OSH, Kyrgyzstan, June 14, (Agencies): A Moscow-led security group said on Monday it would consider sending a military force to southern Kyrgyzstan to quell ethnic clashes that have killed at least 124 people in the impoverished Central Asian state.
The clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbek residents in the cities of Osh and Jalalabad began late on Thursday and escalated over the weekend. Witnesses said gangs with automatic rifles, iron bars and machetes set fire to houses and shot fleeing residents.
The Moscow-led security bloc of ex-Soviet republics, known as the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), met on Monday to discuss the situation in the Central Asian state.
“The CSTO has at its disposal everything needed to act in such situations, including a peace-keeping contingent ... collective rapid reaction forces and collective rapid deployment forces of the Central Asian region,” Russian media quoted CSTO Secretary General Nikolai Bordyuzha as saying.
“But one should think it over well before using these means, and the most important thing is to use them as part of a complex of measures,” he said. He did not specify the measures.
The CSTO comprises Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyztan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
The latest clashes are the worst ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan since 1990, when then-Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev sent Soviet troops into Osh after hundreds of people were killed in a dispute that started over land ownership.
The turmoil has fuelled concern in Russia, the United States and neighbour China. Washington uses an air base at Manas in the north of the ex-Soviet state, about 300 km (190 miles) from Osh, to supply forces in Afghanistan. Russia also has an air base.
Kyrgyzstan’s interim government, which assumed power after president Kurmanbek Bakiyev was overthrown in April, has accused supporters of the ousted leader of stoking ethnic conflict — an allegation Bakiyev denied in a statement on Sunday.
The interim government, led by Roza Otunbayeva, said on Monday that authorities in Jalalabad had arrested a “well-known person” on suspicion of fomenting the riots.
Kubatbek Baibolov, commandant in Jalalabad, said in televised comments: “This is nothing other than an attempt by Bakiyev’s supporters and relatives to seize power.”
Thousands of ethnic Uzbeks have fled to the nearby border with Uzbekistan or sought refuge in local villages to escape the deadly fighting. Many said they were being targeted by Kyrgyz gangs in a “genocide” backed by local police and troops.
“Crowds of Kyrgyz are roaming around. They set our homes on fire and kill Uzbeks right in their houses,” ethnic Uzbek Muhammed Askerov, a Jalalabad businessman, told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed village.
Some ethnic Kyrgyz retort by blaming the bloodshed on Uzbeks or criminal gangs vying for influence in the region.
“The people who are talking about genocide are the same people who started this war,” Khimiya Suyerkulova, an ethnic Kyrgyz UN volunteer living in Osh, said by telephone.
“We have relatives who are Uzbeks. We have friends. We live in the same houses,” she said. She added that aid sacks of flour and potatoes had been delivered to feed residents who had feared starvation, as shops had been burned to the ground.
Azimbek Beknazarov, deputy head of Kyrgyzstan’s interim government, said the situation in Jalalabad had stabilised on Monday afternoon after the mediation of Kyrgyz and Uzbek elders.
“There are no more crowds in the streets. We have resolved it by our popular methods,” he said by telephone from Jalalabad.
But he said many houses, including that of local Uzbek leader Kadyrzhan Batyrov, were still on fire.
Uzbeks who fled Jalalabad accused authorities appointed by the interim government of participating in the killings.
Some estimates said that 100,000 people had fled across the border into Uzbekistan leaving explosive tensions in Osh and other towns in southern Kyrgyzstan.
Charred corpses lay unattended in a burned out ethnic Uzbek shop in Osh and the streets were strewn with shell cases and wrecked cars.
Intermittent gunfire was heard on Monday while further north in the city of Jalalabad the violence was reportedly still in full swing.
“The situation got worse in Jalalabad,” the deputy chief of Kyrgyzstan’s interim government, Temir Sariyev, told reporters in Bishkek.
“There are local clashes and it is not yet possible fully to contain the situation. Armed groups are breaking through here and there and this is linked to the fact that our forces are insufficient” to control the situation.”
The Kyrgyz news agency AKIPress said that 2,000 people had gathered in the main square in Jalalabad near the regional government building and that cafes and stores were ablaze on main streets.
It said between 150 and 200 youths were marching around threatening to shoot Uzbeks.
In Osh, Uzbek men, armed with makeshift weapons, stood on guard outside their homes while women and children cowered in basements.
An AFP journalist was shown video footage of the burials of dozens of bullet ridden bodies that residents said they had filmed since Friday.
“There are at least 1,000 dead here in Osh. We have not been able to register them because they turn us away at the hospital and say it is only for Kyrgyz,” Isamidin Kudbidunov, 27, told AFP.
Shocked residents said the violence would have repercussions for generations to come. Some accused Kyrgyz government forces of taking part in the brutal mob violence.
Dildor Dzhumabayev, a 38-year-old ethnic Uzbek, said people were gunned down by armed personnel carriers that were used to clear the way for mobs on the streets.
Kyrgyzstan is of key importance to the major powers as both the United States and Russia have military bases near the capital of the Central Asian country. There is growing international alarm over the unrest.
EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton said Monday she was “very concerned” and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed his worry at the extent of the violence on Sunday.
A rising tide of ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan threatens crucial US and Russian interests as fears grow of the strategically vital Central Asian country descending into chaos.
For the United States the unrest threatens to destabilise what has been a pivotal transit hub for troops and supplies for the US-led war in Afghanistan.
Since 2001, a US military installation outside the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek has been a key conduit for US air refuelling tanker planes and for the giant transport planes that ferry US troops and supplies to and from Afghanistan.
Moscow has its own base in Kyrgyzstan. The violence endangers the strategic gains it made earlier this year when an interim government seen as closer to Russia took power after riots ousted President Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
Having failed to quell the unrest in the south of the country, the interim government has appealed to Moscow for military assistance, but Russia has so far only dispatched paratroopers to reinforce security at its base.
“These events have certainly made both (Moscow and Washington) very concerned and anxious... And the longer the unrest goes on in the south and the more it spreads the more concerned they are going to be,” said Paul Quinn-Judge, the Central Asia project director at the International Crisis Group.
Uniformed Kyrgyz troops gave armed support to mobs attacking ethnic Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan, according to refugees who fled the violence.
Bakhtiyor Sharipov, a 30-year-old officer in Kyrgyzstan’s army, said he deserted his armoured unit in revulsion after watching his own troops gun down ethnic Uzbek civilians in the southern city of Osh.
“What I saw was not an army,” Sharipov recounted to AFP at this Uzbek border post where he joined tens of thousands of ethnic Uzbeks who fled the bloodshed and poured into Uzbekistan.
“They were shooting at civilians of the Uzbek diaspora, working together with criminals. I left for that reason and crossed the border,” said Sharipov, himself an ethnic Uzbek.
“The Kyrgyz defence ministry ordered us not to fire on civilians. But in Osh, military and police in uniform ignored this order and helped bandits to kill Uzbeks,” he said.
Sharipov specifically charged that his commanding officer, a colonel in the Kyrgyzstan army whom he named as Kursand Asanov, allowed the troops to shoot.
Sharipov’s story corresponded with accounts offered by ethnic Uzbek refugees who had crossed into Uzbekistan and with stories told by local residents to AFP in the southern Kyrgyzstan city of Osh.
Many described how Kyrgyz security forces in armoured vehicles drove down streets in Uzbek neighborhoods in Osh, shooting frequently and clearing the way for mobs of ethnic Kyrgyz men in civilian clothes who followed behind.
Most could not say whether the forces were from the Kyrgyzstan army or from interior ministry security units.
“The Kyrgyz military came to tell us about the curfew. When we were all in our houses, they let armed gangs set fire to our houses and kill everyone,” an elderly man, Uraynjon, said at one swelling refugee camp.
Women and children were prey to some of the most brutal attacks, according to refugees, many of whom said women were raped.
“I saw with my own eyes how they nailed a little boy to a tree,” one elderly refugee, who gave her name as Markhabo told AFP. “The burnt corpses of women lay on the road.”