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Local residents walk beetwen Uzbek soldiers standing guard / Photo: AFP

# Uzbekistan Faces New Turmoil as Refugees Sent Back

Created: 10.06.2005 12:33 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 12:33 MSK

MosNews

New unrest broke out in Uzbekistan, with demonstrators facing off against riot police at a round-the-clock rally outside the house of an arrested dissident, international media reported.
Norboy Kholjigitov, an official with the Human Rights Organization of Uzbekistan, was arrested on Sunday and has been charged with corruption, the Irish Times reported Friday. Protesters said the charges were fictitious and that he was being singled out after reporting on last month’s blood bath when 500 protesters were reportedly killed by security forces in the town of Andijan.
Since the arrest, growing numbers of demonstrators, now standing at about 600, have held vigil around the house in the village of Babur. Also arrested and jailed for 10 days was independent radio journalist Tulkin Karaev, who had reported on the Andijan massacre and the subsequent crackdown by security forces across the eastern part of the country.
He was jailed earlier this week on charges of hooliganism but human rights officials believe the arrest, like that of Kholjigitov, is politically motivated. The protest comes as pressure builds for an international inquiry into last month’s massacre, which the government has denied carrying out.
Earlier this week US-based Human Rights Watch released a report, based on interviews with refugees fleeing Uzbekistan, indicating that the Andijan massacre took place not just in the town square, but in surrounding streets with troops firing into crowds of fleeing civilians. Human Rights Watch backed calls by the European Union to allow an international investigation team into the country, but President Islam Karimov has refused.
The Red Cross has complained that its officials are also being refused access to the town and the massacre survivors. Unrest in Uzbekistan is expected to feature in talks when British Prime Minister Tony Blair meets Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Monday.
Russia is an ally of Karimov, and Blair, soon to assume the chair of the European Union, will be anxious to persuade Putin to support a call made yesterday by Brussels for an international inquiry into the Andijan killings.
In a separate development, Kyrgyzstan sent home four Uzbek refugees who fled last month’s bloody crackdown in Andijan, the UN says. The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) told the BBC that sending the four back may have been a breach of international law.
It said the four were part of a group of 16 refugees detained by Kyrgyz special forces on Thursday. Several hundred Uzbeks fled across the border after the Andijan killings, and are now in a camp overseen by the UN.
Kyrgyz security forces took the 16 refugees from their camp in Sassyk in Kyrgyzstan to the nearby town of Jalal-Abad.
Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UNHCR in Geneva, said the agency then discovered four had been sent back to Uzbekistan. There are fears that any refugees sent back will face punishment from the Uzbek authorities.

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09.06.2005 14:34 MSK, MOSNEWS.COM

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