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Uzbeks Accused of Inciting Violence in Kyrgyzstan

02 July 2010 04:40 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. 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, APA reports quoting The New York Times.
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 Kyrgyzstanâ€™s interim president, Roza Otunbayeva, has been turned into a campaign of persecution against ethnic Uzbek political and religious leaders, human rights groups say.
There has been no international monitoring of the current police investigation, the groups say.
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. â€œWe are concerned that most of the arrests seem to be targeted against the Uzbek communities,â€ said Ole Solvang, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who documented what he called unjustified detentions of Uzbeks, in a telephone interview. â€œThe government has to investigate, detain and prosecute all violators, and not just members of one ethnic group.â€
The arrests underline the still smoldering tensions in the south of this strategically important country in Central Asia, where both Russia and the United States maintain military bases. The American base at Manas is a vital conduit for troops and matÃ©riel going to the NATO operation in Afghanistan.
In the post-riot investigation, the police have detained 72 people in southern Kyrgyzstan on charges related to the violence that began on June 10. The authorities have declined to identify the detainees by nationality.
While independent observers have implicated factions of the Kyrgyz police and army in the violence, the government has offered competing explanations. It first laid blame for the violence with the former president, Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev, saying he deliberately caused it in an effort to destabilize the interim government that took power after he was deposed in April. Later, the police said they had detained Tajik snipers who had been hired by the former president.
The domestic intelligence agency last week issued a statement blaming Islamic radicals who it said were colluding with both the former president and ethnic Uzbek community leaders who wanted to establish an autonomous Uzbek region in the south, foreshadowing the arrests that followed.
â€œIn realizing their political demands they wound up connected with terrorists and pro-Bakiyev forces,â€ the statement said of the ethnic Uzbek leaders.
The United Nations and the United States and other governments have called for an independent investigation of the violence, an idea backed by Ms. Otunbayeva. Russia has opposed a deployment of police monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but warned of continuing instability in the Kyrgyz crisis.
The Kyrgyz government on June 17 formed its own commission to investigate the conflagration.
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.
Last week, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement saying the police in the south had detained two ethnic Uzbek reporters working in the southern city of Jalal-Abad. The group said that ethnic Uzbek journalists were being singled out for retaliation on the basis of their ethnicity, and that Kyrgyz authorities were unable to provide adequate protection.
Kubatbek Baibolov, the police commander for the Jalalabad region, denied any discrimination in the investigation.
â€œWe catch individuals committing crimes, regardless of nationality,â€ Mr. Baibolov said.
Still, for Uzbeks, the arrests have been terrifying ordeals and come on the heels of a wave of violence that left their neighborhoods smoldering ruins but ethnic Kyrgyz areas largely untouched.
Manzura Zharbayeva, whose neighborhood was raided in a predawn operation on June 23, said dozens of policemen with black balaclavas covering their faces forced men to lie in the street, hit the men with rifle butts, cursed at them and accused them of killing Kyrgyz. The police took jewelry, money and cellphones from the homes, she said.
Zafar Akbaraliyev, an Uzbek businessman in Osh, said the police searched his home while he was away, terrifying his family. Unless an independent police force arrives, he said, the Uzbeks will live in fear. â€œThe army attacked us and now they are blaming us,â€ he said.