GENEVA, March 20: The United Nations refugee agency said on Monday it had been ordered out of Uzbekistan amid rising diplomatic furore over a crackdown on dissent in the Central Asian state.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said the Uzbek government asked it to leave in a Friday memo that read: “UNHCR has fully implemented its tasks and there are no evident reasons for its further presence in Uzbekistan.”

UNHCR helped relocate hundreds of Uzbek refugees who fled across the border to Kyrgyzstan after troops used force to suppress a May 2005 uprising in the eastern town of Andizhan, where witnesses said as many as 500 people were killed.

The Uzbek government says 187 people — mostly ‘terrorists’ or ‘bandits’ — died in the incident on which it has drawn harsh criticism from western countries including the United States.

UNHCR, which evacuated 439 Uzbek refugees from Kyrgyzstan to Romania, has urged the Kyrgyz government to refrain from compelling others to go back home across the border.—Reuters