Muslim rebels vow to establish Islamic state in Uzbekistan town

KORASUV, Uzbekistan -- The bearded 42-year-old farmer, astride a horse with a colorful saddle and wearing a traditional Uzbek embroidered black-and-white skull cap, snapped his fingers as he gave orders to an assistant.

"We will be building an Islamic state here in accordance with the Quran," rebel leader Bakhtiyor Rakhimov said as he watched two roads converging at an intersection. "People are tired of slavery."

It was unclear how many people Rakhimov commands. But there was no sign of any Uzbek government officials Wednesday in this town of about 20,000 people on the border with Kyrgyzstan.

Rebels cherishing the prospect of a strict Islamic state were firmly in control of Korasuv, throwing up a new challenge to the government as it tried to prove to skeptical diplomats that its troops didn't fire on civilians in the nearby city of Andijan.

The government of President Islam Karimov dismissed the rebel leader's claims as "nonsense." Rakhimov maintains he has 5,000 followers ready to fight any troops that try to crush the rebellion.

The Uzbek officials apparently fled the town when rioters attacked police and government offices Saturday, a day after the violent confrontation in Andijan.

The rebels in Korasuv did not appear to be armed. "We don't have weapons, but if they come and attack us we will fight even with knives," Rakhimov said.

Observers of the impoverished Central Asia region have long feared that any social unrest could be used by Islamic groups to promote their own goals.

The uprising in Andijan that set off the violence Friday focused largely on social and economic demands. But it may have provided the opening Islamic militants have craved.

"While one cannot call Uzbekistan an Islamic country, and other sources of the conflict in Uzbekistan are social and clan-based, Islam as a very strong ideology, a strong factor, will be ready to fill the ideological voids created by the regime of Islam Karimov," Russian analyst Stanislav Belkovsky said in Moscow.

"So I consider that in the coming two to three years, an Islamic revolution and the Islamization of Uzbekistan is unavoidable. Of course this will be accompanied by bloodshed," he said.

Karimov's government has blamed the unrest on militants and has denied that troops fired on any civilians, though an AP reporter saw troops opening fire on protesters in Andijan on Friday. The government cites 169 dead in Andijan, but opposition activists say more than 700 were killed -- more than 500 in Andijan and about 200 in Pakhtabad -- most of them civilians. Interior Minister Zakir Almatov on Wednesday dismissed allegations of a crackdown by troops in Pakhtabad.

Judging by Friday's shooting, the government's first response was to crush the Andijan uprising before it could spread farther. But the emergence of a second hotspot in Korasuv, 20 miles to the southeast on the border with Kyrgyzstan, has coincided with an intense international focus on Uzbekistan -- attention that may be staying Karimov's hand.

Uzbek officials took foreign diplomats and journalists on a lightning-quick tour of Andijan on Wednesday, showing them a prison and the local administration building and arranging meetings with local officials, as the top U.N. human rights official called for an independent investigation.

The delegation was kept blocks away from the people of Andijan, leaving little chance for an objective assessment of Friday's violence.

"We blocked a few roads for your security," Almatov told the delegation as it was bused along streets lined with cordons of troops and police.

Inside the gutted administration building, a local official pointed at signs of looting and described how militants allegedly executed local officials whom they took hostage and used civilians as a shield as they tried to flee.

Almatov ignored a reporter's request to visit to a school where a prominent doctor had said 500 bodies were stored after the violence. The doctor spoke on condition of anonymity out of fears for her safety.

After three hours in Andijan, the delegation was treated to a lavish lunch of the national lamb-and-rice dish, plov, and flown back to the capital, Tashkent. Some diplomats complained the trip was too short and that there was no opportunity to speak to residents.

"I think we need to be realistic about how much can be achieved in a whistle-stop tour of ambassadors in a large delegation format over such a short period," said British Ambassador David Moran. "I think what we need now is a systematic process of openness that will enable the international community to make an authoritative assessment of the scale and nature of what happened here."

It was equally difficult to assess just how great a force -- and whom -- Rakhimov and his Islamic followers in Korasuv represent.

One of Rakhimov's aides, Arab-Polvon Badanboyev, rode a horse back and forth before a crowd of 600 to 700 refugees jostling at the Kyrgyz border on Wednesday morning. Kyrgyz border guards had closed the bridge spanning the river border, but the crowd was demanding they reopen it so they could reach a market on the other side.

"If you don't open the border, all these people will sweep you away," Badanboyev threatened -- and the Kyrgyz guards obliged.

Rakhimov's men, clad in traditional V-necked white shirts and embroidered skull caps, could be seen scattered around the town.

"All decisions will be taken by people at a mosque. There will be rule of Shariah law," Rakhimov said. "Thieves and other criminals will be tried by the people themselves."

Among the groups that promote such ideas, the one that probably has the most followers in formerly Soviet Central Asia is the Hizb-ut-Tarir party, which Uzbek authorities accuse of inspiring terror attacks in Tashkent and the central city of Bukhara last year that killed more than 50.

Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which claims to reject violence, denied responsibility for those attacks. The organization wants to establish an Islamic state throughout a broad swath of Central Asia.

Rakhimov said he and his supporters did not belong to any specific Islamic organization. "We are just people," he said. "We just follow the Quran."

Ikbol Mirsaitov, a Kyrgyz expert on Islam, speculated that some of the rebels may have been people who escaped from prison in Andijan on Friday, because they had very short beards -- indicating they had grown them in the past few days.

Asked if he feared soldiers would try to regain control of Korasuv by force, Rakhimov said: "They came here today, a few military people. I turned them back."

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Associated Press Writer Kadyr Toktogulov in Andijan contributed to this report.