BISHKEK -- People in Kyrgyzstan are preparing for a referendum the government says represents the only way to end ethnic clashes many believe to have killed thousands this month. But with hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uzbeks and others displaced in the south of the country, there's serious doubt the vote will be seen as legitimate.
Is the "international community" blaming Azerbaijan for the recent violence in Karabakh that killed several soldiers on each side? So claims Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian. Really? Well, not publicly, of course; the official statements are impartial. But Nalbandian says that that's what they are saying to the Armenians, according to RFE/RL:
“In contacts with us, those making such statements, especially after the latest incident, are telling us, ‘You can clearly see to whom our statements are addressed,’” he told a joint news conference with Austria’s visiting Foreign Minister Michael Spindeleger.
“Because clearly it’s not Armenia that makes bellicose statements, calls for war,” said Nalbandian. “It’s not Armenia that organized that provocation on the border and inside the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic’s territory. It’s not Armenia that rejected a proposal to reinforce the ceasefire regime which was made by the OSCE Minsk Group.”
Unfortunately I don't see any transcript of the press conference, and none of the press accounts report on whether Spindelegger commented on this assertion. But it would seem that either Nalbandian is lying, or talking about off-the-record conversations in public. Either one is surely annoying the international community which Nalbandian claims is on his side.
As General Stanley McChrystal, the top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, prepared to face the music over his criticism of high-ranking members of the US administration, he had some unlikely supporters in his corner.
An international peacekeeping force in Nagorno Karabakh seems like it would be a long way away, but Iran has already weighed in on who they don't want participating: the U.S. Reports RFE/RL:
An Iranian diplomat says Tehran is strongly opposed to U.S. involvement in a multinational peacekeeping force that would be deployed around the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in the event of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace accord, RFE/RL's Armenian Service reports.
Iranian Ambassador to Armenia Seyed Ali Saghaeyan issued the warning at a news conference in Yerevan on June 23....
According to Saghaeyan, the United States is keen to have troops in Azerbaijan's Fizuli district, which borders Iran and was mostly occupied by Karabakh Armenian forces in 1993. He claimed such a move would pose a serious threat to Iran given its tense relations with Washington.
"Iran is the only country adjacent to the conflicting parties, and in terms if ensuring its own security, it will not allow the deployment of American forces," Saghayean said.
This opposition seems a little premature. It's not clear what organization would oversee this potential peacekeeping force -- the UN? OSCE? -- but the U.S. participation in non-NATO peacekeeping forces is pretty minimal, and it's hard to imagine NATO providing the peacekeepers here.
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.
Armenia and Azerbaijan on June 21 clashed for the second time in roughly three days on the Nagorno-Karabakh frontline, RFE/RL reports. The skirmish, which allegedly killed one Azerbaijani soldier, comes after a June 18-19 gunfire exchange that killed four Armenian soldiers and one Azerbaijani soldier -- the worst violation of the Nagorno-Karabakh cease-fire since 2008.
Mediators pleaded with both sides to tone down the aggressive rhetoric that has accompanied the violence, which started the day after the conclusion of a St. Petersburg summit between Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
Local and international human rights groups have inceasingly been reporting abuses by Kyrgyz security forces as they attempt to quell violence still ongoing in southern Kyrgyzstan. Vitaly Ponomaryov, head of the Central Asian Program for Memorial Human Rights Center, the leading Russian human rights group, said hundreds of Kyrgyz special forces and other agents took part in a raid at dawn June 21 on the village of Nariman of the Karasu district, ferghana.ru reported. Two people were killed; one man was shot while troops were searching the area, and the other one was severely beaten and died later, human rights monitors report.
OSH, Kyrgyzstan -- Troops and local residents in Kyrgyzstan's southern city of Osh have began dismantling barricades erected by ethnic Uzbeks after bloody clashes earlier this month that, according to interim leader Roza Otunbaeva, could have left as many as 2,000 people dead.
