Foreign delegation assess Uzbek violence
A group of foreign diplomats and journalists arrived in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan today to assess the scope of a violent government crackdown on demonstrators.
Uzbekistan’s government said 169 people were killed in Andijan on Friday when government troops put down a demonstration after protesters seized a prison and local administration building.
But opposition figures and rights activists say more than 500 people, many of them innocent civilians protesting against poverty, were gunned down in what they said was a massacre.
The trip follows a request by Britain and other nations to allow unrestricted access to Andijan for foreign journalists, diplomats and relief workers.
Prosecutor-general Rashid Kadyrov and President Islam Karimov held a news conference in the capital, Tashkent, blaming alleged Islamic militants for last week’s unrest and denying that government forces shot and killed any civilians.
“Only terrorists were liquidated by government forces,” the prosecutor said yesterday, adding that militants killed several hostages and innocent civilians.
Kadyrov said 137 “terrorists” and 32 troops were killed in the eastern town of Andijan – a sharp rise from the nine deaths the government originally announced on Friday. Some of those killed were foreign fighters, he said.
But opposition leaders blamed government troops for most of the killings. They say more than 500 people, many of them innocent civilians, were killed in Andijan and more than 200 in the nearby town of Pakhtabad.
The unrest was the worst since the former Soviet republic won independence in 1991.
Nigara Khidoyatova, head of the unregistered opposition Free Peasants Party, said her party reached its figure of 745 killed in the two towns by speaking to relatives of the missing. “The count hasn’t yet finished, and the death toll will rise,” she said.
Other witnesses said several hundred people were killed in Andijan.
The Uzbek president dismissed Khidoyatova’s claim of more than 700 dead as one made by a “person who needs psychiatric treatment”.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice again appealed to Uzbekistan’s government to open its political system and to reform.
The events began on Friday when protesters stormed a prison in Andijan, freed alleged Islamic militants and other inmates, and seized local government offices.
Thousands of demonstrators filled the city’s central square and listened to speeches, mostly complaining about poverty and unemployment.
An Associated Press reporter and photographer saw trucks with troops drive by the square and open fire into the crowd after some protesters threw stones at them. Some protesters were armed.
But at a tent camp across the Kyrgyzstan border, Uzbek refugees said their demonstration in the central square was peaceful and that the troops kept firing.
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