ASKAR AKAEV

won his bid to be re-elected president of Kyrgyzstan in a landslide, receiving more than 1.4 million votes, around 75 percent of those cast. Some of the international observers who monitored the elections, however, suggested that the incumbent president was not quite that popular. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, for example, released a preliminary statement the day after the vote declaring that it had not met “international standards for equal, free, fair, and accountable elections.” The group cited among its concerns “pressure” against a major domestic election monitoring NGO, interference by state officials in the electoral process and the work of election commissions, and campaign restrictions and biased media that “failed to ensure free and fair conditions for candidates.” On Election Day itself, “the remarkable level of transparency for the tabulation of results was marred by serious violations before the results were entered into the computerized system,” the OSCE/ODIHR report noted. Which seems like a euphemistic, bureaucratic way of saying that Kyrgyz officials applied a whole lot of erasers and white-out to the initial results.