OSH, Kyrgyzstan — A plane carrying 40 tons of flour, pasta, cooking oil and other food landed at the airport in this traumatized city on Tuesday, and citizens tentatively ventured out onto the street for the first time since spasms of ethnic violence seized the city last Thursday.
The thick black pillars of smoke that rose from ethnic Uzbek neighborhoods during four days of ethnic rioting had thinned out, and shaken citizens were lining up to board government buses that had been commissioned to take them to the airport. At the border, where thousands of refugees have been stranded without clean water or medical care, medical supplies, aid blankets and tarpaulins were due to be delivered by the International Committee for the Red Cross.
Meanwhile, officials in the capital, Bishkek, said they hoped the pace of aid delivery would steadily increase.
“This is our obligation,” said Aleksandr Dulin, the flight manager aboard the Il-76 cargo plane, during the 45-minute flight to Osh. “People are starving, they are in desperate shape. They cannot feed themselves. There is not even a single loaf of bread.”
“It is frightening,” said Ms. Kondubayeva, who was shepherding three small children. “We don’t turn on the lights after dark. We close the doors and windows. Our young men stand guard.”
News was spreading on Tuesday about the arrest of Maksim Bakiyev, the youngest son of the ousted former president Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev, as he landed a rented private plane at an airport in the southern English county of Hampshire. The provisional government in Bishkek on Tuesday said Maksim Bakiyev had orchestrated rioting in the multiethnic cities of Osh and Jalalabad so that his father could return to power.
“It was a carefully planned operation conducted by the enemies of the interim government,” said Alzambek Atambayev, first deputy head of the interim government. “The information available to our special services confirms that all of these measures were funded by the Bakiyev family, particularly his youngest son, Maksim Bakiyev.”
Mr. Atambayev acknowledged that the provisional government had been unable to cope with the unrest but also blamed local law enforcement bodies in the south, which he said still supported the former president.
“The law enforcement agencies were filled with criminals loyal to the previous government,” he said, in comments carried by Interfax. “We have to find the traitors now.”
Kurmanbek Bakiyev on Monday angrily denied the accusations at a news conference in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, where he fled after his ouster. He said the provisional government was “absolutely not in control of the situation; they don’t know what to do.”
Both sides of the conflict were calling on Russia to step in, saying third-party peacekeeperswere 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 on Monday without a commitment to send in troops, though the Russian president,Dmitri A. Medvedev, called the situation “intolerable” and intimated that troops could be deployed if conditions worsened.
“So far, they don’t seem ready to act in a significant way,” said Andrew C. Kuchins, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There is definitely a reluctance to spend blood, not too much enthusiasm about treasure, and nobody is putting political capital on the line.”
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 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 favor 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.
American authorities were working to rush humanitarian aid to the region and coordinate any security response with Russia and other international players. While the United States is not currently planning to send peacekeeping troops, the Obama administration wants to make sure any foreign forces that go do so under the auspices of the United Nations.
“To have an international blessing for whatever happens is essential,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.
Last week’s events have introduced a host of new fears. Since armed mobs began raiding Uzbek neighborhoods in the southern city of Osh, the demographics of southern Kyrgyzstan have been redrawn. As many as 80,000 ethnic Uzbeks — more than 10 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s Uzbek population — were believed to have crossed the border into Uzbekistan, which on Monday announced it could accept no more refugees.
Many Uzbeks who remained in their homes in Osh took cover behind barriers thrown together from rocks, burned-out cars and building materials.
Kyrgyz men outside the walls were poised with bats and iron bars, saying they needed to suppress a plot by Uzbekistan to seize control of the country’s multiethnic south. “Death to Uzbeks” had been spray-painted on wrecked buildings, beside intact structures labeled “Kyrgyz.”
The proportions of the violence were coming into focus slowly, and estimates of the dead were still unreliable. Kyrgyz officials gave the toll on Monday as 125 dead and nearly 1,500 wounded.
But Pierre-Emmanuel Ducruet, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Osh, said that inspections of the city’s morgues suggested a much higher number, perhaps 700 in Osh alone, and that “not less than 3,000” people were in need of medical help, mostly for gunshot wounds.
Rumors were swirling about what, precisely, had ignited the violence. Some said it had started spontaneously, when Uzbek and Kyrgyz youths brawled outside a casino. But most believed the attacks were orchestrated from outside for political reasons. The south has remained largely loyal to Mr. Bakiyev, while ethnic Uzbeks have supported the new provisional government in Bishkek.
Kubatbek Baibolov, appointed last week as the military commander of the restive city of Jalalabad, said he believed that Mr. Bakiyev had engineered the violence so that he could return to power. Mr. Baibolov said his forces had detained a dozen men who had been hired by people “close to the government of Bakiyev” to foment ethnic conflict around Osh by shooting at both Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the hopes of setting off reprisals.
“This action is political, not interethnic,” Mr. Baibolov said.
Uzbek refugees said the violence flared up with a terrifying suddenness. Manzara Saipova said that she hid in the attic with her granddaughter when a large group of men in black masks entered her neighborhood, and that when her house began to burn she fled to a neighbor’s home and watched the destruction through a basement window.
Islambek Israilov, an ethnic Uzbek waiting at the border on Monday with a bullet wound in his hand, said a crowd began building outside the gates to his neighborhood enclave late last week. “The first day they shot in the air,” said Mr. Israilov, 19. “By the second day, they shot me.”
Kyrgyz irregulars, armed with guns, bats and iron bars, described the Uzbeks as the aggressors. Sultan Shakhamadiyev, who had traveled to Osh from Bishkek when the violence began, pointed to a blood-spattered car where he said a fleeing Kyrgyz family had been ambushed by Uzbek snipers. He said he was compelled to travel to Osh to protect Kyrgyzstan’s south from being absorbed into Uzbekistan.
“There is a war to take our Osh and make it into an Uzbek region,” Mr. Shakhamadiyev said. “It’s our Kyrgyz region.”
Marat Ismanaliyev, who was standing nearby, said the Uzbeks inside the enclaves were heavily armed, though on visits to three such neighborhoods on Monday, a reporter saw only one gun.
Though violence seemed to have quieted late Monday, a poisonous mistrust now divides Uzbeks and their Kyrgyz neighbors, and both said only troops from outside the country could guarantee safe passage to victims of violence and ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid.
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