Americans and Russians co-located in unrestland

by YankeeJim | June 13, 2010 at 02:41 am

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At the heart of the unrest, the story says, “As many as 1 million Uzbeks live in Kyrgyzstan, many of them recent migrants who have taken over farms abandoned by an equally large number of Kyrgyz who have moved to Russia to find jobs.” The boundaries of nations are arbitrary and tribal. People needing to work see no boundaries. It is all about a struggle for scarce land and resources.

The US Air Base is a source of capital serving NATO interests. The fact that Russians are there too is a good thing. After all, Russia lives next door and the USA is far from home.

The struggle is an internal matter. The best thing for the USA, and NATO, is to slip away into the night.

“Russia won't intervene in Kyrgyzstan; unrest spreads

By Philip P. Pan

Sunday, June 13, 2010

MOSCOW -- Russia turned down an appeal for peacekeeping troops from the fragile interim government of Kyrgyzstan on Saturday as deadly ethnic rioting there spread to a second city and prompted a panicked exodus from the former Soviet republic, which hosts a key U.S. air base.

The Kremlin said the violence -- in which at least 77 people have been killed and nearly 1,000 injured -- did not call for Russian military intervention. But the government held emergency consultations with its neighbors about a joint response.

Thousands of frightened ethnic Uzbeks in the nation's south were fleeing toward the border with Uzbekistan as President Roza Otunbayeva acknowledged that her government had lost control of Osh, Kyrgyzstan's second-largest city. Meanwhile, new clashes broke out in the nearby city of Jalalabad.

Witnesses said gangs of young Kyrgyz men armed with guns and metal bars set fire to Uzbek neighborhoods and seized weapons from the security forces as the region braced for a third consecutive night of looting and gun battles.

Local authorities have said the violence was touched off by a brawl in a restaurant over a dinner bill. But Otunbayeva accused supporters of the recently ousted former president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, of fanning unrest to undermine her government before a referendum this month on a new constitution.

The region is a Bakiyev stronghold and a cauldron of ethnic and religious tensions, part of a densely populated, richly fertile valley divided between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan along largely arbitrary Soviet-era borders. In 1990, clashes over land between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz left hundreds dead, and in recent years, the three nations have sought to suppress the rise of radical Islam in the valley.

As many as 1 million Uzbeks live in Kyrgyzstan, many of them recent migrants who have taken over farms abandoned by an equally large number of Kyrgyz who have moved to Russia to find jobs. Tensions in the south have been running high since Bakiyev was ousted in a bloody uprising April 7, with Uzbeks seeking a greater role in the new political order and many Kyrgyz there continuing to back the deposed president.”