Report Implicates Kyrgyzstan Officials in Ethnic Violence Last Year

For a year, the Kyrgyz government has denied any complicity in the violence. That position became harder to defend on Tuesday when an international commission led by a Finnish politician issued a report implicating civilian and military officials, some still serving in government.

The report described circumstances during a period of fluidity and weak authority after the popular uprising that ousted Kyrgyzstan’s authoritarian leader, Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev.

The subsequent disarray in the army created the conditions for an ethnic massacre, as what had begun as a jubilant liberation movement for the Kyrgyz majority soured after ethnic Uzbeks also demanded more rights. The report said that 470 people were killed, 1,900 injured and about 411,000 temporarily driven from their homes.

The report asserts that the violence rose to the level of a “crime against humanity” as defined by international conventions, if the evidence the commission saw were proved in court. “In many instances crowds of attackers seized firearms and ammunition from the military and police,” largely unopposed, the report said. Members of the crowd then committed “murder, rape, other forms of sexual violence, physical violence” against ethnic Uzbeks.

The report said uniformed soldiers also participated in the violence in several documented instances, and that their commanders failed to maintain discipline or investigate the loss of armored vehicles and weapons.

That finding is an embarrassment to President Roza Otunbayeva, who blamed Bakiyev loyalists and Islamic extremists. The report found no evidence of either.

Kyrgyz authorities, in an addendum, argued that the report’s authors gave too much credence to accounts by Uzbeks and that the research was incomplete.

Analysts said that while the report was useful in drawing international attention to the severity of the events in southern Kyrgyzstan a year ago, it could also undermine the tenuous authority of Ms. Otunbayeva.

Government officials, most of them ethnic Kyrgyz, are likely to blame her for authorizing the investigation, Mars Sariyev, a political analyst at the Institute of Social Policy in Bishkek, said in a telephone interview. “It will initiate an explosion of nationalism in Kyrgyzstan,” he said.

After the April 7, 2010, uprising that overthrew Mr. Bakiyev, the new leaders first aligned themselves with ethnic Uzbek groups in the south that had set about ousting mayors and other local officials. But as the southern revolution escalated, the central government shifted its support to the old political establishment and security services.

The report concluded that officers and soldiers garrisoned in Osh, the capital of the southern region of the country, which has a mixed Uzbek and Kyrgyz population, abetted the violence, which began June 10.

The police, mostly ethnic Kyrgyz, detained a disproportionate number of Uzbeks and accused them of instigating the unrest. The report notes ethnic Kyrgyz also suffered, though in lesser numbers.

Soldiers distributed weapons, including automatic rifles and machine guns, to crowds of ethnic Kyrgyz young men, who then used them to kill Uzbeks. The young men rampaged in armored personnel carriers. The report singled out one general in particular, Ismail Isakov, then commandant of the south, for failing to use his soldiers to protect civilians. It also implicated a security force commander in the city of Jalalabad, Kubatbek Baibolov, who was prosecutor general of Kyrgyzstan until late March.

The report supports a narrative of the violence in June widely reported by foreign journalists and conveyed by witnesses in the ethnic Uzbek neighborhoods of Osh, known as mahallas.

“We thoroughly analyzed the scale of the violence,” Kimmo Kiljunen, the chairman of the commission and a former member of the Finnish Parliament, said in a telephone interview from Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital. “It is not genocide, it is not war crime, but the attacks on the mahallas in June of last year were a crime against humanity.”

Because Kyrgyzstan is not a member of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Mr. Kiljunen said, the government is not obliged to cooperate in international prosecution. The designation of the violence as a crime against humanity, he said, was important all the same to elevate international pressure on the Kyrgyz authorities to impartially apply domestic law.

So far, Mr. Kiljunen said, 80 percent of those arrested for the violence have been ethnic Uzbeks while 74 percent of the victims were also Uzbeks.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe helped coordinate the work of the independent commission but was not responsible for its conclusions. Scandinavian governments, the European Union and the United States financed the $1.4 million report.