Well first, in order for their widely spread and bizarre rumor “uzbek mafia lost 500 girls to kazakhs” to be true one should indeed suppose that it is indeed possible to lose something that does NOT belong to you to someone else.

Second, that statement presupposes that people are indeed a bunch of dumb sheep that could be ordered to do whatever “uzbek mafia” wants them to do.

Think about it for a second. Who would those 500 girls have to be in order for such rumors to be even remotely true? Even an average mind with a slightest sense of intelligence (or logic for that matter) would register that there is something wrong with that statement. Now I am not denying that there is human trafficking, I am just amazed by uzbek explanation of the underlying factors that’s all.

If the fact that this rumor originates in Uzbekistan and is widely accepted as a cause for missing girls by a large number of population does not make it uzbek then I don’t know what could.

Or would you now say that Uzbeks in Samarqand are not representative of the whole nation or their ethnicity because every person is unique? Wouldn’t that make YOUR statement “dangerous”?

No matter how you look at it or try to slice and dice the information (young, old, professional, street vendors, rich or poor) each nation (especially in CA) has a fundamental set of values, traditions and a system of beliefs which form its mentality which in turn differentiates it from another.

Those are taught in the school, in your neighborhood and in your family. Plus they are confirmed by the same society you live in. At the end, these set of values become ingrained in your thinking process. They form a prism through which people look at the world and try to find the cause & effect between two different events (in our case the disappearance of girls and uzbek mafia).

Anyway, I think I made my point more than clear here and in my post in uzbek blog (by the way check the second comment and you will see that yet another uzbek thinks the explanation is quite a plausible one).

Cheers!

The point being that Uzbekistan and Kazakstan and all the Central Asia republics have now joined the 21st century, where it is very difficult indeed to find common characteristics of thinking or relating to the world among an ethnic group. Rural and urban grow further from one another, young and old exist in different worlds, the rich and poor have vastly different opportunities, choices, and lifestyles. To place an ethnic group into one “mentality” is to deny the reality of our very complicated world.

sermon ended. Amen.

I don’t understand what makes classifying people’s mentality as such so dangerous? The word “mentality” can be applied to groups (ref. English dictionary) so there is no need to be overly drammatic about it.

The fact that you divide uzbeks into rural or urban, etc. does not make any less uzbeks (unless they are nominal uzbeks, i.e. living abroad and having been influenced by non-uzbek culture and way of thinking).

My experience shows that people CAN be characterized along ethnic lines especially in places like CA where ethnicity is closely tied with a system of beliefs and a particular thought process.

So if you speak about people across the border from Tajikistan, you may through your “unique” perspective out of the window. Uzbeks there are dictated what type of crop to plant and what to think.

That “unique” environment generates such statements as “uzbak mafia lost to kazakhs 500 girls”. For this to be possible and even thinkable people must think that girls have no rights, i.e. people are commodity.

With the way the country run, they may not be far from truth and that, my friend, what makes uzbek mentality what it is.