Kyryz death toll 'closer to 2,000'

Kyrgyzstan’s interim president warned today that up to 2,000 people may have died in ethnic clashes as she made her first visit to a riot-hit town since the violence broke out.

Official 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,” president Rosa Otunbayeva said.

She said current figures do not take into account those buried before sundown on the day of death, in keeping with Muslim tradition.

In addition, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uzbeks have fled the area.

Meanwhile the United Nations said up to a million people may need aid after the violence.

Aid agencies and the World Health Organisation say the figure includes the potential number of refugees, internally displaced, host families and others that may suffer in one way or another from the unrest.

A UNICEF spokeswoman said the figure was an estimate to help agencies plan how much aid they need to prepare.

The agencies said those uprooted by the unrest most urgently needed food, water, medicine and shelter.

Ms Otunbayeva arrived by helicopter today in the central square of Osh, a city of 250,000. Parts of it have been reduced to rubble by roving mobs of 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 good will between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks would end hostilities.

The United Nations estimates that 400,000 people fled the country’s south after ethnic Kyrgyz killed hundreds – chiefly Uzbeks.

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.

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.

Ethnic Uzbeks yesterday accused security forces of standing by or even helping ethnic-majority Kyrgyz mobs as they slaughtered people and burned down neighbourhoods.

Col. Iskander Ikramov, the chief of the Kyrgyz military in the south, rejected allegations of troop involvement in the riots but said the army did not interfere in the conflict because it was not supposed to play the role of a police force.

The military and police set up roadblocks and began patrols this week after the worst violence was over.

Uzbeks in Osh said that on one street alone, ethnic Kyrgyz men sexually assaulted and beat more than 10 Uzbek women and girls, including some pregnant women and children as young as 12.

Members of the Kyrgyz community have denied accusations of brutality and have accused Uzbeks of raping Kyrgyz women. Eyewitnesses and experts say many Kyrgyz were killed in the unrest, but most victims appear to have been Uzbeks, traditional farmers and traders who speak a different Turkic language and have been more prosperous than the Kyrgyz, who come from a nomadic tradition.

More than a million Uzbeks who lived in Kyrgyzstan before the crisis had few representatives in power and pushed for broader political and cultural rights. About 800,000 of them lived in the south, rivalling Kyrgyz in numbers in Osh and Jalal-Abad. Both ethnic groups are predominantly Sunni Muslim.

Meanwhile, in Bishkek, the capital, human rights advocates were gathering in the centre to demand authorities probe the alleged arrest of their colleague in the southern city of Jalal-Abad, who said he had filmed rioting that spread there.