Answer: the article's author has absolutely no clue, so he's going to incorrectly repeat some irrelevant, half-understood anecdotes he got from people in his Ro

Answer: the article's author has absolutely no clue, so he's going to incorrectly repeat some irrelevant, half-understood anecdotes he got from people in his Rolodex, and pull the reliable old hand-waving trick of blaming it on poverty without any concrete explaining why these specific poor people are rioting at this specific time. Gross nonsense like The Uzbeks are phenotypically more similar to East Asians, while Kyrgyz tend to look more like Russians or Persians could have been fact-checked in about 30 seconds by looking up images on Google or Wikimedia Commons, but clearly no one bothered. If you're curious about Central Asia, the two blogs below are good starting points: http://www.neweurasia.net/ http://www.neweurasia.net/ http://www.registan.net/ http://www.registan.net/ Neweurasia is written mostly in Russian or local languages, and then retranslated into English. They've been quite active on Twitter in circulating images and translating reports/tweets about what's going on in Osh. Registan is written in English by American grad students with academic interests in the region (and also tends to have more "meta" posts, fisking/bemoaning godawful mainstream media coverage of their region like this Slate article).