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 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…
New York- Persistent crises in Ukraine and Iraq, and now of course the reoccurring terror in Gaza, have overshadowed the succession impasse in Kabul to a good degree in terms of media focus. Afghanistan is at yet another perilous crossroads that…
New York- With the partial election results from the April 5 vote trickling out from the Independent Election Commission (IEC) along Jalalabad Road on the edge of Kabul favoring Abdullah Abdullah, the world may witness the first peaceful transition of…
New York- I had a couple of long term projects published at the end of this past week. The first was an examination of the little known history conjoining Mali in West Africa with North Korea in Northeast Asia over at…
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…
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…
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…
Kuala Lumpur- The new issue of MLM is out and online at Jamestown for subscribers. I have an article about the life and connections of Hamburg’s slippery Mamoun Darkazanli and briefs on the IMU finally confirming the death of Tahir…
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…
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…
Dushanbe- I got the boot from the local police in Osh for taking an undesirable photo of ethnic cleansing graffiti being whitewashed over in time for UNHCR head Antonio Guterres’ visit to the wrecked city. The official reasoning was…
Osh- It is somewhat of a hackneyed term to call a place like the Ferghana valley an ethnic “tinderbox” but in the case of this month’s staggering disturbances in the cities of Osh and Jalalabad, that type of description could…
Osh- I have a new piece in today’s edition of Asia Times titled “Kyrgyzstan Votes “Yes” Amid Death, Fear” on Sunday’s quietly successful referedum vote here in southern Kyrgyzstan’s deadly ethnic jigsaw puzzle here in the Ferghana valley. Secuirty was heavy…
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…