Angry Uzbeks force authorities to rebuild bridge

updated 3:10 a.m. ET May 16, 2005

KORASUV, Uzbekistan - Hours of rioting left the police cars and government offices of this Uzbek border town torched, but by the end of the day, Korasuv’s residents counted a victory they said was worth the chaos: They could cross the bridge to Kyrgyzstan that their government dismantled two years ago.

The rioting here broke out Saturday, a day after soldiers fired into a crowd of protesters in Andijan, Uzbekistan’s fourth-largest city about 30 miles away, killing as many as 500 people. But while the Andijan bloodshed threw much of the region into harsh anxiety, there was an air of jubilation in Korasuv on Sunday.

‘Just ordinary people’
A local administrator was trapped atop a burned police vehicle for hours until he agreed to have the bridge across the Shakhrikhan-Say River restored, according to residents. The bridge leads to the Kyrgyz town of Kara-Suu, to a market that had been key to residents’ attempts to scrape out a living.

“It was a popular uprising. There were no terrorists here, just ordinary people,” Furkat Yuldashev, 32, said Sunday as he stood with other townspeople near the bridge.

Uzbek authorities tore up the floor of part of the footbridge in early 2003, purportedly to help block infectious diseases in Kyrgyz food products. But locals saw it as an attempt by the government to grind them down, denying them access to the better-developed economy and comparatively more open politics of Kyrgyzstan.

Desperate passage
Some Uzbek traders, desperate to keep their incomes going, tried to cross the river on ropes clandestinely strung above the rushing waters; many drowned.

For more than two years, resentment brewed. It exploded on Saturday, apparently touched off by news of the Andijan violence.

When protesters took to the streets of Korasuv, they set police and tax inspectors’ offices on fire, looted a bank and burned five police cars.

Rebuilding the span took just a few hours and on Sunday crowds of traders eagerly streamed across the bridge into the Kara-Suu market.

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