About 400,000 flee Kyrgyzstan's ethnic violence

OSH, Kyrgyzstan - An estimated 400,000 people, nearly one-twelfth the population, have fled their homes to escape ethnic violence, the UN said Thursday as throngs of refugees huddled in grim camps along the Uzbekistan border without adequate food or water.

That figure represents half the roughly 800,000 ethnic Uzbeks who lived in the south before Central Asia's worst ethnic violence in decades erupted last week. More than 200 people, possibly many more, have been killed, and Uzbeks have been all but purged from some parts of the south.

Ethnic Uzbeks accused security forces Thursday of standing by or even helping ethnic-majority Kyrgyz mobs as they slaughtered people and burned down neighborhoods. Col. Iskander Ikramov, the chief of the Kyrgyz military in the south, rejected allegations of troop involvement in the riots and said the army didn't interfere in the conflict because it was not supposed to play the role of a police force.

The military and police set up roadblocks and began patrols this week after the worst violence was over.

Uzbeks in Osh, the country's second-largest city, said that on one street alone, ethnic Kyrgyz men sexually assaulted and beat more than 10 Uzbek women and girls, including pregnant women and children as young as 12.

Human Rights Watch researcher Anna Neistat, who is investigating the violence in Osh, said it was difficult to say how many rapes occurred. "I just documented at least one case where I spoke to the woman who was raped," she said. "There are several other women in the very same location, so by now I can say with confidence that cases like this did happen. The question is the scale."

Members of the Kyrgyz community have denied accusations of brutality and have accused Uzbeks of raping Kyrgyz women. Eyewitnesses say many Kyrgyz were killed in the unrest, but most victims appear to have been Uzbeks, farmers and traders who speak a different language and have been more prosperous than the Kyrgyz, who come from a nomadic tradition.