Politics & Power Quote by Ed Markey

The word “massacre” isn’t a description here so much as a diplomatic weapon. Ed Markey, speaking as a U.S. politician, is doing two things at once: importing moral clarity into a fog of authoritarian denial, and outsourcing part of the accusation to “human rights groups” so it can travel farther with fewer political consequences. That attribution is the tell. It lets him sound unequivocal while keeping an escape hatch for the rituals of statecraft: hearings, statements, sanctions that can be calibrated without claiming America is the final judge of the facts.

The line lands hardest because it collapses the usual euphemism of foreign policy. “Recently killed” refuses the passive voice (“died,” “clashes,” “unrest”) that regimes like Islam Karimov’s relied on after the Andijan killings of 2005, when security forces fired on demonstrators and the government tried to throttle the story. Markey’s phrasing treats the event not as a contested narrative but as an abuse of power with a clear perpetrator: “the corrupt regime of President Karimov.” Naming the leader matters; it shrinks the distance between an abstract state and an accountable person.

The subtext is aimed as much at Washington as Tashkent. The U.S. had strategic reasons to tolerate Karimov’s Uzbekistan in the post-9/11 security landscape. Markey’s sentence pressures that bargain, signaling that “stability” bought through repression carries a reputational price. It’s less a report than a test: how long can allies be managed as partners if they’re behaving like enemies of their own people?