disputes had already plagued the Fergana region. Around June 1989 in the neighboring Uzbekistan, ethnic Uzbeks launched a series of pogroms against Meskhetian Turks, the cause of which was believed to have been rooted in the existing economic disparities between the two ethnicities. Similarly, in the Tajikistan, there were clashes between local Tajiks and Armenians who had recently been deported from Nagorno-Karabakh. In Kirghizia, ethnic tensions began to simmer in the spring of 1990 when Adolat (Uzbek for "justice"), an Uzbek nationalist group that claimed a membership of over 40,000, began to petition the Osh government for greater representation and the freedom for Uzbek language schooling, publications, and culture. At the same time, Osh Aymaghi, a Kyrgyz nationalist group, was petitioning for its own demands, the foremost of which was the redistribution of land belonging to Lenin Kolkhoz, a mostly Uzbek collective farm. The group was on the verge of seizing the land on its own when authorities finally agreed to redistribute some of the land, but their final decision to reallocate a large portion of Uzbek land to the Kyrgyz denomination with little compensation for the original inhabitants pleased neither party. Uzbek and Kyrgyz demonstrators gathered around the collective farm to protest the party's decision. Riots The violence began on 4 June in the city of Osh after large groups of Kyrgyz and Uzbeks gathered in the territory of Lenin Kolkhoz. The riots started to spread to some other areas of Osh Province on that same day. In the city of Uzgen violence started the next day. The immediate cause of the riots in Uzgen was a dispute between the Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in the area of Uzgen bazaar and bus station. During the riots some of the local militsiyas (the local Soviet police force) expressed loyalties to their own ethnic counterparts by taking part in the riots. Although supplies and vehicles used in the attacks were predominantly stolen by the young rioters, some local Kyrgyz elites who did not openly take part in the violence lent supplies and vehicles to the demonstrators. The worst of the large-scale clashes occurred in the cities of Osh and Uzgen. The violence was not just confined to urban zones; in the villages surrounding Uzgen and the Osh countryside, Kyrgyz herders, often going by horseback, terrorized Uzbek farmers with rape, murder, and property destruction. In the foothills of Bak-Archa, four Kyrgyz shepherds rode