Kyrgyz President-elect Almazbek Atambayev will be inaugurated on Thursday in a ceremony marking the first peaceful transition of supreme power in the country's history since the Soviet collapse.
Atambayev, 55, who has served as the country’s prime minister, overwhelmingly won the October 30 presidential elections with 62 percent of the vote. Interim President Roza Otunbayeva, who took power after Kurmanbek Bakiyev was ousted as president amid large-scale popular protests in April 2010, was barred from running in the polls.
In line with the country’s new constitution drawn up following Bakiyev’s ouster, the president in elected for one six-year term.
More than 30 high-ranking foreign officials will attend Atambayev's inauguration ceremony, the Kyrgyz presidential administration spokesman said.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili, as well as the Kazakh, Tajik and Azeri prime ministers, Karim Massimov, Okil Okilov and Artur Rasizade, have already arrived in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek to take part in the ceremony.
Sergei Naryshkin, head of the Russian presidential administration, Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin, Constitutional Court chairman Valery Zorkin and other high-ranking Russian officials, as well as senior lawmakers from China, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Turkmenistan and Tatarstan are also expected to attend the ceremony.
The guest list also includes the secretary generals of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC), as well as the chairman of the Commonwealth of Independent States’ Executive Committee, Igor Lebedev, EU Special Representative for Central Asia Pierre Morel, the UN special envoy to Central Asia, Miroslav Jenca, and the U.S. assistant secretary of state, Robert Blake.
About 10 million Kyrgyzstani soms ($217,000) has been spent on Atambayev’s inauguration, almost twice less than on the inauguration of the ousted President Bakiyev in 2009, the presidential spokesman said.
Security has been strengthened in the Kyrgyz capital ahead of the ceremony, he added.
The April revolution in Kyrgyzstan was the second since the 2005 Tulip Revolution that ousted post-Soviet leader Askar Akayev and brought Bakiyev to power.
