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In 2005, the Uzbek government invented a group called “Akromiya” to justify a massacre of protesters. Now I worry the US government will do the same.
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On May 13, 2005, the Uzbek government killed over 700 civilians gathered in the eastern city of Andijon to protest the economic, social, and political conditions of Uzbekistan. Prompted by the imprisonment and subsequent jailbreak of popular local businessmen, the crowd grew to 10,000 people, some drawn by a rumor that their dictator, President Karimov, would address the largest protest in Uzbekistan’s history.
Instead, military forces greeted the demonstrators. According to the Uzbek government, the forces targeted only armed insurgents, 187 of whom were killed. According to nearly all other accounts, the military fired indiscriminately into the crowd, murdering at least 700 people, including children.
At the center of the massacre was a group the Uzbek government called “Akromiya”. According to the Uzbek government, Akromiya armed the militants, Akromiya gave the orders, Akromiya was responsible for the deaths of Uzbek citizens in Andijon. Akromiya was a menace that had to be stamped out at any cost.
There was one problem with this theory: Akromiya — by the accounts of Uzbek and international human rights groups, political organizations, journalists, citizens, and accused Akromiya members themselves — did not exist.
The Uzbek government had invented “Akromiya” in reaction to mounting frustration among the Uzbek public. When protests erupted, Akromiya became the all-purpose label slapped on any Uzbek who dared to dissent. Uzbeks accused of being in “Akromiya” were baffled. “Surely it’s clear that Akromiya is just a myth,” exclaimed Abdulboiz Ibrahimov, a businessman imprisoned for being an Akromiya terrorist.
It was clear, but it did not matter. What mattered was the power to create propaganda and use force. Against this, the average Uzbek citizen was helpless. Over twenty years later, there has never been justice for the slain of Andijon.
But it did not take long for the myth of “Akromiya” to be debunked. I know, because I was the one who debunked it.
When I was a graduate student in an Indiana University MA program that the Trump administration defunded despite the university’s willingness to put snipers on the roofs during student protests, I published a paper, “Inventing Akromiya: The Role of Uzbek Propagandists in the Andijon Massacre,” in the peer-reviewed academic journal Demokratizatsiya.
That paper got me got banned from Uzbekistan. It angered US think tanks. It helped some Uzbeks get asylum — though as the West turns autocratic, I wonder what good that did them.
“You’re killing your career early,” my PhD advisor wryly noted, a refrain I’d hear for the next twenty years. He wondered if I should have gone easier on Western accomplices of Uzbekistan’s propagandists: the “war on terror” think-tank crowd. I said I’d rather kill my career than do nothing when hundreds of people are killed. If there was to be no recourse for the victims of Andijon, I at least wanted the truth to be told. Maybe the future would be different. Maybe there could be justice then.
I published the paper on the website Academia to make it free to all. In 2025, Academia swallowed my work and vomited it out as AI for sale. Nothing is free anymore: not research, not people, not truth.
I’ve told the story of Akromiya for twenty years. I’m telling it again now, because today is No King’s Day, and I am afraid that “Antifa” is the American Akromiya: a fabricated entity made by state propagandists to persecute anyone who opposes the government.
The future is different than what I dreamt in 2005, but not for Uzbekistan. The alternate future belongs to America, where justice is a quaint and rusted thing.
It is morning in Missouri, raining after a long drought, thunder crashing like pent-up rage. It is mourning in Missouri as I write this article, worried about American protesters. There is a dark joke that Uzbeks used to tell after the Andijon massacre:
Q: Can an Uzbek participate in a demonstration in Uzbekistan?
A: Yes, but only once.
* * *
Trump and his backers have been building the “antifa” boogeyman since his first term, when it was used as an intentionally vague catch-all for anyone who opposed them. Those four years were marked by the largest number of protests in US history. Topics ranged from civil rights to labor rights to climate action to impeachment, but one unifying factor was disgust with the Trump administration.
Many of these protests continued under the Biden administration and resulted in public anger at Biden along with Trump. The reason for the anger was that nothing meaningful was being done to improve the dismal conditions of American life — including curbing the threat of police violence, which Biden had promised to do. Instead of stopping police violence, Biden built Cop Cities and funded ICE at record levels, creating the infrastructure Trump uses to make his “antifa” fantasies a grim reality. There was no reprieve for activists, only a continuum of state violence.
But Biden never used the word “antifa” to describe the protesters his administration targeted. He couldn’t: he proclaimed he was running to stop fascism in the form of Trump. In reality, he was “reaching across the aisle” to make handshake deals with fascism’s backers. When Trump returned to the White House, Biden greeted him with “Welcome home” and a smile. The “antifa” rhetoric came home, too.
In 2025, “antifa” transformed from a spurious term sputtered by propagandists into a threat with real weight. In 2020, Mark Bray, a historian of activist movements, said that antifa cannot be designated as a terrorist organization because “the groups are loosely organized, and they aren’t large enough to cause everything Trump blames them for.” In September 2025, Trump declared “antifa” a terrorist organization through an executive order, and Bray fled to Spain after receiving death threats calling him an “antifa-aligned professor”.
“Antifa” has long been invoked as a reason to deploy American troops against American civilians. Since the No Kings Day protest in June, Trump has sent or proposed sending the military to major US cities while sending ICE everywhere. Because there is no crisis to combat, the focus is on “pre-crime” through National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7): a list of sweeping sentiments that the administration claims make any citizen a potential threat. As journalist Ken Klippenstein noted, “The plain truth is that NSPM-7 is a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda.”
Trump decreed he would designate “antifa” as a terrorist organization under RICO. Ironically, the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act was codified to stop organized crime: including the mobsters from whom Trump took inspiration, most notably Meyer Lansky and Trump’s mentor, mafia lawyer Roy Cohn.
Using RICO against “antifa” is not only an act of revenge on those who anger Trump, but an attack on the integrity of RICO itself. Under Trump, RICO is now a tool of a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. Somewhere, Lansky and Cohn are looking up, flames reflected in their eyes, smiling.
* * *
The name “Akromiya” came from the group’s alleged “leader”, Akrom Yo’ldoshev, an Uzbek writer who was puzzled to hear that he was the frontman of a nationwide terrorist movement, and less bemused when it landed him in prison.
Yo’ldoshev was the author of a popular tract, The Road to Faith, published in 1992 after the government of Uzbekistan had stopped pushing mandatory atheism and started pushing a narrow nationalist form of Islam. Unlike the government’s strict and sudden edicts, The Road to Faith was a freewheeling guide for confused citizens of a newly independent state.
In 2005, I wrote, “In a parallel universe, one can imagine The Road to Faith supplanting Dianetics and Hollywood-style Kabballah guides among those seeking a fast and easy spiritual fix, so devoid is it of political, geographical, and, to some degree, philosophical affiliation. There is no mention of an organized Akromiya group in the pamphlet or of a desire to form one. This correlates to the bafflement expressed by many alleged Akromists when accused of taking part in the group’s plans—not only did they deny affiliation with a terrorist Akromiya group, but they had no idea such a group existed and found the notion of a political organization built around Yo’ldoshev somewhat laughable.”
I had found an Uzbek-language copy of The Road to Faith months after it was described in English as a terrorist handbook both by the Uzbek government and its Western allies. In this era, before Google Translate included Uzbek, I read the original text line by line, spending months translating it with a dictionary. I became horrified by the discrepancy between reporting on Andijon and what really happened.
By coincidence, I was writing my MA thesis on evolving ideas of religion and owned an Uzbek-language encyclopedia of religious terminology written by one of Uzbekistan’s chief propagandists. This volume had an “Akromiya” entry with a fabricated summary of The Road to Faith — one which I discovered was inspired by propaganda about Uzbekistan’s other boogeyman, Hizb-ut Tahrir.
Unlike Akromiya, Hizb-ut Tahrir is an actual group. In the peak “war on terror” years, it was held up by Central Asian dictators as a reason why they needed a totalitarian state, despite that the Islamic group had not committed violent acts but only criticized governments while marketing a strict form of Islam to Central Asians.
Yo’ldoshev had nothing to do with Hizb-ut Tahrir, but that didn’t matter. The great crime Yo’ldoshev had committed with his free-spirited treatise was to encourage Uzbeks to think for themselves. The Road to Faith therefore needed to be slotted into the “terrorist” category with Hizb-ut-Tahrir, complete with a plan of systemic destruction that Yo’ldoshev never authored or advocated.
For the full story, read my paper. Many tactics I describe draw from the unique conditions of mid-2000s Uzbekistan. But much is applicable to the American experience: not because Uzbekistan changed, but because the US was heading down the road of bad faith from the moment the Bush administration created the Patriot Act and used it to spy on innocent Muslims and anti-war activists.
Right-wing extremists like David Horowitz, the mentor of Stephen Miller, made lists of “dangerous” teachers, creating a culture of self-censorship and fear. He was joined by Islamophobic ideologues like Daniel Pipes, the creator of the spy group Campus Watch. I remember a Muslim professor at Indiana University joking, “His name is Daniel Pipes because he has pipes that reach into our classrooms so he can listen to our conversations.” I remember the tremble behind his smile. And I remember thinking, as I wrote my paper on Akromiya, how much worse it could get.
* * *
The name “antifa” is short for “anti-fascist”, meaning that those who oppose it are “pro-fascist”, which would seem like a self-own if the Trump administration and its lackeys were not so explicit in embracing fascist tactics and tropes.
I am not now nor have I ever been a member of “antifa”. I’m not much of a joiner and it’s awful hard to join a thing that’s not there. I’m not a Democrat and I’m not a Republican. I’m a writer and an all-purpose pain in the ass.
I am the author of many articles that expose state crimes. I keep them free because I like it when things are free. I like it when people are free too.
When you see someone arrested as “Antifa”, remember “Akromiya”, and how dictatorships invent nefarious entities to contain people they dislike.
Consider how, as authoritarian regimes consolidate, they become more insular and paranoid, and their net widens. Consider how, in an age of digital surveillance, an offhand remark can lead to bracelets behind your back.
Think about how unfair it would be to be punished over nothing. Because that is what “Antifa” is: nothing. That’s what “Akromiya” was: nothing.
Nothing but an excuse for slaughter that must never be forgotten or forgiven.
As I write this, Americans are attending the second No Kings Day. I did not attend the first one and I am not attending this one. Not because I oppose it, but because I fear the administration used the first protest to map out opposition strategies, and that they will use the second protest as a pretext for a crackdown against “Antifa”, much like the crackdown on “Akromiya” that resulted in the Andijon Massacre.
Hopefully I am wrong. I fear that even if I am wrong, I will be right at some point, and that frightens me.
This does not mean you shouldn’t demonstrate and continue to fight for freedom. There are a multitude of ways to derail authoritarianism. We need all of them.
Pro-freedom folks need an expansive political imagination, one that can anticipate the tyrant’s next move and understand its logic without obeying it.
There are no fixed definitions in a mafia state. Law is a plaything, evidence is an illusion, and as an Uzbek dissident explained to me twenty years ago in a way I now understand far better, “Suspicious is the same as guilty.”
They will label your kindness as treachery and your generosity as terrorism. They will call your compassion a crime. I look at the costumed protesters in Portland, who many assume may be safe due to the sheer absurdity of their protest, and remember friends of mine in Azerbaijan who got arrested after being known as “the donkey bloggers” after mocking the state while wearing a donkey suit.
This does not mean that you are doomed: it means you are already brave. You are brave for giving a shit. You are brave for not bowing down: this makes you different than the universities and newspapers and state officials who capitulated at the slightest provocation.
Everyday people have been far more resilient than individuals and institutions with enormous resources at their disposal. Maybe it’s because, after decades of having everything stolen, Americans have less to lose. We know what losing is like, and what it’s like when losing is called winning, and when theft is called business.
And we’re not falling for that again.
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An embroidered tapestry that Uzbek exiles gave me.
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A 1990 photo of dictator Islam Karimov (center), who became independent Uzbekistan’s first president in 1991 and died in 2016. Do you recognize the guy lurking on the far right?
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Excerpt of a poem by the Uzbek poet Cho’lpon, who was executed in 1938.
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