Mummy, are we going to die?

Child fleeing Kyrgyzstan:

“Mummy, are we going to die?” a six-year-old girl asked, clinging to her mother after their flight from ethnic bloodshed in Kyrgyzstan to a refugee camp in neighbouring Uzbekistan. She is one of tens of thousands of panicked ethnic Uzbek refugees who fled their homes in southern Kyrgyzstan as violence raged in the Central Asian country for a third day between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks.

The village of Yorkishlok close to the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border was flooded with more than 32,000 refugees, most of them women and children, uneasily settled in three makeshift camps, regional Uzbek emergency officials said. But the true number of ethnic Uzbek refugees is more than 80,000, an unnamed police official said, explaining that child refugees, who numbered in the thousands, were not being registered.

An ethnic Uzbek mother holds her son as they wait at the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border. AFP

Some refugees were barefoot with only the clothes on their backs after a chaotic scramble to escape the brutal clashes that exploded overnight Thursday in Kyrgyzstan. Some sobbed, while others were dazed with shock.

Many furiously accused Kyrgyz law enforcement officials of abetting marauding gangs of ethnic Kyrgyz as they slaughtered Uzbeks in the most terrifying ethnic bloodshed in Central Asia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“They are killing us all the Uzbeks one after the other!,” Rani, 51, told AFP after quitting her home in the Osh region. “I fled. I don’t know what happened to my children and my grandchildren.

“The Kyrgyz soldiers are helping the Kyrgyz to slay us,” she cried.

Some refugees accused Kyrgyz forces of taking part in the inter-ethnic violence in return for bribes from criminal gangs.

One elderly refugee, Uraynjon, described acrid smoke and houses torched in ethnic Uzbek enclaves, despite a curfew and state of emergency imposed by the Krygyz interim government across two southern regions.

“The Kyrgyz forces came to find us and told us about the curfew, then when we were all in our houses, they came and let armed gangs set fire to our houses and kill everyone,” he told AFP.

Many refugees begged for outside help to end the violence as they desperately searched for news of lost loved ones. One old man cried: “Why doesn’t Uzbekistan send in its army?”

Minovar Kholomatova, who fled with three young children, said she hid for many tense hours in the basement of her home but was forced out after gangs set fire to the building.

“People were shooting at us as we left the house,” she said, sobbing as she recalled the frantic flight.

“We are assessing the scale of the problem,” one of the members of the UN’s children’s agency

UNICEF told AFP