SASYK (Kyrgyzstan): They live in sweltering heat in the middle of nowhere among dust, scorpions and poisonous spiders. But they shudder at the thought of returning to their native Uzbekistan.

More than 500 Uzbeks crossed into neighbouring Kyrgyzstan on May 14, fleeing what human rights groups said was a massacre the day before when troops and police shot into a crowd to suppress an uprising in the eastern Uzbek city of Andizhan.

“We just can’t return because we are living witnesses of the atrocities committed against civilians,” said one young, soft-spoken woman wearing a Muslim scarf and a long dress.

“To return there is to meet your death,” she told Reuters, giving an assumed name, Nilyufar. She said her two children and parents were still in Andizhan. Her husband has disappeared.

The Uzbek authorities say 176 people died in Andizhan, many of them “bandits” or “terrorists”. They deny there is any truth to reports by witnesses that an estimated 500 civilians were killed by troops using indiscriminate force.

As Nilyufar spoke, dozens of other visibly distressed Uzbek women sat nearby in this refugee camp in southern Kyrgyzstan, nodding their heads in agreement.

A six-month-old girl, Khadija, the youngest of the camp’s 427 refugees, kicked her feet in a makeshift cradle hung beneath a blue plastic sunshade. The Uzbek refugees include 77 women and 17 children.

The refugees fled more than 40 km to the Kyrgyz border. They say some among them were killed on their way, and those with Kyrgyz citizenship have been moved elsewhere by local officials.

Kyrgyzstan, an impoverished Central Asian state that is smaller than Uzbekistan but shares part of the Ferghana Valley with its more powerful neighbour, has come under pressure from Uzbekistan to hand back some of the refugees, while the West has urged it to live up to commitments to protect them.

On June 4 it pleased the West by moving the refugee camp further away from the Uzbek border to Sasyk.

But, to condemnation from the United States and UN refugee officials, five days later its security services handed four Uzbek asylum seekers back to Uzbekistan, where human rights campaigners say they may be killed.

For the rest of the refugees, it may take until September for the first of them to be granted political asylum in Kyrgyzstan or other states, refugees and camp workers say.

Even those denied asylum should not be deported to Uzbekistan, human rights campaigners say, as that would run counter to international commitments not to send refugees back to countries that use torture.

“Kyrgyzstan unfortunately has failed to give sufficient guarantee that it will respect the international conventions that prohibit return to a country like Uzbekistan that uses torture,” Acacia Shields, senior Central Asia researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch, told Reuters at the camp.

“These people are in great danger. The well-being of those four (deported) is still unclear, it’s unclear whether they are still alive or not,” she said.

Uzbek President Islam Karimov justifies his tough methods by saying he must stop radical Islam in his Muslim nation of 26 million. He blames unspecified “foreign forces” for the Andizhan deaths.

Karimov has won political backing from China and Russia, but faces strong criticism from the European Union, Nato, the United Nations and close military ally Washington, whose demands for an independent inquiry Uzbekistan has repeatedly rejected.

Refugees say Uzbek secret agents in plainclothes, seeking to persuade refugees to return, are frequent guests in the camp.

“My brother Ikrametdin, a mentally retarded person aged 22, gave in to their pressure. My father told me he was jailed shortly after he returned home,” said Zainabitdin, a 33-year-old former carpenter.

The camp, 80 km away from Andizhan and surrounded by sun-scorched hills, is guarded by Kyrgyz Interior Ministry troops and several sniper nests can be seen on hill-tops overlooking the area.

It is a hard place to live, with temperatures hovering at around 40 degrees Celsius (105 Fahrenheit) at noon, and both soldiers and refugees are often stung by scorpions at night.

But even in these conditions, good sanitation and order leap to the eye. Food and drinking water supplies are stable, and refugees dodge the hellish heat in large tents bearing the letters of the UN refugee agency UNHCR.

“There will be no excuse for Karimov — ether he steps down, or Uzbekistan will explode,” said Ulugbek, 29, speaking on the eve of the 40th day since the Andizhan uprising..

“As for tomorrow, we will cook cauldrons of pilaff, slaughter a sacrificial lamb and as Muslims we will pray to mark the 40th day of the innocents who were killed.”—Reuters