Tag Archives: 2010 Kyrgyzstan Crisis

Ethnic persecution of Uzbek communities in Kyrgyzstan continues, according to the Times:

Dozens of Uzbek community, religious and political leaders have been arrested recently by the local police and accused of inciting ethnic violence, rights groups say.

They were detained as part of an investigation into the unrest that raged through ethnic Uzbek neighborhoods here last month in which thousands of people, most of them Uzbeks, were thought to have died. The investigation itself, which was authorized by the government of Kyrgyzstan’s interim president, Roza Otunbayeva, has been turned into a campaign of persecution against ethnic Uzbek political and religious leaders, human rights groups say.
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The arrests are based on a section of the Kyrgyz criminal code that bans inciting ethnic hatred, after the ethnic Uzbek leaders accused the police and army of instigating and in some cases participating in the original violence. “We are concerned that most of the arrests seem to be targeted against the Uzbek communities,” said Ole Solvang, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who documented what he called unjustified detentions of Uzbeks, in a telephone interview. “The government has to investigate, detain and prosecute all violators, and not just members of one ethnic group.”
[…]
Valentina A. Gritsenko, director of a local human rights group, Justice, confirmed in a telephone interview that several of the Uzbek leaders who made public allegations of police or military complicity in the ethnic violence had been arrested.

Azimzhan Askarov, an ethnic Uzbek and the director of a human rights group in the town of Bazar-Kurgan, was arrested on this charge, according to his lawyer, Nurbek Toktokunov, who said Mr. Askarov had bruises on his back suggesting he had been tortured in custody.

This week, Front Line, a Dublin-based group monitoring mistreatment of human rights workers, said two activists in southern Kyrgyzstan documenting the causes of the violence were interrogated by the police and later approached on a street in Osh by unidentified men and threatened.

 
Various people interviewed agreed with suggestions (that I’ve mentioned previously) that they won’t feel secure as long as they’re at the mercy of the domestic Kyrgyz police and military and would prefer an international security force.

The Kyrgyzstani military and police are dominated by ethnically Kyrgyz members and were involved in the violent attacks against Uzbek civilians in southern Kyrgyzstan — near the border with Uzbekistan — several weeks ago. It’s also unclear how much control they’ve taken over the interim government, but it seems the civilian authorities aren’t in charge to the degree they claim.

This morning, acting this time under the official pretext of clearing barricades and restoring government order and control, ethnically Kyrgyz troops from the government of Kyrgyzstan beat two dozen ethnically Uzbek civilians in southern Kyrgyzstan, killing two. NY Times:

Over the weekend, Kyrgyz troops removed the barricades, which residents had built during four days of ethnic violence that started June 10. At dawn on Monday, security forces began a house-to-house sweep of the area, the Uzbek village of Nariman, demanding information about a Kyrgyz police official who was killed there earlier this month.

Witnesses said the troops kicked men and severely beat them with rifle butts during interrogations. One died of a gunshot wound, another died later of his injuries, and 25 were hospitalized, said Telman A. Badalov, a supervising doctor in the local hospital.

Regional officials at first denied that there were any casualties, but at a news conference later in the day, they acknowledged that two residents had been killed and 23 wounded, saying that troops had opened fire because they faced armed resistance and that their actions were justified. A law enforcement official told the Interfax news service that seven men were arrested on suspicion of being “hired snipers.”

But the list of confiscated weapons released by the Osh regional superintendent’s office — two grenades, 40 rifle cartridges and two Molotov cocktails — included no firearms.

 
The attacks today, which many eyewitnesses said were unprovoked and unwarranted, confirmed the fears expressed this weekend that there was a heightened risk for Uzbek civilians and that they could not trust either the government or the military. In the initial wave of violence and killings, eyewitnesses saw and recorded troops assisting rioters and attacking civilians, and so the remaining Uzbek civilians in several cities, towns, and villages tried to barricade their neighborhoods against these incursions, which led to the raid this morning.
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Yesterday:

The Economist this week noted the continuing need for international intervention that doesn’t seem to be coming:

The time for such geopolitical caution is past. The interim government needs and deserves help. Although the bloodletting seemed to be subsiding as The Economist went to press, the misery of the refugees needs to be alleviated. Relief supplies are needed on both sides of the border. The UN’s proposal to set up an “aid corridor” is welcome and urgent. Persuading terrified refugees to go home may require a peacekeeping force, organised either in the region or by the UN. Failure to safeguard the refugees’ return would be to accede in an ethnic cleansing that would set a terrible precedent in Central Asia and beyond. Better to pursue multi-ethnic harmony within Stalin’s hateful legacy than to redraw the map.

 
Furthermore, as I blogged previously, eyewitnesses (one now with video evidence, reported in The Economist this week) in Uzbek neighborhoods saw regular Kyrgyz troops actively assisting the anti-Uzbek mobs in several cities, either clearing their paths with military vehicles or even joining the shooting of civilians. Thus only an outside peacekeeping force will be sufficient to reassure Uzbek civilians that it is safe to return to their homes or to normal activities. None is on the way.

 
Today:

The mayor of this southern city [Osh, where most of the killing occurred] issued an ultimatum that Uzbeks voluntarily dismantle the barricades they have sheltered behind by Sunday night or force would be used to eliminate the barriers, some made with the wreckage of trucks destroyed in the rioting, minibuses and large boulders. The Uzbeks have been holed up in their neighborhoods for days in the wake of the ethnic violence that killed thousands and caused a massive refugee crisis.

“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.
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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.

 
This isn’t going to fix itself. But the world doesn’t care.

This post originally appeared at Starboard Broadside.

As eyewitness accounts reach the outside world, evidence emerges that once riots began in the multiethnic city of Osh (Kyrgyzstan), a number of renegade military units joined the violence and carried out some of the ethnic purges of Uzbek civilians seen earlier this week and over the weekend. This may explain why the military was “unable” to stop the violence for several days and seemed to lose control of the situation to the point where Kyrgyz mobs had suddenly gained access to armored transport vehicles from the troops deployed to restore order.

The accounts from the people of Shai-Tubeh [an Uzbek neighborhood of Osh] and numerous other reports by witnesses lend powerful credence to suspicions of organized violence, pointing to rogue elements of the Kyrgyz government and military. The involvement of even a faction of the military could be a sign that the interim Kyrgyz government is not in complete control.

Shai-Tubeh does not seem to be an isolated case. On Wednesday, at a mosque near the border with Uzbekistan that is now sheltering ethnic Uzbek refugees, several people from other areas of Osh described similar scenes of neighborhoods and houses being assaulted by men in uniform using Kyrgyz military vehicles, arms and matériel.

A doctor at the shelter, Halisa Abdurazakova, 37, said that residents of her neighborhood had blocked the main road with large boulders and other objects after the violence started. But a Kyrgyz Army tank soon arrived, she said, and pushed aside the debris, allowing gunmen in an armored personnel carrier to drive through and start shooting.

 
Assuming this is definitely what happened (the government of course denies any military involvement), the question now becomes how far up the rogue status exists in the chain-of-command and whether or not the provisional government is in danger of a military coup that would probably inevitably lead to further acts of genocide in southern Kyrgyzstan. If high level officers are involved or sympathetic to the Kyrgyz ethnic supremacist cause, they may even have compelled the civilian provisional government to rescind the request for Russian peacekeeping troops, since the cancellation of that request came rather unexpectedly on Tuesday during a lull in the killings.

According the article, Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan are an overall minority of 15%, but are concentrated in the regions near the border with Uzbekistan where the violence occurred and tend to be more economically well-off (or perceived as such) by the majority Kyrgyz population. According to early reports from United Nations investigators, the violence against the Uzbek population appears to have been partially planned, not random or spur-of-the-moment. It is not the first time ethnic violence has hit the region, but this was somewhat systematic, resulting in over 100,000 refugees and over one hundred killed within days.

This post originally appeared at Starboard Broadside.

Things were calmer today as the provisional government and Kyrgyzstan military re-took control of some areas for the first time in days, but United Nations investigators are already suggesting that there is evidence that the ethnic violence against Uzbeks by the ethnically Kyrgyz rioters was planned, systematic, and coordinated. As I had said the other day, that could mean there is an ethnic violence or genocide campaign afoot. Reportedly, already over 100,000 Uzbek civilians have fled to refugee camps inside Kyrgyzstan or across the border in Uzbekistan proper, and at least a hundred have been killed in the “riots” that targeted/looted/burned/raided Uzbek neighborhoods, stores, and buildings in the multi-ethnic cities of Osh and Jalabad.

Relief planes with medical and food supplies began arriving today to help non-governmental organizations such as the Red Cross to fulfill needs in the refugee camps, in what has been rapidly deemed a serious humanitarian crisis.

The provisional government said it has withdrawn its request for Russian peacekeeping troops, although I am unclear on why they feel they have definitively reversed the situation. Russia was still debating the matter internally and before the Collective Security Treaty Organization, in any case. Also earlier today, deposed president Kurmanbek Bakieyev was spotted and “detained” in London, prompting Kyrgyzstan’s provisional government (which replaced him after the popular coup in April) to request his formal extradition on charges of allegedly fomenting the ethnic violence and other attempts to regain power. No word yet on whether Britain will comply.

This post originally appeared at Starboard Broadside.