Field Reports

Late in the night on June 18, a major armed incident took place on the contact line between Azerbaijan and Armenian-controlled territories in Azerbaijan, which resulted in casualties. As usual, each party accused the opposite side for violating the cease-fire. However, all casualties were sustained in Armenian-held positions, near the village of Chaylu in Mardakert region. This led the Armenians side to conclude that it was the Azerbaijani side which initiated the clash by attacking the Armenian positions.

On June 27, the national referendum on the new Constitution was held in Kyrgyzstan. According to the Kyrgyz Central Election Commission, almost 70 percent of eligible voters came to the polling stations, 90 percent of whom supported the proposed changes. Only 8 percent of all voters were against the draft Constitution. Around 200 international and 5,000 local observers monitored the voting in the nation’s 2,280 polling stations.

At midnight on June 10, what started as a conflict between young people in one of the casinos in Osh, the largest city in southern Kyrgyzstan, led to bloody, inter-ethnic clashes between the Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities. A few days later, mass unrest rapidly spread to the neighboring region of Jalalabad, leading to chaos in the entire southern part of the country. It took more than a week for the authorities to take control of the situation.

As a result of the massive interethnic clashes that started in the south of Kyrgyzstan on June 11, tens of thousands of ethnic Uzbek residents of the Osh and Jalalabad districts of Kyrgyzstan crossed the border to Uzbekistan as refugees. According to UNICEF, about 75 refugee camps were set up near the city of Andijan in Uzbekistan. About 90 percent of these refugees are children, women and elderly people. Some sources report that about 30,000 more are at the border between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, trying to cross. However, in some border areas, passage is restricted as there is physically no place to house more refugees. Nevertheless, Uzbekistan accepts all the injured and sick without any exceptions. In light of the massive influx of refugees, Uzbek authorities call for humanitarian assistance and support from the international community.

On June 1-4, 2010, Baku hosted the 17th Caspian International Oil and Gas Conference whose practical dimension was highlighted by a Refining and Petrochemicals Exhibition organized at the Baku Expo Centre.

On June 8, the high-level International Conference “Water for life” was held in Dushanbe. The conference was organized jointly by the Government of Tajikistan and the United Nations, and dedicated to the mid-term comprehensive review of the implementation of the International Decade for Action “Water for Life 2005-2015”. The main goal of the conference was a stocktaking of the progress achieved in the implementation and prospects for the fulfillment of international commitments on water and water related issues by 2015.

On May 23, Nagorno-Karabakh held its fifth parliamentary elections since 1992, when the first parliamentary ballot took place. The Central Electoral Committee put the turnout figure at around 70 percent of some 95,000 eligible voters. According to the final results, the majority of the 33 seats were taken by the Free Homeland Party led by incumbent Prime Minister Ara Harutiunian, followed by Parliamentary Speaker Ashot Ghulian’s Democratic Party of Artsakh [Karabakh] and the ARF-Dashnaktsutiun Party.

The recent incident in the Uzbek Sokh enclave in southern Kyrgyzstan once more serves as a reminder of the importance of disputed border areas in the Fergana Valley between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. As temporary solutions are being offered, the reality remains – a final delimitation of state borders is required in order to avoid possible inter-governmental conflicts, experts argue.