Ethnic Unrest Report Under Fire in Kyrgyzstan

When a long-awaited report into the ethnic clashes in southern Kyrgyzstan in June 2010 was finally unveiled last week, a number of human rights activists accused its authors of bias and of failing to identify the root causes of the violence. 

The head of the commission that drafted the report, Abdygany Erkebaev, said it contained serious recommendations such as a demand for top members of the interim government of the time and also local government officials in Osh and Jalalabad to be held accountable for failing to prevent the violence, and for not doing enough to stop it once it started.

The report says 426 people are known to have died in the course of several days of attacks, arson and looting.

Although the commission compiled its findings after sifting through thousands of official documents, eyewitness statements, and audio and video recordings, human rights defenders like Aziza Abdurasulova say it is gravely deficient.

“The findings should have been objective, the truth should have been established, and the focus should have been on the facts rather than on repeating the same thing over and over again,” she said. “It shouldn’t just have presented the arguments of one side, but of the other as well.”

Abdurasulova alleges that the commission has withheld from the public some of the information to which it was privy.

Political scientist Mukar Cholponbaev says Erkebaev was a member of the interim government himself at the time.

Orozbek Moldaliev, one of the commission’s members, said the reason the report took so long was that the team had to go through a massive amount of material.

(See also Deep Rifts Remain in Conflict-Torn Kyrgyz South.)

The audio programme, in Russian and Kyrgyz, went out on national radio stations in Kyrgyzstan, as part of IWPR project work funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.