Osh: Kyrgyzstan's interim president said on Friday that the death toll from the ethnic clashes that have rocked the country's south could be near 2,000, as she made her first visit to a riot-hit town since the unrest broke out.
Kyrgyz Health Ministry officials figures put the number of killed in rampages, led mainly by ethnic Kyrgyz, at 191. "I would increase by ten times the official data on the number of people killed," Interim President Roza Otunbayeva said, according to her spokesman, Farid Niyazov.
She said current figures don't take into account those buried before sundown on the day of death, in keeping with Muslim tradition, according to the spokesman.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uzbeks have fled the area. US Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake, visiting a refugee camp in Uzbekistan about five kilometers from the Kyrgyz border, called for an investigation into the violence and said he was working to ensure the refugees would be able to return home safely.
Otumbayeva arrived early Friday by helicopter in the central square of Osh, a city of 250,000. Parts of the city have been reduced to rubble by roving mobs of young Kyrgyz men who burned down Uzbek homes and attacked Uzbek-owned businesses in violence that began late last week.
"We have to give hope that we shall restore the city, return all the refugees and create all the conditions for that," she said. She insisted goodwill between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks would end hostilities.
Up to 100,000 people have crossed the nearby border into neighbouring Uzbekistan where they are getting food and water in specially created camps. Thousands more remain camped out in squalid conditions on the Kyrgyz side of the border, unable to cross due to Uzbek restrictions.
At one camp in Uzbekistan, in a former polymer plant near the Kyrgyz border, Blake was swamped by throngs of crying refugees, mainly older woman and children, complaining they were desperate to return home but too fearful of fresh attacks to do so.
Blake, who was accompanied by two-dozen-strong security detail, appeared to be conducting his own probe, asking the refugees if they thought the violence had been organised, as the UN and Kyrgyz authorities have suggested.
"Yes, of course it was organised, it all happened so unexpectedly," answered one refugee, Nasiba Mamyrdzhanova, from Osh.
Kyrgyz authorities have said the violence was sparked deliberately by associates of Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the president who was toppled in April in a bloody uprising. The UN has said the unrest appeared orchestrated but has stopped short of apportioning blame.
Comments
0 comment