BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — A top U.S. envoy called Saturday for an independent investigation into the violence that has devastated southern Kyrgyzstan, as amateur video emerged of unarmed Uzbeks gathering to defend their town during the attacks.
Prosecutors on Saturday charged Azimzhan Askarov, the head of a prominent human-rights group who shot the video, with inciting ethnic hatred. Askarov had accused the military of complicity in the bloody rampages that sent hundreds of thousands of Uzbeks fleeing for their lives.
The country’s rights ombudsman, Tursunbek Akun,insisted the charges against Askarov were fabricated, and activists in Bishkek, the capital, demonstrated before United Nations offices to demand his release.
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Valentina Gritsenko, head of the Justice rights organization, said she feared Askarov was being tortured. He was detained Tuesday with his brother in his southern hometown of Bazar-Korgon, colleagues said.
Entire Uzbek neighborhoods in southern Kyrgyzstan have been reduced to scorched ruins by mobs of ethnic Kyrgyz who forced nearly half of the region’s roughly 800,000 Uzbeks to flee. Interim President RozaOtunbayeva says up to 2,000 people may have died in the clashes.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake met with Otunbayeva in Bishkek on Saturday after touring several packed refugee camps in neighboring Uzbekistan.
Blake said the interim government should probe the violence and “such an investigation should be complemented by an international investigation by a credible international body.”
He said the U.S. was working with the Kyrgyz government to make sure the refugees would be able to return home safely. The United States has released $32.2 million in aid, and Russia and France also sent plane loads of relief gear.
Some officials in the provisional Kyrgyz government, which took office in April after rioting deposed President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, have said the lease on an American air base in Kyrgyzstan should be renegotiated.
Asked at a news conference about that issue, Blake said, “Nobody raised that with me.”
The interim government has claimed that Bakiyev provoked the recent violence in an effort to return to power. On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said those accusations might be plausible.
Bakiyev, from exile, has denied any involvement. The U.N. has said the unrest appeared orchestrated, but has stopped short of assigning blame.
Many ethnic Uzbeks also accused security forces of standing by or helping majority Kyrgyz mobs as they slaughtered Uzbeks and burned neighborhoods. Col. Iskander Ikramov, chief of the Kyrgyz military in the south, says the army didn’t interfere because it is not a police force.
The Associated Press obtained Askarov’s video, which was shot last Sunday at the height of the rampages. It shows a few dozen Uzbeks pacing nervously around a square in Bazar-Korgon, an ethnic Uzbek settlement, apparently before rioters descended. Armed with only sticks and stones, several men are seen heading across the square as gunshots ring out and smoke rises in background.
“Are we going to just sit around and wait for them?” one man says in Uzbek. In a different shot, a voice colleagues confirm as Askarov’s is heard saying, “They’re getting close.”
“So many people have died over there. ... One armed group is gone; there is still another which has stayed. They’re shooting from the direction of the prison, and Uzbeks have nothing but sticks 1 meter or half a meter long. There is smoke rising, and I have no idea what’s left there,” Askarov says.
Destruction caused during the rampages was visible Saturday in parts of Bazar-Korgon, and Askarov’s office was one of several gutted buildings.
The United Nations estimates 400,000 people have fled their homes and about 100,000 of them have entered Uzbekistan.
UZBEKS HOLED UP
Kyrgyz authorities demanded Saturday that makeshift roadblocks that have turned the country’s second-largest city, Osh, into a patchwork of no man’s lands be removed, setting up a confrontation with the city’s ethnic Uzbeks.
The mayor of the southern city issued an ultimatum that Uzbeks voluntarily open their neighborhoods by tonight or force would be used to eliminate the barriers they have set up, some made with the wreckage of trucks destroyed in recent rioting, minibuses and boulders. The Uzbeks have been holed up in their neighborhoods for days in the wake of the ethnic violence that began June 10.
“To create zones where the government does not have power, we are never going to allow that,” said the mayor, Melisbek Myrzakmatov.
Uzbek leaders immediately rejected his demand, but already by Saturday night, the military started preliminary work on pulling down some of the barricades.
Uzbeks have said the Kyrgyz military took part in the attacks, and they have repeatedly said that they will not get rid of the barricades because they have no confidence that the provisional Kyrgyz government will protect them. Ethnic Kyrgyz also died in the rioting, but it appears that most of the casualties and damage were in Uzbek neighborhoods.
At a news conference Saturday, Myrzakmatov, who is ethnic Kyrgyz, said emergency vehicles and humanitarian aid were unable to get through to Uzbek areas, and he contended that criminals suspected in the violence might be hiding there.
But he also suggested that the police might want to enter the neighborhoods to search for Kyrgyz who he said were missing.
About 20 ethnic Kyrgyz were in the hall where he held the news conference; they were seeking information about relatives who had disappeared in the conflict. Myrzakmatov pointed to them and said that if Kyrgyz had been kidnapped and were being held in Uzbek areas, then the authorities needed to be able to go there to investigate.
“Look here, mothers are crying, children are crying, because there is no news about victims,” he said. “Are we going to allow that? If one side is clean, without sins,then let them show it.”
A leader of the ethnic Uzbeks, Jalal Salakhutdinov, said that he had been negotiating with officials and warned them about the potential for violence if they tried to remove the barricades.
“People are very scared,” Salakhutdinov said. “They do not want to open the barricades. They say, ‘Give us some guarantees that they are not going to again come in after us.’ People are saying, ‘If they are going to shoot us, they have already killed so many, we are ready to die as well.”’
AID FOR DISPLACED
Thousands of ethnic Uzbeks have massed in recent days in VLKSM, a village near Kyrgyzstan’s main southern city of Osh. The village’s name is a Russian-language acronym for the Soviet Communist Youth League, left over from when the Central Asian nation was a Soviet republic.
Red Cross spokesman Christian Cardon said agency workers distributed oil and wheat flower to 12,750 displaced people in VLKSM on Saturday and handed out supplies to 18,750 displaced in Suretapa.
“The situation is still quite tense, but we’re able to access all the places” where uprooted people have gathered, he said.
Employees from the Kyrgyz Red Crescent and International Committee of the Red Cross workers monitor the distribution of aid, he said.
Many said they could not go back to their towns and live next to the people they accuse of attacking them.
“This is our nation, this is a holy land, but I can’t live here any more,” said Mukhabat Ergashova, a retiree who had taken shelter with dozens of others in a crowded tent.
“We are all witnesses to the fact that innocent citizens were fired upon from an armored personnel carrier by soldiers in military uniform. I don’t know whether they were from the government or some third party, but they only shot at Uzbeks,” said Sabir Khaidir, an ethnic Uzbek in Jalal-Abad.
Supplies of bread and rice from Uzbekistan kept the refugees from starvation. But many had to sleep in the open air, and overcrowding, bad sanitary conditions and a shortage of clean water were making many sick. Overwhelmed doctors struggled to treat outbreaks of diarrhea and other ailments with paltry medical supplies.
Information for this article was contributed from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, by Yuras Karmanau and Romain Goguelin, from VLKSM, Kyrgyzstan, by Peter Leonard and from Geneva by Eliane Engeler of The Associated Press; and from Osh, Kyrgyzstan, by Clifford J. Levy and from Bishkek by Michael Schwirtz of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/20/2010