The US envoy for Central Asia visited Kyrgyzstan on Saturday after the State Department suggested the country's deposed president may be responsible for last week's outburst of ethnic violence. The United States and Russia, both operating military air bases in the strategic Muslim nation, are concerned that continued turmoil in Kyrgyzstan could spread to other parts of Central Asia, a vast former Soviet region north of Afghanistan. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake was in Kyrgyzstan to meet its interim leadership and visit the turbulent south. The government says as many as 2,000 Uzbeks and Kyrgyz may have been killed in several days of ethnic violence last week. The UN says an estimated one million people were affected. In remarks posted on the State Department website, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Kurmanbek Bakiyev, Kyrgyzstan's president who was toppled in a revolt in April, may be to blame. “Certainly, the ouster of President Bakiyev some months ago left behind those who were still his loyalists and very much against the provisional government,” she said. “There certainly have been allegations of instigation that have to be taken seriously.” Bakiyev, an ethnic Kyrgyz currently in exile in Belarus, has denied any involvement. Uzbeks and Kyrgyz have blamed the atrocities on each other. Uzbeks say the attacks were led by gangs of Kyrgyz youths and have accused Kyrgyz government troops of aiding armed civilians. Interim leader Roza Otunbayeva has struggled to assert control in the shattered south where Uzbek neighborhoods have barricaded themselves against Kyrgyz parts in a tense standoff. She said Bakiyev loyalists, seeking to avenge their expulsion, are trying to destabilise Kyrgyzstan before a referendum on a new constitution on June 27. “I think we will be able to prevent any further outbursts,” she told Reuters. “God help us stay this way.” The violence is the worst since 1990, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sent troops to Kyrgyzstan, then still part of the Soviet Union, to quell similar unrest. This time Russia has rejected Kyrgyz pleas for military intervention, although Russian state media reported Moscow was still contemplating sending forces to guard strategic sites. The violence has set off a wave of refugees, and around 400,000 people, mainly women and children, are crammed into squalid camps and huts on the sun-parched Kyrgyz-Uzbek border. – Reutersaged from outside.”
