Refugee crisis worsens in Kyrgyzstan

The UN refugee agency says that more than a quarter of a million people have fled fierce ethnic fighting in southern Kyrgyzstan.

It is mounting an emergency airlift of supplies to help cope with a growing refugee crisis caused by the violence between members of the ethnic Uzbek minority and Kyrgyz from surrounding villages.

Seventy-five thousand of the ethnic Uzbeks who have been displaced have managed to cross the border into neighbouring Uzbekistan.

Some are telling reporters they have had to leave their dead loved ones behind, unburied.

As the BBC's Rupert Wingfield Hayes reports, many ethnic Uzbeks in the city of Osh did not escape in time.

The United Nations says it has received information indicating that the violence did not just flare up spontaneously.

They warn that the continuing ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan could spread to neighbouring countries if it is not stopped soon and that ethnic minorities in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, along with other minorities in Kyrgyzstan, are at risk.

Rupert Colville is the spokesman for the office of Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Such has been the stampede to escape the violence in Kyrgyzstan that the Uzbek authorities are saying they cannot cope with any more refugees.

The Red Cross say 15,000 more ethnic Uzbeks are waiting at the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border seeking refuge.

The BBC's Rayhan Demytrie is on the Kyrgyz-Uzbek frontier.

First broadcast 15 June 2010