Uzbek refugees fear return to homes

REFUGEES who fled a crackdown by Uzbek troops said yesterday they dared not return home, and the UN turned up the volume on its demands for an inquiry into deaths believed to have run into hundreds.

Reuters correspondents who travelled to a village near the epicentre of last week’s violence, the town of Andizhan, saw fresh graves in which, local residents said, victims of the clashes between protesters and troops were buried.

President Islam Karimov has denied ordering troops to fire on civilians in Andizhan, but rejected a UN call for an international inquiry. His officials have blamed the violence on armed Islamic extremists.

“We feared they would finish us off in Andizhan so we decided to flee to Kyrgyzstan,” said Khasan Shakirov, 27, whose said his two brothers had disappeared. “I will not return.”

He was among more than 500 people crammed into a small refugee camp inside Kyrgyz territory but just 150 meters from the Uzbek border. In interviews, they said they were ordinary people, not terrorists.

“Those who left the crowd were finished off by snipers,” said Nabidzhan Yunusov, a 41-year-old market trader, describing a dramatic border crossing during which he was wounded in the hip.

Mr Karimov has said 169 people were killed when soldiers seized control over Andizhan after what he called a ‘bandit’ uprising. Officials say there were only seven or eight civilian deaths, describing the rest as police and rebels.

Witnesses said more than 500 people were killed by troops putting down a popular protest against the trial of 23 local businessmen and an outburst of anger over Mr Karimov’s tough rule.

Reuters correspondent Dmitry Solovyov saw around 20 fresh graves near the village of Bogu Shamol outside Andizhan which, locals said, contained the corpses of unidentified civilians secretly buried by soldiers after the Andizhan crackdown.

“This is the place they buried the unidentified bodies of people killed last Friday,” said a local resident. “There are similar burials at the other end of this cemetery and in nearby places.”

Uzbekistan, with 26 million people is the most populous state in ex-Soviet Central Asia and is an ally of US President George W Bush’s war on terrorism. It hosts a US airbase which serves operations in Afghanistan.

Despite Mr Karimov’s refusal, the UN special investigator on extrajudicial killings Philip Alston pushed to be allowed into Uzbekistan, while the the Red Cross sought access to those wounded or arrested. The Uzbek Foreign ministry said it had told the Kyrgyz authorities it was ready to take back women, the old and children, without conditions. Adult males returning would be subject to checks, the ministry said.