Moderate PM claims election victory in Kyrgyzstan

The moderate premier of Kyrgyzstan claimed a crushing victory Monday in a presidential ballot that was marred by fraud allegations and haunted by memories of last year's ethnic bloodshed. Almazbek Atambayev has promised to use his six-year term to smooth over the ethnic fissures that fueled the divisive campaign -- and saw heated challenges from two Kyrgyz nationalists who would have troubled the West if they had won. A peaceful election promises to make the strategic nation -- the only one to house both a Russian and US military base -- the first in authoritarian Central Asian to secure a Western-style transition of power since the USSR's collapse. But both of the 55-year-old premier's chief rivals gave strong hints that they had no plans to admit defeat despite official results showing a clear first round victory for Atambayev. The central election commission said Atambayev had 63.0 percent of the vote with 95 percent of the precincts reporting on turnout of 60.3 percent.  His main rivals in the 16-candidate field -- the one-time parliament speaker Adakhan Madumarov and former boxer Kachimbek Tashiyev -- trailed with 14.9 and 14.4 percent of the vote each. "Atambayev collected enough votes to win in the first round. We have about a million votes and this is sufficient for a first-round victory," an official in his campaign office told AFP. But the campaign team of the boxer Tashiyev accused the authorities of "brazenly making up numbers that are far removed from reality." "We do not intend to recognise these elections," Tashiyev's campaign office said. The charismatic ex-speaker Madumarov also accused the authorities of overseeing "unprecedented violations". "If the election results are falsified, we will definitely launch protest action," Madumarov told AFP. "I will defend the vote of each one of my supporters." Observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe were scheduled to report their initial findings at 0800 GMT.  The stakes remain high for the mountain nation of 5.3 million people one year after a popular uprising ousted the regime of Kurmanbek Bakiyev and 470 people died in inter-communal clashes that feed resentment to this day. Outgoing President Roza Otunbayeva took power in 2010 after Bakiyev was ousted after being blamed for rampant corruption and cronyism. She set about creating the only parliamentary democracy in Central Asia and worked on repairing ties with Washington. But her government failed to prevent the unprecedented June 2010 violence around the southern city of Osh between the Kyrgyz majority and the local Uzbeks -- a community that lives in distress to this day.  And the new team's failure in the months thereafter to win many ethnic Uzbeks' trust now poses one of the most serious challenges to Kyrgyzstan's future viability as a state. Atambayev cast himself as a unifying figure on Sunday as he voted. "People are tired of meetings. They want political stability. People want peace," Atambayev said when asked about the possibility of violence in the days to come. Tense as it was, the election still contrasts starkly with the ceremonial polls held in the strongman regimes of neighbouring ex-Soviet Central Asian states, run with an iron grip by the same men for years on end. Outside observers such as Doug Wake of the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights praised the choices available to voters, but criticised imperfect registration lists that kept some people from voting. Even the outgoing president's own son Atay Sadybakasov said he had been told he was not registered to vote at his polling station.  Not all the voters were taking such problems in their stride. "If we don't get an opportunity to vote, we will be forced to take extreme measures and wreck the elections," Osh resident Aytbu Sultanova told AFP. Analysts said the unstable peace in the violence-hit south could have been especially threatened by a victory from either of the main Kyrgyz nationalists. A win for Tashiyev or Madumarov could also have harmed the West's attempts to continue using Kyrgyzstan as a supply base for its operations in the decade-long campaign in Afghanistan.