Around 170 international observers will monitor the referendum on a new Kyrgyz Constitution, Kyrgyz interim Prime Minister Roza Otunbayeva said on Friday.
Kyrgyz citizens will vote on Sunday on the conversion of the Central Asian state from a presidential to a parliamentary republic. The referendum will take place despite recent clashes in the country's south that may have caused the deaths of up to 2000 people.
"There are representatives of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the CIS [among the observers]. As the Central Election Commission has reported, there were 170 international observers [monitoring Kyrgyz presidential elections] in 2005, and there will be the same number now," Otunbayeva said during a briefing with CSTO head Nikolai Bordyuzha in Kyrgyz capital Bishkek.
The CSTO was earlier forced to recall 300 observers for security reasons.
Violent clashes between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks began in the southern city of Osh on June 11 and spread to nearby Jalalabad region. The official death toll stands at 260 people but officials say the actual figure could be ten times higher.
Hundreds of houses are still being vandalized in Osh and in the some districts of the Jalalbad region, mostly in the areas inhabited by ethnic Uzbeks.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has sent a police assessment mission to Kyrgyzstan to help the country's authorities restore order in the country.
Moscow declined Kyrgyz requests for it to send peacekeepers to the republic, saying the unrest was Kyrgyzstan's domestic affair.
BISHKEK, June 25 (RIA Novosti)
