Aid Shipments Begin to Arrive in Kyrgyzstan

Source: NYT

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
Published: June 15, 2010

The thick black pillars of smoke which rose for days from ethnic Uzbek neighborhoods had thinned out, and shaken citizens were lining up to board government buses that had been commissioned to take them to the airport. At the border, where thousands of refugees have been stranded without clean water or medical care, 40 tons of medical supplies, aid blankets and tarpaulins were due to be delivered by the International Committee for the Red Cross. Planeloads of food were also expected to arrive on Wednesday from Amman, Jordan, and Kabul.

News was spreading on Tuesday about the arrest of Maksim Bakiyev, the youngest son of ousted former president Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev, as he landed a rented private plane in an airport in the southern English county of Hampshire. The provisional government in Bishkek on Tuesday said Maksim Bakiyev had orchestrated rioting in the multi-ethnic cities of Osh and Jalalabad so that his father could return to power.

“It was a carefully planned operation conducted by the enemies of the interim government,” said Alzambek Atambayev, first deputy head of the interim government. “The information available to our special services confirms that all of these measures were funded by the Bakiyev family, particularly his youngest son Maksim Bakiyev.”

Both sides of the conflict were calling on Russia to step in, saying third-party peacekeepers were needed to defuse standoffs between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz. But an emergency meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a regional alliance dominated by Russia, ended on Monday without a commitment to send in troops, though President Dmitri A. Medvedev called the situation “intolerable” and intimated that troops could be deployed if conditions worsened.


Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/world/asia/16kyrgyz.html

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or do the tensions run deeper than that between the Uzbeks and Kyrgyz. Anyone have a brief summary of the history of that area? I have read a few pieces on it and nothing really seems to explain the level of hostility quite to my satisfaction. There would seem to have to be deeper, more historical hatred going on to cause such a level of violence.