Unidentified bodies buried in Uzbekistan

ANDIJAN, Uzbekistan – A truck drove up Tuesday and left 37 corpses wrapped in white shrouds. The bodies were buried, under police guard, in an empty field on the hills overlooking this eastern Uzbek city. Who the dead were, no one here knows.

Five people who died in Friday’s violence already were buried by workers at the Bogu Shamol cemetery, where by local tradition relatives place overturned teapots or cups used by the deceased atop the knee-high hump of earth covering their final resting place.

There were no such personal touches at the graves some 50 yards away from the small cemetery set on hills south of the city, where splashes of wild red poppies grow in the dry grass. Instead, the 37 graves were marked with small numbered plaques – some buried in twos, some alone – with the dirt leveled flat with the ground. Eleven other graves sat empty.

Days after the outbreak of violence in Andijan, the fourth-largest city in this U.S.-allied nation in central Asia, there remained major discrepancies in the death tolls given by the government, activists and witnesses.

Uzbekistan’s top prosecutor said Tuesday that 169 people – 137 “terrorists” and 32 troops – were dead. But an opposition group claimed to have tallied 745 killed, most of them civilians.

On Tuesday, Tashkent, President Islam Karimov dismissed the claims of hundreds of deaths.

“Let’s count the number of graves tomorrow,” he said, referring to a government-organized trip to Andijan for media and diplomats set for today.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice again appealed to the government to open its political system and to reform.

“Nobody is asking any government to deal with terrorists,” she said of a bloody clash between government forces and protesters.

At a State Department news conference Tuesday, she stressed U.S. concern with the country’s human rights record and said she hoped the government “would be very, very open in understanding what has happened here.”