ANDIJAN, Uzbekistan, 16 May 2005 — Families of hundreds killed in Uzbekistan when troops opened fire to quell protests buried their dead yesterday as witnesses told of bloody mayhem in which women and children were shot “like rabbits”.
In a single incident in Andijan on Friday, witnesses said soldiers had fired on a crowd including women and children and their own police comrades who were begging them not to shoot.
Hundreds of bodies lay overnight outside the eastern town’s School No. 15 after the massacre until they were removed in the early hours on Saturday, the witnesses, who did not wish to be named, said.
Soldiers later moved in among “literally hundreds” of bodies, finishing off some of the wounded with a single bullet, said one witness to Friday’s killings outside School No. 15.
The two independent eyewitness accounts to Reuters, both by men who live nearby but who asked not to be identified, could not be independently verified. President Islam Karimov said Saturday he had forbidden the use of force against women, children and the elderly.
Two days after an uprising in the mostly Muslim Central Asian state’s Ferghana Valley, blood and body parts, hastily sprinkled with soil, still lay on the pavements, streets, and gutters in the center of this leafy town of 300,000 people.
A human rights campaigner from Andijan, Saidzhakhon Zaidabitdinov, has said up to 500 were killed, including police and soldiers, in the Friday violence.
The first to die outside School No. 15, the witnesses told Reuters, were a group of policemen who had been seized by rebels. Some rebels seen in Andijan on Friday were carrying guns.
“About 10 policemen were pushed ahead of the crowd as hostages,” said one of the witnesses, a 35-year-old businessman. He said an armored personnel carrier (APC) and troops took up position in front of them.
“’Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ they (the police) begged. But then the APC opened fire from about 150 meters away.”
It was not clear from witness accounts to what extent those in the crowd were armed, or returned fire.
Panic broke out as troops continued firing from rooftops and people fled down narrow alleyways, some pursued by soldiers.
The rebels, who Karimov says are Islamic militants, had earlier taken 10 police officers hostage and seized a state building in the central square. Protesters, some calling for Karimov to resign, staged a demonstration outside.
When troops opened fire in the square, the rebels took their hostages and mingled with a large crowd, including casual onlookers, that made its way 1,200 meters down Cholpon Avenue, a broad tree-lined street, to the school, the witnesses said.
School No. 15’s facade was pockmarked yesterday with at least 20 bullet holes and there were pools of blood in the blocked open drains.
On Saturday, soldiers started removing corpses and the wounded, but a handful who tried to escape were shot dead, the witnesses said.
“Those wounded who tried to get away were finished with single shots from a Kalashnikov rifle,” said the businessman. “Three or four soldiers were assigned to killing the wounded.”
The second witness, a 42-year-old driver, said he saw soldiers later loading corpses onto trucks and buses.
“At about 5 a.m. (on Saturday) the dead women and children were the first to be removed from the street,” he said. “I could not count all the dead, there were literally hundreds.
“There were many bodies lying on top of each other, and smashed brains on the pavement.”
A third witness, a man in his 20s who did not see the shooting outside the school, said he helped remove bodies to a makeshift morgue in the school building.
“When the soldiers left, we saw that around 30 dead people were left lying on the pavement and I was among those who took them to School No. 15,” he said.
Faizula Shakirov, 67, said his 33-year-old son Said, himself a father of three, had been killed in another part of town on Friday.
“My son wanted to look at what was going on,” he said after burying his son. “He walked out of the courtyard, turned a corner into a neighboring street and was shot in the leg and stomach by a soldier.”
“He lay wounded there until (Saturday) morning,” Shakirov said. “None of the neighbors could help him because people were afraid they would be shot if they left their homes.”
The bloodshed prompted up to 4,000 people to flee to the closed border with Kyrgyzstan.
“There have been about 1,000 people in the column I was in moving toward the border,” Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted one of the refugees as saying.
“Uzbek troops shot at us several times although we shouted to them that we are civilians,” he said. “The last time we came under fire was when we were breaking through to Kyrgyzstan. There were wounded and as far as I know four people were killed.”
Nearby southern Kyrgyzstan, also part of the Ferghana Valley, is home to many ethnic Uzbeks and was the starting point for violent protests earlier this year which led to the overthrow of President Askar Akayev.
The Kyrgyz coup followed the peaceful overthrow of established leaders in Ukraine and Georgia. The firm rule Karimov exerts on his country would appear to rule out any such peaceful revolutions taking place in Uzbekistan.
In Britain, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw denounced “a clear abuse of human rights, a lack of democracy and a lack of openness” and called on Uzbekistan to allow in the Red Cross and foreign observers to establish what happened.
Tashkent reacted angrily, Russia’s RIA news agency said, saying Uzbek forces had not fired on demonstrators.
