RUSSIA appeared to edge closer to a military intervention in strife-torn Kyrgyzstan last night as aid began filtering into the south of the country where the death toll from ethnic clashes was expected to climb into the hundreds.
While security officials in the worst-hit areas reported an uneasy calm, residents from the ethnic Uzbek and Kyrgyz communities called for an international peacekeeping force to deliver aid and provide safe passage for victims of the violence.
An emergency meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation – a Russia-dominated security grouping of former Soviet states – agreed to send military helicopters and trucks to help the Kyrgyz interim government quell fighting.
Moscow has resisted two direct pleas from Kyrgyz interim President Roza Otunbayeva to lead a peacekeeping force, although it has sent hundreds of troops to reinforce its military base outside the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek.
But Russian President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday described the situation in the south as “intolerable” and hinted troops could be deployed if conditions worsened.
“This is extremely dangerous for this region and it is necessary to do everything possible to put an end to such acts,” he said after the CSTO meeting in Moscow.
Russia’s reluctance is almost certainly linked to some degree to its disastrous 2008 intervention in Georgia, which it claimed was necessary to defend the tiny ethnic Ossetian minority but which drew international criticism.
Kyrgyz government officials say about 170 people have been killed and 1762 wounded since violence broke out last Thursday between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in the southern provinces of Osh and Jalalabad – strongholds of former president Kumanbek Bakiyev, who was ousted in a popular uprising in April.
However, Pierre-Emmanuel Ducruet, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, told The Australian that figure was likely to be “heavily underestimated”.
In Osh alone, he estimated, “not less than 3000” people were in need of medical help, mostly for gunshot wounds, but the ICRC was concerned by reports that wounded and sick patients were unable to reach hospitals.
An additional 80,000 to 100,000 ethnic Uzbeks have flooded over the border into Uzbekistan.
While the Uzbek government has called for international aid to support the refugees and threatened yesterday to close its borders, aid workers reported ethnic Uzbek women and children continued to cross over yesterday afternoon.
The violence began in Osh when ethnic Kyrgyz gangs attacked the shops and homes of ethnic Uzbeks, igniting tensions between the two dominant groups in the region that have simmered for a generation.
By yesterday afternoon, police chief Omurbek Suvanaliyev said there was “a slow but growing stabilisation” in the south, although many residents remained barricaded behind burnt-out cars, rocks and building materials.
Journalists in Osh described streets littered with bodies, and Uzbek men roaming neighbourhoods with makeshift weapons to guard against Kyrgyz gangs and the Kyrgyz security forces they accuse of aiding them.
Medical supplies, food and body bags have begun trickling into the south, but Mr Ducruet said the situation was desperate for many barricaded in their homes or in refugee camps who were running out of food and water.
US authorities were rushing aid to the region via its Manas airbase in the north, a crucial supply base for NATO troops in Afghanistan.
The US has no plans to send peacekeepers in but sources said the White House was keen to co-ordinate any security response with Russia and other international players, and ensure foreign troops acted under UN auspices.
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