New York, June 14, 2010—The Committee to Protect Journalists is disturbed by reports that local television stations in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh were ordered to cease transmission on Friday by the city government in the wake of interethnic violence in the region. Osh residents now have access only to the state television channel, KTR, and several Russian television channels, the independent news agency Zpress reported.
“We call on the Kyrgyz government to allow all
television stations to resume broadcasting immediately,” CPJ Europe and Central
Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova
said. “It is critical that the government does not censor independent
journalists during this breaking story in the south of Kyrgyzstan.”
According to local press reports, on Friday, the independent
Osh television channels Osh TV and Mezon
TV, and the recently nationalized, Russian-language channel Piramida, stopped
broadcasting on the orders of the Osh city government, which did not publicly
explain why it was shutting down the stations. Since the order to stop
broadcasting, Mezon TV and Osh TV have both been vandalized, the independent
regional news Web site Ferghana
reported. The news Web site Vesti
reported on Saturday that the regional television station in Jalal-Abad was in
flames.
Kyrgyz official estimates put the death toll from
ethnic clashes in Osh
and Jalal-Abad, which have been raging since Friday, at 125. But according to
the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), the count stands much
higher; The New York Times reported
today that an ICRC spokesperson put the estimate at more than 700.
International news reports say tens of thousands of ethnic
Uzbeks have fled the two cities and crossed the border into Uzbekistan to
escape the violence. What prompted the clashes remains unclear, but armed criminal
gangs of men in their 20s have been attacking ethnic Uzbek neighborhoods in
both cities, setting houses and stores on fire and shooting people trying to
flee. The Kyrgyzstan
interim government led by Roza Otunbayeva declared a curfew on Saturday,
deployed troops to the region, and gave “shoot-to-kill” powers to security
forces in the south, according to news reports.
In a separate incident, Uzbek police in the city of Andijan are holding a
prominent independent journalist for a second day. The reporter, Aleksei
Volosevich, who is based in the capital, Tashkent,
had travelled to the border with Kyrgyzstan
to report on the humanitarian crisis resulting from ongoing clashes between
ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks in the Fergana
Valley cities of Osh and Jalal-Abad. Volosevich, who was
reporting for Ferghana, was detained when
he tried to get to the Yor-Kishlok village in Uzbekistan,
where Uzbek refugees from the clashes have been arriving from Kyrgyzstan. At
around 7 p.m. yesterday, Volosevich was photographing buses transporting the
refugees, Ferghana reported, and did
not have his personal documents on him—they were in a bag he had temporarily
handed to a colleague at the time of the arrest. His mobile phone is turned off,
and CPJ was unable to make contact with him. Volosevich is currently being held
at the Andijan regional police department, Ferghana
said.
“We call on Andijan police to immediately release our
colleague Aleksei Volosevich and stop obstructing him and other reporters from
doing their job,” Ognianova said.
Ethnic Uzbeks comprise one-fifth of the population of Kyrgyzstan—the
biggest minority in the country; most live in the south. Since the ousting of
President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in April, tensions have grown between ethnic
Uzbeks, who largely support the interim government, and ethnic Kyrgyz, who
largely back Bakiyev in the south. Over the weekend, Otunbayeva blamed the
exiled Bakiyev for instigating the clashes from abroad to destabilize the
country ahead of a referendum scheduled for June 27 to adopt a new constitution.
Bakiyev categorically denied the claims from his temporary home in Minsk, Belarus,
according to international news reports.
