BISHKEK. May 24 (Interfax) - A new demonstration demanding pullout of the U.S. Transit Center from the Bishkek Manas Airport has taken place in the Kyrgyz capital city.
The Green Party and the People's Patriotic Movement organized the action.
About 50 activists and residents of the village Cholok-Aryk in the Panfilovsky district of the Chui region, where the Transit Center's KC-135 Stratotanker crashed on May 3, gathered near the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek at around noon, an Interfax correspondent reported.
They demanded withdrawal of the U.S. airbase from Kyrgyzstan and compensation for the environmental damage incurred from the KC-135 crash and kerosene dumping of Transit Center planes above the Chui region.
"They have been pouring jet fuel over our gardens and cropland for the past twelve years. Harvests have shrunken, cattle are sick and 90,000 liters of jet fuel leaked into sewage and irrigation canals in the tanker plane crash," Green Party leader Erkin Bulekbayev told reporters.
The demands were handed over to U.S. Embassy staff members.
A similar action took place near the House of Government on Friday afternoon.
The U.S. Transit Center opened at the Bishkek Manas Airport on July 14, 2009, to replace the coalition base deployed in December 2001 to support the operation in Afghanistan. The republic renounced the airbase agreement in February 2009. The Transit Center backs up the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). A number of transport planes and tanker places are permanently stationed there. The center is manned by about 1,000 U.S. servicemen.
Early this week the Kyrgyz government submitted to the parliament a draft law renouncing the Manas Transit Center intergovernmental agreement with the United States.