New Uzbek asylum seekers registered in south

The number of Uzbek nationals seeking asylum in southern Kyrgyzstan is slowly increasing following the departure of more than 400 Andijan refugees from the country in July. "There is not a huge influx of asylum seekers from Uzbekistan, [but] there is a slight increase [in them]," Vitaliy Maslovsky, a consultant with the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh, said on Thursday. "A group of them has undergone registration and we are awaiting the decision of the [Kyrgyz] migration service," Maslovsky added. In the most recent case, a 41-year-old woman from the eastern Uzbek province of Andijan - where Uzbek security forces killed civilian demonstrators suppressing dissent last May - applied to the Kyrgyz migration service office in Osh, the country's second largest. Tashkent says 187 died in the violence, rights groups put the figure at more than 550. "Her application has been registered and she has been issued a document specifying that she is an asylum seeker," Nurilia Joldosheva, head of Osh's migration and employment committee, said. "She will be interviewed and then the reasons, circumstances and details, which made her leave her home country will become clear." The first influx of asylum seekers fleeing the government clampdown on dissent in the Uzbek part of the densely populated Ferghana Valley to Kyrgyzstan was in May 2005. The group of around 440 was granted the status of UNHCR-mandated refugees and airlifted in July to Romania for third country resettlement despite pressure from Tashkent to extradite them. Since their departure, the migration officials in southern Kyrgyzstan have registered 25 new Uzbek asylum seekers. The majority of them live mainly in Osh and adjacent Kara-Suu district, with some of them residing in the neighbouring province of Jalal-Abad. Preliminary information suggested that the woman from Andijan had to flee fearing persecution back home because of her political activity. A teacher by profession, she was an active supporter of an opposition activist - a member of the banned Birlik opposition party. The Russian-based Ferghana.ru news and information web site reported that she decided to go to Kyrgyzstan after she had been summoned to the local office of the Uzbek National Security Service several times. "Her family and children are still in her home country," migration officials in Osh noted. Sherali (not his real name) is another asylum seeker, staying with friends in Osh. "I found a job and work at a bakery. Other guys [asylum seekers] are not sitting idly either. Some are working as builders, others are pushing carts for clients at the markets. Everyone is earning their daily bread," he said. "In other words we are making ends meet. We receive assistance from UNHCR, relatives from Andijan sometimes support us as well," the asylum seeker added. However, asylum seekers keep a low profile in an effort to avoid any problems, Abdumalik Sharipov, head of the Jalal-Abad-based local NGO, Spravedlivost (Justice), said. "They are afraid of the Uzbek secret service and checks by the Kyrgyz police," he explained. In one incident, the local police detained a registered asylum seeker and conducted checks on him. Given the special migration regime in neighbouring Kyrgyz and Uzbek provinces that allows visa-free entrance and a stay for up to five days, the Uzbek secret police can freely operate in southern Kyrgyzstan, local civic activists claimed. Some local NGOs claimed earlier that there might be hundreds of irregular Uzbek asylum seekers in southern Kyrgyzstan. But migrations officials doubted those figures. "In an effort to reach them, we tried to get the message across several times, including via NGOs. But since then, only a handful of people have shown up. There are no barriers for them to come to us," Joldosheva of the migration office said. Meanwhile, Adyljan Abidov from the local Centre for Supporting Civil Society Initiatives agreed, saying that the number of those irregular asylum seekers might not be high. "Maybe they are not rushing to register, hoping that they will be able to get over difficult times and go back home without any major problems. It seems that only those who have serious problems with the Uzbek authorities are coming to the Kyrgyz migration officials," he said.