Russia Weighs Pleas to Step In as Refugees Flee Kyrgyzstan

[tekisui]

Source: New York Times

OSH, Kyrgyzstan — As four days of ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan threatened to build into a major refugee crisis on Monday, both sides of the conflict were calling on Russia to step in, saying third-party peacekeepers were needed to defuse standoffs between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz.

But an emergency meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a regional alliance dominated by Russia, ended Monday without a commitment to send in troops, though President Dmitri A. Medvedev called the situation “intolerable” and intimated that troops could be deployed if conditions worsened.

The news coming from Kyrgyzstan was painful: doctors reported that dysentery was spreading among children at makeshift refugee camps, and thousands of victims were too fearful to seek treatment for gunshot wounds. All these elements pose a pointed quandary for Moscow, which said its 2008 military campaign in Georgia was necessary to defend a tiny ethnic minority, the Ossetians, and which has cast the post-Soviet space as its “zone of privileged interests.”

“One would imagine this kind of self-declaration also comes with responsibility,” said Fiona Hill, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “They can declare their interests and the right to intervene at the time they choose, but when people ask them to intervene they are much more reluctant.”

Russia is hardly the only stakeholder in Kyrgyzstan, whose poverty is offset by strategic importance. An American military base, Manas, supports the NATO mission in Afghanistan, and for years Moscow and Washington jockeyed for the favor of its former president, Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev, to ensure a military foothold there. Since Mr. Bakiyev was ousted in April, that competition has been replaced by a more cooperative relationship, as well as shared concerns about the stability of the interim government.

more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/world/asia/15kyrgyz.html?src=mv