RFE/RL correspondent Daisy Sindelar is reporting all week from Osh, southern Kyrgyzstan, where residents and authorities are commemorating the victims of ethnically charged bloodshed a year ago that killed some 470 people. You can follow her tweets at @DaisySindelar.
One Year After The Violence: Images Of Osh
1
Ten-year-old Madina, an ethnic Uzbek, holds her niece in the courtyard of her family home in an Uzbek mahalla in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh. Her family's home was destroyed by fire in the June 2010 ethnic clashes. A report by the international Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Commission says Uzbeks made up three-fourths of the 470 people killed in the clashes and also sustained the majority of the property damage.
2
Shades of Mondrian in an Osh mahalla, or neighborhood. Streetside shops offer soda, tea, and the legendary kumys, or mare's milk, drunk on the spot in real glasses. A popular business as the temperatures reach 35 degrees Celsius.
3
Many homes in Osh neighborhoods still bear scrawled telephone numbers -- a remnant of the days and months after the June 2010 clashes, when residents left telephone numbers where relatives and aid agencies could reach them. Here, an Uzbek home in the neighborhood of Cheremushki, which saw some of the worst violence.
4
A lush summer scene outside an Uzbek mahalla in Osh.
5
Both Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Osh continue to receive aid to help rebuild lost homes through bodies like the UN refugee agency, the Red Cross, and the Aga Khan development group. But the process is moving slowly, with some families having rebuilt just one or two rooms in the past year. Here, construction at a Kyrgyz family home.
6
Among the businesses destroyed in the June 2010 clashes in Osh were dozens of Uzbek restaurants that had lined the city's main thoroughfares. Several have since been reconstructed but have reappeared under new Kyrgyz names -- and, many Uzbeks suspect, new Kyrgyz owners as well. Here, the newly named Yntymak restaurant -- Kyrgyz for "friendship."
7
Roses grow in abundance in Osh, where even the most modest yards and roadside patches are packed full with the fragrant flowers.
8
No, it’s not an air freshener, it's the Kyrgyz flag. A growing number of Kyrgyz taxi drivers in the southern city of Osh have been decorating their car with the flag.
9
Malika Usadzhanova, a 74-year-old Uzbek resident of Osh who was born, educated, and raised on a single two-block district in the city center. A former geography teacher, Usadzhanova now lives alone in a burned-out, two-story home. Most of her children and grandchildren have moved to Russia to look for work. She survives on a monthly pension of 4,250 soms ($94).
