Just days ago, Kholida Ahmedova led a relatively comfortable life along with her husband and their children in a house in Cheryomushki, a predominantly Uzbek neighborhood in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh.
It will go down as one of the crueler ironies of the interethnic clashes convulsing southern Kyrgyzstan that the violence was fueled, in part, by ethnic Uzbeks' concerted effort to integrate into Kyrgyz political life.
It has come to this: under pressure from the international community for its handing of the violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, the provisional government in Bishkek is blaming the media.
When Suyun Sherbayev and Sobirjon Satybaldiyev set off for work at the Osh local government office on June 11, they had no idea it would be anything other than a routine work day. The two colleagues were unaware that ethnic violence had erupted in the city overnight.
Minadjan Inamova lies listlessly on the floor in a dark room, clutching the hand of her one-year-old son. She raises her head now and then to let out a rasping cough as her mother-in-law, Zamira Inamova, watches anxiously, holding a neighbor’s baby in her arms.
Photographer Dalton Bennett was in southern Kyrgyzstan during the early days of the inter-ethnic violence that claimed hundreds of lives and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes. Here is his account of his experiences at makeshift camps of displaced Uzbeks and elsewhere.
The emergence of troubling information about the recent violence in southern Kyrgyzstan – that the violence was planned, may have been abetted by Kyrgyz security forces, and predominately targeted ethnic Uzbeks – is raising the potential for an explosive reaction in Uzbekistan.
Those who lived through five days of violence in southern Kyrgyzstan are not sure who started the fighting, or why. But many have a horror story to tell.
Foreign diplomats and international organizations are backing a Kyrgyz provisional government decision to proceed with a constitutional referendum in late June, despite the widespread violence in southern Kyrgyzstan.
Attempts by the interim Kyrgyz government to control media coverage of the bloodshed in Osh and Jalal-Abad and to blame its political opponents for the unrest appear to be aggravating tensions in southern Kyrgyzstan. Uzbek community representatives, in turn, charge that the interim government has imposed de-facto censorship to conceal alleged ethnic cleansing in southern Kyrgyzstan.
