Kyrgyzstan holds vote after violence

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The people of violence-wracked Kyrgyzstan voted on Sunday on a new Constitution just weeks after deadly ethnic purges, a vote that the interim government hopes will legitimise the power it seized in April.

The Central Asian nation was on high security alert for the vote, deploying almost 8,000 police officers and an equal number of defence volunteers to keep the peace after rampages that killed hundreds of ethnic Uzbeks and forced thousands to flee earlier in June.
Voting in the southern city of Osh, where entire Uzbek neighbourhoods were burned to the ground during attacks by ethnic Kyrgyz, interim President Roza Otunbayeva said the vote was proof of her country’s strength. “In this referendum, the people of Kyrgyzstan are proving that the country is united, standing on its feet and going forward,” Mr Otunbayeva said. “As a people, we want to heal the wounds we have sustained.”
Proponents of the new Constitution say it strips wide-ranging executive powers from the head of state and gives more authority to Parliament, setting an unusual democratic precedent for a region mostly ruled by authoritarian strongmen.
Over 56 per cent of the nation’s 2.7 million eligible voters have cast ballots so far, the Central Election Commission reported late on Sunday afternoon.
The vote, supported by the UN, the US and Russia, is seen as an important step on the road to democracy for the interim government, which came to power after former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was ousted following deadly street protests. The provisional government, which faces deep internal divisions, needs the vote to legitimise its power ahead of parliamentary elections in October. The interim government has accused Mr Bakiyev’s followers of instigating the recent attacks to try to stop the referendum, a charge that Mr Bakiyev, now living in Belarus, denies. Uzbeks have mostly supported the interim government, while Kyrgyz in the south backed Mr Bakiyev, whose regime was seen as corrupt. Bakytbek Omurkulov, an Osh-based rights activist, said Sunday’s vote was peaceful.
—AP