Uzbekistan's crackdown on a prison break and mass protest last month has been labeled a massacre in a report by a prominent human rights group, which says responsibility for much of the death lies with the Uzbek government.
The group, Human Rights Watch, based in New York, issued the report on Tuesday, providing the most extensive independent review to date of the failed uprising on May 13 in the Uzbek city of Andijon.
Drawing from interviews with more than 50 witnesses, it corroborates and expands upon previous reports of a brief armed revolt that became an anti-government protest, which the authorities broke with rifle and machine-gun fire.
The report also provides accounts from two witnesses of Uzbek troops moving among the bodies on the street the morning after the crackdown, shooting wounded people who had survived the night. "There was a systematic effort to slaughter," said Kenneth Roth, the organization's executive director.
With the release of the report, Human Rights Watch renewed calls by several international organizations and Western governments for an independent investigation.
Uzbekistan had flatly refused to allow such an investigation in the weeks after the crackdown, but has since signaled it might offer limited cooperation.
Human Rights Watch also urged the US to suspend negotiations for a long-term US presence at the Uzbek air base, located near the Afghan border, unless Uzbekistan accepts an investigation. "There is something unseemly, to say the least, about negotiations for a base agreement with a country that has just massacred hundreds of its own citizens," Roth said.
Also on Tuesday the International Committee for the Red Cross, the Geneva-based aid organization, announced that it still had not yet been able to get access to those injured and arrested in the crackdown, in spite of repeated attempts. The committee noted that many Uzbeks still do not know whether their missing next of kin are dead, injured, arrested or have fled.
Since the crackdown it has defended itself with a mix of defiance and assigning blame to the armed men who raided the prison.
The Uzbek president, Islam Karimov, has insisted, without providing public evidence, that the uprising was carried out by international terrorist groups that seek to create an Islamic state. Human Rights Watch said it found no evidence of this.
"The protesters spoke about economic conditions in Andijon, government repression and unfair trials and not the creation of an Islamic state," the report says. "People were shouting `Ozodliq!' (`freedom'), not `Allahu Akbar!' (`God is great')."
Human Rights Watch did not estimate the number of dead, and avoided embracing opposition accounts of as many as 745 dead civilians, which have not been independently verified. But it dismissed the official Uzbek claim of 173 dead, writing that "hundreds" were killed on one street alone.
The report also noted Uzbek efforts to restrict the flow of information about the crackdown, and to intimidate and harass witnesses.
Fears for the safety of witnesses have intensified since a Radio Free Europe correspondent reported last month of being led by a local guide to a mass grave outside Andijon; the next day, the radio service said, the guide was fatally stabbed.
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