In the strongest statement by US officials since Uzbekistan carried out a bloody crackdown earlier this month against a revolt and demonstration in the city of Andizhan, three US senators on Sunday called for an international investigation into the violence, and issued a stern rebuke to the authoritarian regime.
The senators' statement came amid new details of the conduct of Uzbek security forces during and after the violence, including claims that injured victims have disappeared from hospitals, and that troops had fired on a civilian ambulance during the crackdown, killing three medical workers inside.
The accounts further undermine the insistence of Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan's president and a US ally in the "war on terror," that his troops operated with precision, and that armed men behind the revolt were responsible for the civilians deaths.
Uzbekistan now says 173 people, including 36 government troops, died in the uprising and crackdown on May 13. The government attributed the increase from the previous count of 169 to the deaths of four more troops from injuries suffered that day.
Human rights groups, opposition parties, survivors and relatives of the dead have said that at least several hundred civilians were killed by troops who fired rifles and machine guns into dense crowds.
Appearing in Tashkent, Uzbekistan's capital, where the senators met with members of four opposition parties, the delegation called the crackdown "a tragedy," and suggested that given Uzbekistan's long record of repression and human rights abuses, the bloodshed was not surprising.
"History shows that continued repression of human rights leads to tragedies such as the one that just took place," said Senator John McCain, Republican-Arizona. He later added: "When governments repress or oppress their people, sooner or later, if they have no avenue of expressing their desire for freedom, violence takes place."
The statement, made in the presence of the US ambassador to Uzbekistan, was a significant shift in tone. The three senators, all Republican supporters of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism efforts, did not characterize the gunmen or escaped prisoners who initiated the revolt as militants or terrorists, as some US officials have.
Uzbekistan has repeatedly described the men it fought as international Islamic terrorists, a characterization rejected by witnesses, who said the gunmen were local men who had been pushed to violence by the unrelenting repression and corruption of Karimov's regime.
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