Kyrgyzstan clashes were anti-Uzbek massacre — victims focus 06/20/2010

Kyrgyzstan clashes were anti-Uzbek massacre — victims

focus 06/20/2010 OSH — The deadly unrest that engulfed Kyrgyzstan was a brutal and orchestrated campaign of violence targeted against the Central Asian country’s Uzbek minority, victims told AFP. Victims of the violence, which killed at least 191, and according to the UN displaced 400,000, have given harrowing testimony of armed militias ravaging Uzbek districts in southern Kyrgyzstan in coordinated actions. By contrast to hundreds of Uzbek houses, districts inhabited by ethnic Kyrgyz in the Jalalabad and Osh regions have been left largely untouched by the violence, AFP correspondents said. Kyrgyz-inhabited homes have been seen daubed with the letters “KG” in an apparent effort to spare them from the ethnically inspired violence. “It was Friday night just after evening prayers,” said Davran Badalov, 35, who runs an Uzbek bakery in the village of Shark, near Osh, where an entire neighborhood of 50 houses was burned down. “An armored vehicle followed by regular cars with armed men arrived from the main road. They started shooting and screaming ‘we will kill all the Uzbeks! Kyrgyzstan for the Kyrgyz!,” he said. “We ran away, and they set fire to all the houses. When we came back to put out the fires, they started shooting at us. I don’t know who they were. We had nothing but stones to fight them back.” The violence prompted a refugee exodus to neighboring Uzbekistan. According to UN figures, there are 100,000 adults alone in Uzbekistan.... MORE Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100620com3.html

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