Kyrgyz president: "I haven't resigned"

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — Askar Akayev, the Kyrgyz president who disappeared when protesters overran his office last week, resurfaced in Russia yesterday, saying he would not resign his position but holding out the possibility of returning to talk things over.

Akayev made his statements to Russian reporters near Moscow, where he said he retreated for his own security.

"My term in office will expire on Oct. 30, 2005. I haven't resigned yet," he said in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio broadcast yesterday evening. "Currently, I can see no reason to resign."

Akayev, 60, climbed with his family aboard a Russian-made MI-8 military helicopter at the presidential mansion on the outskirts of the capital Thursday for the short hop into neighboring Kazakstan, according to witnesses. He later journeyed on to Russia.

The hurried departure came two hours after protesters swarmed into his downtown office known as the White House, pushing past guards. Akayev, a trained physicist, said he had forbidden the guards to use deadly force and that staying would have brought a pitched battle.

"I am sure this would have been the beginning of a civil war, which would have grown into an interregional and interethnic conflict with all the most dangerous consequences following from this," he told the newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta.

Kyrgyzstan has a significant social divide between its north and south, with a substantial minority of ethnic Uzbeks resident in the south. Interethnic fighting there killed hundreds in 1990.

The demonstrations against Akayev — whose family's enrichment during 15 years in office offended many in a country where 44 percent live in poverty — had no overtly ethnic flavor, however. It was far from certain that any security forces would have fired on unarmed demonstrators, in a country where the killing of five protesters in the southern town of Aksy remains a matter of scandal three years later.

"Look, the army is never going to fight against its own people," said Lt. Col. Torobek Kolubaev, from his post at the gate of the presidential mansion.

In his absence, opposition leaders appointed a former prime minister, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, as interim president. That appointment was endorsed on Monday by the same parliament Akayev rushed to seat just before the capital fell to demonstrators who were incensed by irregularities in the balloting that produced the body. Akayev's son and daughter won seats in that parliament but left the country with their father.

Akayev called the new parliament the only legitimate authority in the country, and pointedly praised its newly named speaker, Omurbek Tekebayev, as an old ally. The praise appeared significant, coming a day after Tekebayev publicly appealed to Akayev to negotiate the fate of his office.

"It is with the new parliament and its speaker Omurbek Tekebayev, if security is guaranteed to me, that I am willing to start dialogue with so that life in Kyrgyzstan could return to the constitutional framework," he told the newspaper.

Yesterday, Bakiyev gathered government workers to warn them against accepting bribes or hiring relatives as employees. News services said the workers listened in stony silence.

"A huge part of the state system was devoted to the election process," Bakiyev said, referring to the parliamentary contests widely described as corrupt. "That is not a secret. Fighting corruption and paying pensions and benefits is our number one priority now."