The summer camp looked deserted. Just inside the high metal fence, a plump woman in slippers and a purple kerchief squatted outside a two-room shack, washing dishes with a plastic tub and two dented kettles.

“Maybe she’s one of them,” I thought -- an ethnic Kyrgyz who’d lost her home in the barbaric interethnic violence that swept across southern Kyrgyzstan in June.

The camp lies at the end of a dirt road a few miles outside the city of Osh, where, three months after the clashes, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks still circulate photos of the dead and missing and each side tells the same stories, split into “us” and “them”: “their guys raped our girls”; “we are a peace-loving people”; “they’re the ones who started it”; “all the aid goes to them and we get nothing.”

On this last point, the two groups differ in one respect: Uzbeks complain that humanitarian aid controlled by local officials (predominantly ethnic Kyrgyz) does not go to them, while Kyrgyz -- many of whom feel unfairly demonized by the outside world -- say the same of aid from international organizations. In Osh, the most visible type of aid from abroad is construction material: new bricks and gravel piling up on curbsides to build new homes before winter. Most beneficiaries are indeed Uzbeks, since their houses and shops make up the overwhelming majority of those hit by arson.

But the painful battle of narratives is still raging, so when a prominent Kyrgyz activist and candidate for the national parliament told me that many ethnic Kyrgyz had also been displaced and were settled at the summer camp, my colleague and I felt compelled to check.

“No,” said the woman washing dishes, with a gold-capped smile, “there’s no one living here but me.” She was Kyrgyz, but not homeless, just a local villager looking after the camp in the off season. She said there hadn’t been any IDPs at the camp that she knew of. “You should go to the sanatorium, by the checkpoint. There’s lots of people living there.”

“Are they Kyrgyz who lost their houses? How long have they been there?”

“Yes, yes… Since June.”

So off we went.

The sanatorium -– really, a children’s tuberculosis hospital -– stands on the edge of town. Where the road past it slopes uphill, leading to two suburbs populated by ethnic Uzbeks, it is blocked off with concrete barriers manned by Kalashnikov-wielding Kyrgyz men in camouflage.

They walked over as our car pulled up to the tank parked outside the sanatorium gate.

The next five minutes wouldn’t surprise anyone who’s dealt with ominous security forces in the former Soviet Union. The men, who claimed to be local police, wore no insignia or identifying marks on their fatigues (easily buyable, by the way, at local markets), though by law -- if they were in fact police -- they must. They grabbed our press cards, deleted our tank photo and demanded to know why no officials were accompanying us. The most senior-looking of the three started making calls from his cell phone; I, in turn, scrolled through the numbers in mine, dropping names I thought might afford us some protection.

The police force is made up mostly of ethnic Kyrgyz. Salaries are low, corruption rife and laws are viewed as suggestions at best. Well-documented studies by the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch have presented strong evidence that local security forces in the south did little to stop June’s violence and, in some instances, facilitated attacks against ethnic Uzbeks.

Outside the sanatorium, our explanation that we were following up on reports of ethnic Kyrgyz IDPs -- an example, one might think, of the fair reporting many Kyrgyz have felt is missing -- did not persuade the men to let us in. They insisted that the building stood within their security perimeter and they had to guard it; moreover, they said there were no displaced people on the territory of the hospital, just sick children.

I called back the activist to let her know what we’d found. 

“Ah, that means they’ve been taken to other places already,” she said of the displaced. “But, before, they were definitely there. I didn’t see them myself, but they were definitely there. I know. I heard about it.”