 MOSCOW: The leaders of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, both former Soviet states with autocratic regimes, are "worried" after the revolution in Kyrgyzstan which toppled the 15-year-old regime there, the interim leader of the Central Asian state said in an interview published on Wednesday. Uzbek President Islam Karimov and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazabayev expressed their concern in telephone conversations, Kyrgyzstan's provisional president and prime minister, Kurmanbek Bakiyev told Russia's Kommersant newspaper. "I can't deny it, what happened in our country doesn't make them happy," Bakiyev said.
| The question is, what're they going to do to avoid the same thing happening to them? Akayev was a pussycat compared to either of them, and they're both pretty nice fellows compared to Turkmenbashi... |
He also told the daily that the revolt had no outside help and was entirely sparked by domestic matters, rejecting claims by ousted leader Askar Akayev that meddling by unnamed foreign organisations led to the overthrow. "I didn't go to Ukraine nor Georgia to copy their methods," he said, referring to two other ex-Soviet states that had their regimes toppled by street protests. |