Kyrgyzstan's ousted president was in exile in Belarus today, as the interim authorities controlling the Kyrgyz capital warned he would be imprisoned if he tried to return to the Central Asian country, AP reported. Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who fled Kyrgyzstan after a bloody uprising on April 7, had taken refuge last week in neighboring Kazakhstan but then left Monday for a destination not announced. Belarus' authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko said Tuesday he had arranged for Bakiyev to come to the Belarusian capital. His presence, however, could exacerbate Belarus' tensions with both the West as well as neighboring Russia. «President Bakiyev and his family are in Minsk under the protection of our state and me personally,» Lukashenko said in televised remarks to parliament, adding that his guests were undergoing medical checkups. Lukashenko also said he had ordered food deliveries to Kyrgyzstan, where widespread poverty contributes to political tensions. Kyrgyzstan's interim authorities have warned that Bakiyev will be imprisoned if he returns to the Central Asian country, after being deposed in an uprising that left 85 people dead when gunfire broke out at a protest rally. Interim government member Edil Baisalov told Russian agency Interfax that Bakiyev could only return «in the capacity of a prisoner.» He accused Bakiyev of being responsible for the April 7 bloodshed in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek. The shaky coalition, which is set to run the former Soviet country for six months, is struggling to restore stability. Deadly clashes have broken out between mobs of ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Meskhetian Turks in a village on the outskirts of the capital, while Bakiyev's supporters in his southern stronghold have managed to maintain control of the region by imposing their own interim governor. The mood was tense Tuesday in Mayevka village, outside Bishkek, after hundreds of young ethnic Kyrgyz men armed with sticks and metal bars arrived a day earlier beat residents while burning several houses and cars. At least five people were killed, the Interior Ministry said. The rampage appears to have been motivated by an attempt by squatters to seize arable land. Mayevka is populated largely by Meskhetian Turks, descendants of an ethnic group deported from Soviet Georgia in 1944. «When we learned that there was a claim out on our field, we urgently evacuated women and children from the village,» said Alik Aliyev, an ethnic Meskhetian Turk inhabitant of Mayevka. «Toward the evening, around 1,000 young Kyrgyz men, some of them drunk, came down our street and started to smash windows of homes and cars.» Aliyev said local residents were forced to flee under attack from the squatters, but later returned to find their homes had been looted and set on fire, and that their cattle had been stolen. Hundreds of squatters assembled for a rally Tuesday morning a short distance from Mayevka, demanding the release of jailed rioters and that they be allocated land. -- SPA
