Rosa Otunbayeva is apparently a tough character: she will need to be if she is going to lead her provisional government to a safe harbour! In Bishkek the obstacles to the exercise of power, internal and external, are sizeable and numerous.

Internal Obstacles

The tens of thousands of poor wretches, who survive on the outskirts of the capital in the daily search for a dollar to survive, set in motion the inaugural assault on the very first night of the existence of the new government. The city centre and the inner suburbs, where luxury shops, tourist hotels, casinos and the smart residences of the privileged, not to mention the traffickers, fascinate the wretched, unemployed refugees and hooligans, looking for any weakness in police coverage to break windows and help themselves. Mafias and the proliferating criminal underworld, grown rich chiefly from the drug trade, have the financial resources to recruit from this mob whenever they want, and launch it on the smart districts; they can also ensure that developing situations are in their favour. On 7 April, of course, the downtrodden had enough matter for discontent to attack the authorities off their own bat. In future, however, they could be subject to manipulation, particularly over the question of land reform.

The traditionally nomadic Kyrgyz people have moved out of their traditional areas in their hundreds of thousands. In search of fresh pasture they have swarmed into the fertile Chou plain, not far from Bishkek. They have their eyes on the plots cultivated by farmers already installed there (often Slavs or Caucasians), but also on the lands still under indirect state control that have not yet been distributed.⁽¹⁾ These samozakhvatchiki or land-grabbers have recently invaded seeded fields, hoping to build mud-bricked temporary huts and pasture their meagre flocks around them, but in the short term jeopardizing the harvests.