Unrest Spreads
In Uzbekistan
By Peter Boehm
and Daniel Howden
17 May 2005
The
Independent
Authorities
in Uzbekistan have lost control of a key border town in the eastern
Ferghana valley, despite a brutal clampdown that has so far claimed
the lives of an estimated 700 people.
If reports of further
killings can be confirmed the violence would be the most brutal of its
kind in Asia since China gunned down hundreds of democracy protesters
in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The hardline government
of Islam Karimov, an ally of London and Washington in the "war
on terror", has dispatched an armoured force into the restive area
in the east of the country after mass arrests of alleged radical Islamists
sparked what appeared to be a popular uprising.
Saidjahon Zaynabitdinov,
head of Appeal, a local human rights advocacy group, said troops had
killed about 200 demonstrators on Saturday in Pakhtabad, just outside
the city of Andijan, where witnesses saw security forces kill up to
500 civilians the previous night.
United Nations officials,
rights groups and Kyrgyz border police said thousands of refugees who
were fleeing the violence in and around Andijan had made for the nearby
border area, leading to further unrest.
Security forces
loyal to the regime of Mr Karimov had last night sealed off the town
of Korasuv on the border with Kyrgyzstan.
Heavily armed police
set up roadblocks on the approach to Korasuv and officials admitted
they had lost control of the town, which is an economic lifeline to
the more affluent and liberal Kyrgyzstan .
"There is no
police in there and there is no civil administration there," a
police official said.
Andijan itself has
been turned into a civilian ghost town. The city, which has a population
of 300,000, was dominated yesterday by a massive military presence,
reinforced by police on every street corner as the government reluctantly
relaxed the strict controls in which reporters were ejected and the
area sealed off on Sunday.
Outside the prison
compound where 23 local businessman had been held in the incident that
sparked the protests, a wrecked car sprayed with bullet holes gave an
indication of the scale of fighting.
In the city centre,
armoured personnel carriers, tanks and army trucks underlined the sense
of a city under siege, while lorries loaded with soldiers carrying automatic
rifles rumbled through.
The headquarters
of the regional administration, where the protesters gathered in support
of the insurrection, was still blocked off by soldiers. The blackened
and charred upper storeys of what had been the nerve centre of Mr Karimov's
authority, pock-marked with bullet holes, bore witness to the fighting.
Mr Karimov has sought
to blame the violence on radical Islamists with alleged links
to al-Qa'ida attempting to overthrow the secular government in
Tashkent. But human rights groups and independent observers, including
the former British ambassador Craig Murray, say Mr Karimov was leading
a brutal police state, propped up by the arbitrary detention and torture
of Muslim dissidents protesting at the desperate economic conditions.
Separatist movements
in the Ferghana valley, which runs across the eastern border into Kyrgyzstan,
sprang up in the early Nineties in response to Tashkent's persecution
of minorities in the area. The security forces have waged a ruthless
campaign to crush both the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which seeks
a Muslim state in Ferghana, and Hizb ut-Tahrir, another Islamist group
whose members have been blamed for a bomb attack and labelled "terrorists"
by the Karimov regime.
Sympathy for the
protesters has spread as far as the capital, where a small gathering
of people risked the wrath of the authorities to lay flowers in commemoration
of the bloodiest days of fighting in the country's post-Soviet era.
"It was a black
day in Uzbek history. We are ashamed," said Tashpulat Yuldashev,
a political analyst. "We dissidents have been long been afraid
of standing up to express our discontent. But this time we can't stay
silent," he said.
Many of the activists
were wearing black armbands and ribbons.
The rebellion in
the Ferghana valley has given the country's fragmented and disorganised
opposition movement a fresh momentum to unite and openly express opinions,
Mr Yuldashev added. Opposition parties are banned from running in elections.
State television
has so far ignored the uprising, while Western and Russian broadcasts
have been cut off since the clashes began on Friday.
©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.