Ethnic rioting spread yesterday in southern Kyrgyzstan, where at least 97 people have been killed and more than 1,000 wounded. Thousands of Uzbeks fled after their homes were torched by roving mobs of Kyrgyz men.
Fires destroyed much of Osh, the second-largest city in a Central Asian country that hosts US and Russian military air bases. Stores were looted and the city was running out of food.
Gunfire rang out yesterday in another major southern city, Jalalabad, where the day before a rampaging mob burned a university, besieged a police station and seized an armored vehicle and other weapons from a local military unit.
In the nearby village of Bazar-Kurgan, a mob of about 400 Uzbeks overturned cars and killed a police captain, local political activist Asyl Tekebayev said. Residents said Kyrgyz men from other parts of the region were arriving in the village armed with sticks, metal bars and even pitchforks.
The riots are the worst violence since former Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev was ousted in a bloody uprising in April and fled the country.
Interim Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbayeva acknowledged on Saturday that her government had lost control over Osh, a city of 250,000, even though it sent troops, armor and helicopters to quell the riots.
Otunbayeva asked Russia to send in troops, but the Kremlin said it would not meddle in what it described as Kyrgyzstan’s internal conflict. Russia sent in a plane to deliver humanitarian supplies and evacuate some of the victims.
Russia has about 500 troops, mostly air force personnel, at a base in Kyrgyzstan. The US has the Manas air base in the capital, Bishkek, a crucial supply hub for the coalition fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The official casualty toll yesterday rose to at least 97 people dead and 1,066 wounded, with more than 600 hospitalized, the Kyrgyz Health Ministry said. The real figures may be much higher because doctors and human rights workers said ethnic Uzbeks were too afraid to seek hospital treatment.
Witnesses said on Saturday that many bodies were lying in the streets of Osh and more were scattered inside the burned-out buildings.
As Uzbek refugees, mostly women and children, fled the city toward the border with Uzbekistan, they were shot at and many were killed, witnesses said.
Otunbayeva on Saturday blamed Bakiyev’s family for instigating the unrest in Osh, saying they aimed to derail a constitutional referendum to be held June 27.
Maksat Zheinbekov, the acting mayor of Jalal-Abad, said in a telephone interview that Bakiyev’s supporters in his home region started the riots by attacking both Uzbek and Kyrgyz people. The rampaging mob quickly grew in size from several hundred to thousands, and automatic gunfire rang over the city, he said.
Ethnic tensions have long simmered in the Ferghana Valley, split by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s whimsically carved borders between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
In 1990, hundreds of people were killed in a violent land dispute between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Osh, and only the quick deployment of Soviet troops quelled the fighting. Both ethnic groups are predominantly Sunni Muslim.
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