Kyrgyz Death Toll Rises as Gunmen Target Uzbeks, Refugees Flee

map via WSJ

 

 

Bloomberg:

 Kyrgyzstan’s ethnic violence continued today as gangs of gunmen raided Uzbek districts and the death toll mounted, news organizations reported.

The Associated Press said there are claims at least 200 Uzbeks have been buried, citing the head of the Uzbek National Center, Jallahitdin Jalilatdinov. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is meeting central Asian officials today in a bid to stem the unrest as neighboring Uzbekistan said the bloodshed is aimed at provoking ethnic tension.

Gangs of Kyrgyz gunmen continued raids on Uzbek enclaves and a refugee crisis grew at the border with Uzbekistan. The city of Osh, where mobs ran riot for three days, was reported as quiet today by the New York Times.

“There is every reason to conclude such actions have an organized, managed and provocative character,” the Uzbek Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its website today. “We have no doubt that all this is taking place under the instigation of forces whose interests are totally far from the interests of the Kyrgyz people.”

Security Council secretaries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which comprises central Asian former Soviet republics, are meeting Medvedev today to discuss the crisis, Interfax said, citing his press secretary Natalia Timakova. More than 80 human rights groups have called on Russia to send peace- keeping troops to end the bloodshed, Interfax said today.

Emergency

Kyrgyzstan’s interim government yesterday extended a state of emergency throughout the Jalalabad region as tens of thousands of refugees fled the country and Russia sent a battalion of soldiers to protect its military base.

About 60,000 refugees who fled the violence were registered in the Andijan border region, though the number doesn’t count thousands of children, the deputy head of Uzbek emergency services in the region told Agence France-Presse today. The AP reported at least 100,000 had fled for the border and were awaiting entry into Uzebekistan, citing Jalilatdinov.

The Kyrgyz government declared a partial mobilization of civilian reservists and authorized troops to shoot to kill rioters in a bid to stabilize the situation in the south.

The U.S. and Russia have been jostling for influence in Kyrgyzstan, where both countries have air bases. Russia agreed in April to give the provisional government $50 million. Edil Baisalov, the government’s chief of staff, said at the time that the U.S. planned to give emergency aid.

Growth Prospects

The U.S. relies on the Manas air base outside the capital Bishkek to support operations in Afghanistan after Uzbekistan evicted the American military in 2005.

The violence may hurt Kyrgyzstan’s economic growth prospects, according to the International Monetary Fund. Growth in Central Asia and the Caucasus will accelerate to 4.3 percent in 2010 as exports increase, capital flows turn positive and the drop in money sent home from abroad slows, the IMF said in a May 25 report.

Kyrgyzstan’s projected 4.6 percent expansion may be damped by political tensions that started in April and led to the ouster of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the fund said.

The landlocked country depends on remittances from migrant workers in Russia for about 40 percent of national income, and also relies on rent paid by the U.S. and Russia for their bases. Kyrgyzstan’s average monthly wage was $132 in January, according to the country’s National Statistical Committee.

Raids Continue as Ethnic Uzbeks Flee Kyrgyzstan --NYT

Gangs of gunmen continued raids on ethnic Uzbek enclaves, and a refugee crisis grew at the border of this strategically important Central Asian nation on Monday, after four days of violence left swaths of the country’s ethnically mixed south in ruins.

 

Ethnic Uzbeks walk beside the wreckage of burned houses in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, on Monday.

The city of Osh, where mobs marauded for three days, was mostly quiet on Monday morning, and its government buildings appeared to be well protected.

But Kyrgyz volunteers armed with bats and iron bars — some recently arrived from the north of the country — continued to patrol outlying villages, saying they were defending the country’s south against an Uzbek attempt to seize it.

Thousands of people fleeing the violence massed at Nariman, on the border with Uzbekistan, where Dilmurad Failakov, a doctor from a local hospital, said four newborns had died on Monday morning and dysentery was spreading among the children. Refugees, who were mostly sitting on the ground, said they had seen truckloads of humanitarian aid passing by, but none of them had stopped.

The government of Uzbekistan estimated that 75,000 people were fleeing and said it had set up refugee camps on its side of the border.

Doctors in Nariman said they were scrambling to treat gunshot wounds and cases of dysentery under circumstances they described as desperate. There was no government presence at the growing camp, and Mr. Failakov, the doctor, said 10 of his patients had died because he had no access to medical supplies.

Roughly 70,000 refugees had crossed the border on Sunday, and about 1,000 were able to cross on Monday, said Akmal Khaidarov, another doctor at the site, who estimated that the number of Uzbeks crowding into the border village had grown to 5,000.

Occasional truckloads of people fleeing the violence continued to arrive, including a man who said he had been driving when a gunmen in a bus opened fire on his car, which flipped over as he tried to escape.

Families sat together in groups under a scattering of tents, and naked children played in the open air as Uzbek border guards in camouflage faced them from the other side of a barbed-wire barrier. Ethnic Uzbeks make up about 15 percent of the overall population of Kyrgyzstan, but they are represented in much higher numbers in Osh, which has roughly 225,000 people and is on the Uzbek border.

Kyrgyzstan Violence Threatens Region -- WSJ

For nine years the U.S. has maintained an air base in Kyrgyzstan, known for its picturesque mountains and high meadows. Lately the country been the scene of civil strife: In April mobs toppled its autocratic president after protests over his alleged corruption and utility rate hikes. Now ethnic strife has sprung up in the vacuum left behind.

Leaders in Bishkek's interim government have blamed the ousted president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, for inciting unrest in the south in an effort to regain power. Mr. Bakiyev issued a denial Sunday, saying that Kyrgyzstan "is on the verge of losing its statehood."

"Instead of mobilizing all the resources to contain this conflict, the government is giving interviews and lying about me and my relatives," he said, according to the Interfax news agency.

The brunt of the violence has been borne by ethnic Uzbeks, who are a sizeable minority in Kyrgyzstan, mainly concentrated in the country's south. Uzbek officials say that thousands of Uzbeks, many of them women and children, have fled over the Kyrgyz border into neighboring Uzbekistan, after ethnic Kyrgyz began burning Uzbek homes and looting shops in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh. Uzbekistan's Emergencies Ministry said it was setting up refugee camps for the victims in border areas, according to Russia's RIA Novosti news agency.

Ethnic tensions have simmered between Kyrgyzstan's ethnic communities since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but have seldom broken above the surface. They stretch back to 1990, when rising ethnic nationalism and worsening economic conditions before the breakup of the Soviet Union let to a deadly conflict in which hundreds were killed before it was eventually put to a stop when Soviet troops intervened.

 

Posted via email from Jim Nichols