Agree with Nathan and David that there’s a lot to take issue with here, and that anyone with any Central Asian knowledge and/or critical thinking skills who has the patience to read Akiner’s entire report could pick it apart logically and factually if s/he wanted to dedicate the time.
One thing that is immediately clear to any reader is that Akiner had a very busy day. In fact, on closer inspection of the report, she had a nearly impossibly busy day. In any event, looking closer at how she spent her time can give readers an idea of how careful her research was likely to have been.
She says she was there for 12 hours (this was almost two weeks after the end of the events, by the way) and interviewed 40 people. That’s an average of 18 minutes per interviewee without even factoring out travel time in the city, meals, waiting for interviewees to show up. She says she also “walked around the city”, inspected the jail and the school, and paced out the entire square in front of the Hokimiyat in order to get a rough measurement – this would have all taken time too. Akiner, however, claims to spend 20 – 45 minutes with each witness – a mathematical impossibility.
She notes that she spoke with a classroom of about 15 madrassah students – and while it is somewhat disingenuous to pad the number of “witnesses” you had by counting all the participants of a class discussion, assuming that she included these 15 as witnesses make her account of her day a little more palpable, though still unlikely. Without the 15 madrassah students from the class discussion, it is actually 25 witnesses, that gives an average of about 28 minutes per interview (again, if Akiner spent every second interviewing people, which she clearly did not).
Akiner indicates that she spoke with 12 categories of witness (Akiner calls anyone she talked to a “witness”) besides madrassah students: madrassah teachers, imams, mahalla committee members, cemetery keepers/ gravediggers, doctors, prisoners, prison staff, bazaar traders, government officials, law enforcement officers, independent human rights activists, one hostage. So her remaining 25 interviewees were presumably divided among these categories (mostly official appointees or state employees with something to lose—notice the absence of anyone who was actually in the square, except for the hostage and perhaps law enforcement officials).
It also appears that at least several of these remaining witnesses were mahalla leaders, as Akiner relies on them for death estimates, citing a range of 3-10 deaths per mahalla (one would hope that she didn’t just ask two mahalla leaders to get this range) this eats into the remaining 25 witnesses with people whose testimony, as just neighborhood leaders, would not be particularly useful.
So really we’re talking about 20-odd interviews that probably lasted 15-20 minutes each after factoring in all of Akiner’s class discussions, inspecting of buildings, measuring public squares and walking around town. This is still an extremely tight interview schedule, which implies that someone was bending over backwards to get her all this face time (and presumably, most interviewees would be going through those who organized the interview and, thus, could be briefed or intimidated beforehand). Additionally, most of these interviews were of people who were either direct state appointees or de facto appointees (mahalla heads and official imams) who have to more or less tow the official line.
So the real question is how did this report get so much attention? For God sakes, an entire lecture tour?!! Akiner herself even admits she is not writing as an academic, but as a layperson.
Oh, and Starr’s assertion in the introduction that HRW was hiding dead bodies in Tashkent is just plain ridiculous. It’s a shame that someone so detatched from reality is allowed to continue to teach. He should be sued for libel.
My favourite so far certainly is 
