türkmenistan

New York-Some twenty years ago I wound up in one of our world’s most hermetically-sealed nation-states, Saparmurat Niyazov’s Türkmenistan. It was a place I never intended to visit nor was it part of a global bucket list to visit every…

City of Fire

City of Fire from Derek Flood on Vimeo. New York- The above video project, City of Fire, about the ethnic violence that rocked southern Kyrgyzstan’s portion of the Ferghana Valley in June 2010 was one such unfinished project. Often termed a…

A Decade of War and Peace

Barcelona- Partly out of boredom and partly out of the itch to simply create something new out of old, I threw together this photo montage over the weekend. In this era of digital photography where one shoots thousands of frames…

The Kalashnikov

New York- The Avtomat Kalashnikova assault rifle, known popularly as the AK-47 or Kalashnikov, became one of the defining symbols of Third World national liberation movements and a physical manifestation of anti-imperialist thought in the second half of the twentieth…

The Fabled City

New York- In sorting through some old belongings today I found a couple of now ancient-seeming portfolios which I went to a lot of trouble to make at the tail end of the portfolio era. In what turned out to…

Voice of America Appearance

Abu Dhabi- Yesterday, I appeared on Voice of America’s Russian language news service talking about my experiences and observations in southern Kyrgyzstan before and after the June 27 referendum on the country’s future. I was interviewed by my Jamestown colleague…

The Buddha Sleeps in Dushanbe

Dushanbe- I took a quiet stroll through Tajikistan’s Museum of National Antiquities this morning after a friend here told me about a giant sleeping Buddha there in what I guessed would be the incredible Hellenic-Buddhist fusion of the now long…

Into Southern Kyrgyzstan

Osh- I’ve made it to Osh in Kyrgyzstan’s troubled Ferghana valley of orchards and ethnic cleansing. The vote on the future of the interim government (and subsequently the October election that will follow) of Roza Otunbayeva will be held here…