THE Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, spoke by phone Thursday with the new interim leader in Kyrgyzstan whose ‘peoples government’ has been placed in power by an uprising of the Kyrgyz masses.
Putin offered aid to the central Asian state that had been part of the USSR, until it was decreed out of existence by the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy led by Boris Yeltsin.
Putin noted that Russia has always provided, and remains ready to provide, necessary humanitarian aid to the people of Kyrgyzstan, while crowds in the Kyrgyz capital were assured by the country’s new leader Roza Otunbayeva, that she had already spoken by phone with Putin.
Putin told Otunbayeva that ‘he supports the policies of Kyrgyzstan’s provisional government,’ opposition leader Omurbek Tekebayev told the crowds, while the Russian media made the point that this was not another ‘Orange’ counter revolution, but a ‘peoples uprising’.
Otunbayeva claimed the leadership on Wednesday following a day of major clashes between the masses and the security forces who opened fire with live ammunition on the crowds, killing over a hundred people, before they fled the capital with the former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
Otunbayeva said that the provisional government will see to it that there will be presidential elections in six months.
She called for calm and urged the armed forces to return to their barracks.
‘We ask you not to give in to provocations, or to destroy and loot the property of ordinary citizens.
Some of us were killed and wounded, and we must do everything in our power to help them,’ she said in a nationwide broadcast.
The exact whereabouts of Bakiyev, 60, were not immediately clear but reports from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia said he had sought safety near his traditional stronghold of Osh.
‘The president is trying to consolidate his electorate in the south, in order to continue defending his positions,’ Otunbayeva said at a separate news conference while the provisional government insists that he stands down.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said the United States was monitoring the situation ‘very closely’, because there is both a Russian and a US military base in Kyrgyzstan.
A US official in Washington has said that the Kyrgyz authorities have already closed the airport north of the capital, that is used as a transit point for US troops in Afghanistan.
A total of 168 people were killed in the fighting that led to the Kyrgyz opposition taking control of the strategic Central Asian state.
Another 527 people were injured in clashes with security forces in Bishkek and other towns, 400 of whom remain hospitalised.
In March 2005 mass unrest in the country overthrew the regime of President Askar Akayev. Now his successor Bakiyev has been forced to flee.
There is a growing mass movement of workers throughout the states that made up the USSR, from the enclave of Kaliningrad, to Belarus, the Ukraine, through to Russia and the central Asian states.
The movement is growing at the same time as the ruling Stalinist bureaucrats seek to go further down the road, back to capitalism, despite the fact that the world capitalist crisis is revealing the bankruptcy of the world capitalist system.
The revolution in Kyrgyzstan follows on from the destruction of the Georgian army at the hands of Russia, and the defeat of the Orange counter-revolutionaries in the Ukraine, as well as the mass demonstrations in Kaliningrad, and the strike movement that is taking place in the Ford and other foreign owned factories in Russia.
The working class is now re-emerging as the only really revolutionary force all over the USSR.
Led by the Trotskyist movement it will reconstitute the USSR, and rule through workers and peasants soviets, through carrying out political revolution, and rejoining the movement of the world socialist revolution that is rapidly emerging.
