Russian officials are debating possible intervention in Kyrgyzstan after days of ethnic clashes that have killed at least 118 people.
Moscow sent at least 150 paratroopers to Kyrgyzstan yesterday to protect its own military facilities in the country and representatives of the Moscow-led security bloc of ex-Soviet republics known as the Collective Security Treaty Organisation gathered today to discuss further steps.
The CSTO comprises Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was alarmed by the scale of the clashes and ordered a special envoy to travel to the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek.
The Red Cross has said that the humanitarian situation in southern Kyrgyzstan was becoming 'critical'.
Uzbekistan is attempting to get food, water and medical help to tens of thousands of refugees who have arrived into the country to escape the fighting.
Ethnic Uzbeks in a besieged neighbourhood of Kyrgyzstan's second city Osh said gangs, aided by the military, were carrying out genocide, burning residents out of their homes and shooting them as they fled.
Witnesses saw bodies lying on the streets.
Authorities in several districts have had to find shelter in schools, factories and other available buildings for the refugees.
Officials said they were still in the process of counting and registering refugees, most of them women, children and the elderly and have yet to announce an official, comprehensive total of the numbers.
Estimates from various Uzbek emergency and law enforcement officials suggest that the number may exceed 100,000 people who were being accommodated in numerous districts in eastern Uzbekistan along the border with Kyrgyzstan.
A local resident in the Kasansay district of Namangan province in eastern Uzbekistan, reached by telephone, said 'many' refugees, both ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks, had arrived there overnight.
Efforts were under way to house them in a local sanatorium, said the resident.
Another source, a Tashkent resident who had travelled to Fergana province to visit relatives, also said by telephone that a substantial number of refugees had arrived there in the past 24 hours.
Kyrgyzstan's interim government, which assumed power after an April revolt that overthrew president Kurmanbek Bakiyev, has been unable to gain full control of the country's south, which is separated from the north by mountains.
Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan intertwine in the Fergana Valley. While Uzbeks make up 14.5% of the Kyrgyz population, the two groups are roughly equal in the Osh and Jalalabad regions.
The latest clashes are the worst ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan since 1990, when then-Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev sent Soviet troops into Osh after hundreds of people were killed in a dispute that started over land ownership.
