| GEO World | | Kyrgyz refugees find borders shut as bodies litter streets | Updated at: 0047 PST, Tuesday, June 15, 2010
OSH: Uzbekistan ordered Monday its frontier closed to an exodus of refugees fleeing deadly violence in Kyrgyzstan where government forces were accused of helping gangs slaughter ethnic Uzbeks.
Bodies littered the streets of the southern Kyrgyzstan city of Osh where fresh gunfire rang out, and more fighting was reported in the nearby city of Jalalabad. Scores are reported killed in four days of clashes.
With estimates of up to 100,000 people already inside Uzbekistan, the Central Asian state's Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Aripov said the border would be shut, despite pleas from aid groups and the UN to leave it open.
"Today we will stop accepting refugees from the Kyrgyz side because we have no place to accommodate them and no capacity to cope with them," he said.
He said Uzbekistan needs international humanitarian aid to cope. "If we have the ability to help them and to treat them of course we will open the border" again, he added.
Aripov said Uzbekistan had registered 45,000 adults from Kyrgyzstan, while another official said there were 65,000 adults in Uzbekistan's Andijan region alone and the UN's refugee agency said it was sending aid for 75,000.
Ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks have flooded into Uzbekistan in the four days of bloodshed around Osh and Jalalabad which has left at least 138 dead and 1,761 wounded, the health ministry said.
The violence exploded Friday in Osh when ethnic Kyrgyz gangs began attacking the shops and homes of ethnic Uzbeks, igniting tensions between the two dominant groups in the region that have simmered for a generation.
The unrest comes barely two months after President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was overthrown in a popular uprising. Bakiyev's stronghold is in southern Kyrgyzstan.
Ethnic Uzbeks said many more had been killed and accused government forces of helping Kyrgyz mobs in their deadly rampage. |  |
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