The inter-ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan is posing a political challenge for Uzbekistan. The Influx of tens of thousands of ethnic Uzbek refugees into Uzbekistan is straining the country’s infrastructure. Meanwhile, Tashkent so far has been unusually reticent in its diplomatic dealings with Kyrgyzstan’s provisional government.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, citing Uzbek estimates, said in a June 14 statement that 75,000 ethnic Uzbeks, mostly women and children, had crossed into Uzbekistan from Kyrgyzstan since the start of the violence. [For background see EurasiaNet’s archive].
About 45,000 refugees had been officially registered. UNHCR officials later indicated that tens of thousands more ethnic Uzbeks still inside Kyrgyzstan could try to make their way across the border in the coming days.
Officials in Tashkent said that even though inter-ethnic violence was showing no sign of abating in southern Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan’s ability to accept more refugees was limited. According to some reports, Uzbek authorities wanted to close the border with Kyrgyzstan in order to stem the continuing influx of refugees. “We have no place to accommodate them [refugees] and no capacity to cope with them," Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Aripov said on June 14.
International aid agencies announced the launch of relief efforts designed to ease Uzbekistan’s refugee burden. UNHCR, for example, announced that it was preparing an airlift of food, medicine and other essentials for Uzbekistan. The International Committee of the Red Cross said it would be supplying emergency aid for 20,000 families who have been displaced by the violence.
Officially, 124 people have died since the outbreak of inter-ethnic violence late on June 10 in Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s southern capital. However, unofficial estimates suggest the death toll is much higher. At least 1,600 people have been injured amid the fighting. [For background see EurasiaNet’s archive].
President Islam Karimov’s administration is known for aggressive rhetoric in defending Uzbek national interests, including on Central Asian water usage, terrorism and border issues. But Tashkent has so far taken a low-key approach on the violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, an indication that Uzbek officials may be divided on how to respond.
An Uzbek Foreign Ministry statement on June 12 noted that ethnic Uzbeks were being targeted by certain “forces whose interests are absolutely distant from the interests of the Kyrgyz people.” It added that the violence was out of line with “the traditional relations of friendship and cooperation between representatives of all ethnicities and peoples in Kyrgyzstan that have lasted for centuries and been tested by history.”
The Foreign Ministry statement went on to express hope that “healthy forces” in Kyrgyzstan could “stop this orgy of crime and abuse, in order to stabilize the situation in the country and assure a peaceful and prosperous future for the multiethnic people of Kyrgyzstan.”
At home, officials are clearly concerned that the unfolding refugee crisis could have a destabilizing influence on Uzbek citizens. Tashkent has kept Uzbek media coverage of events in southern Kyrgyzstan to a minimum. For example, state TV’s weekly news roundup on June 13 made no mention of the refugee crisis. Meanwhile, the independent Uznews website reported that Uzbek authorities detained Tashkent-based journalist Aleksey Volosevich in Andijan, where he was reportedly striving to gather information about the influx of refugees.
“Many people are aware of the violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, but some do not know that the Uzbeks are primary targets there,” a Tashkent resident told EurasiaNet.org, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Like Uzbekistan, other Central Asian states seem to be struggling to come up with a response to southern Kyrgyzstan’s sudden descent into lawlessness.
“We are all following with concern everything that is happening in Kyrgyzstan,” President Imomali Rahmon said during the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, held in Tashkent. [For background see EurasiaNet’s archive].
As chair of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Kazakhstan has worked behind the scenes to forge consensus among international organizations on how to address the Kyrgyz unrest. Kanat Saudabayev, Kazakhstan’s foreign minister and OSCE chairperson-in-office, also dispatched a special envoy, Zhanybek Karibzhanov, to Bishkek to help coordinate the international response.
Inside Kazakhstan, media outlets have reported extensively on the ethnic violence, but state outlets have been careful to play up the dangers of political violence, and thus tacitly strive to reinforce the status quo. On June 13, for example, programming on the Khabar TV channel highlighted the risks to prosperity and stability posed by political upheaval. “All international experience says that any revolution leads to the release of destructive energy of monstrous strength which the revolutionaries themselves cannot then cope with” the Khabar program stated.
Joanna Lillis provided reporting for this story.
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