UZBEKISTAN

Telegraph: Refugees Put Uzbek Dead In Thousands

Refugees who fled from the massacre committed by Uzbek security forces agreed on one thing yesterday: the number of dead is not 500 - the most common reported figure - but could be in the thousands.

As reports continued to come in of clashes spreading outside the town of Andizhan, a sergeant in charge of the bridge at the border village of Kara Suu said he believed that 2,000 had been massacred during three days.

There is no way to confirm numbers offered by refugees, but it seemed likely that when the truth emerges, the massacre in Uzbekistan, an American ally in the fight against terrorism, could become the deadliest assault on civilians since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

Rakhmat, a trader who crossed the hastily rebuilt Kara-Suu river bridge, said he saw desperate refugees drown in the river swollen by spring rains. "President Islam Karimov took that bridge down in 1999 because he didn't want us trading in Kyrgyzstan, that's half the reason why there were protests in Andizhan, it was poverty not politics that drove people on to the streets.

"It was chaotic. I saw several people drown as they tried to cross the bridge. Anyone who says the protest was the work of militant Islamists is lying. It was the people, tired, poor, hungry people, not extremists, who took to the street. Anything else is Karimov's propaganda," he added.

* Alec Russell, in Washington, writes: The Bush administration yesterday toughened its stance towards President Karimov, calling on him to ease his repressive control over the country. In the strongest language to date, the State Department said yesterday it was "deeply disturbed" by reports that soldiers in Uzbekistan fired on unarmed civilians.

Dmitry Solovyov in Andizhan: Uzbekistan 'Crackdown' Death Total Now Over 600

least 600 people were killed in a military crackdown following protests in the Uzbek city of Andijan, the head of a local non-governmental organisation who saw the bodies said today.

Families of hundreds have buried their dead as witnesses told of bloody mayhem in which women and children were shot "like rabbits".

Five hundred bodies lay stored yesterday in one of the eastern city's schools, said the head of the Animokur organisation, Gulbahor Turdiyeva. Another 100 were packed in a nearby construction college, she added in a telephone interview.

In the last few decades of american foreign-policy the americans always prefered undemocratic pro-western strongmen to real democracy as long as they could provide "stability" for american business interests . No one should wonder why there's no cia-backed velvet revolution in Uzbekistan. America still has this "He's a son of a bitch but at least he's our son of a bitch" mentality. But at least the State Department is " "deeply disturbed" by the fact that the neo-stalinist regime of Azimov is killing unarmed civilian protesters in their thousends. This is another proof that the whole democracy-this democracy-that talk is all Propaganda