Brussels pushes for dialogue in Uzbekistan
The European Commission has joined the international community in expressing worry about the weekend's reported massacre in Uzbekistan.
"We are following the events very, very closely and we are deeply concerned about what we see and hear", a spokeswoman for external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said on Tuesday (17 May).
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But Brussels has ruled out using its "nuclear option" of trade sanctions for now, urging dialogue and restraint instead.
The EU's relations with Uzbekistan are governed by a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) that entered into force in 1999, urging Tashkent to comply with international norms on democracy and human rights.
"The purpose of the PCA is to create a framework for contact between the two sides", the spokeswoman explained. "The fact that there has been no immediate recourse to sanctions or punitive actions does not mean that it's a worthless agreement".
Brussels also pays some 10 million euro a year in development aid to the country.
We need to get in there
At least 500 demonstrators and 10 soldiers were killed when violence erupted in Andijan, near the Kyrgyz border, on May 13.
The actual death toll in the region could be much higher though.
Uzbek leader Islam Karimov blamed the incident on Islamic extremists linked to the nebulous Akronyia group, but most external observers say that the army fired on a grass-roots protest against poverty and unemployment.
Eyewitness statements published by regional news agencies and the UK-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting say that soldiers circled the crowd in armoured vehicles shooting high-calibre machine guns while drinking vodka.
Witnesses also allege that the Uzbek army has begun hiding the corpses of women and children in mass graves.
The UK and the OSCE are currently trying to broker access for international organisations to the region, which has been shut off from diplomats, aid workers and journalists for the past five days.
"Uzbekistan's foreign minister [Ilior Ganiev] has promised our ambassador [David Moran] that we can have access", a British foreign office spokesman indicated. "We've seen the pictures and we've read the reports like everybody else, now we need to get in there".
Meanwhile, the UN has confirmed that 560 Uzbek refugees fled to the Kyrgyz town of Suzac on May 14.