Roza Otunbayeva

Roza Otubayeva appears to be head of the provisional government of Kyrgyzstan following a revolution in April 2010. She is the former Kyrgyz Foreign Minister. Otunbayeva said she was now head of a temporary caretaker government after Prime Minister Daniyar Usenov signed a letter of resignation and President Kurmanbek Bakiyev left the capital, and told Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, she would "coordinate an interim administration for at least six months until a new constitution is drafted that would pave the way for 'fair' presidential and parliamentary elections"

Current activities

She said the provisional government controls the situation in four out of seven regions but Bakiyev was trying to rally support. At the meeting, Michael McFaul, Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council Senior Director for Russia and Eurasia denied the unrest was a Russian coup, saying The people that are allegedly running Kyrgyzstan and I emphasize that word because it's not clear who is in charge right now -- these are all people that we've had contact with for many years. This is not some anti-American coup. That we know for sure and this is not a sponsored by the Russians coup"

On a Russian radio station, Bakiyev said "I am the elected head of state and I do not accept any defeat."

Background

Jackson Diehl, an editorial writer for the Washington Post, said he met her, in 2005, She had lived in Washington, D.C., "for several years in the 1990s while serving as her country’s first ambassador to the United States. She is a product of the former Soviet Union; she was once the Soviet ambassador to Malaysia. But the good news is that she comes as close as anyone in Kyrgyzstan does to being a liberal democrat."

Diehl said she came, again, to Washington in June 2005 as acting foreign minister following Kyrgyzstan’s last revolution,the "Tulip revolution,” in the spirit of the popular uprisings for democracy that had taken place in Georgia, Ukraine and Lebanon in the previous 18 months. But the nature of the 2005 Kyrgyz uprising was more ambiguous than the other “color revolutions.” Some of its leaders were advocates of liberal democracy; others were simply rivals of the previous ruler, Askar Akayev.

During the 2005 visit, Diehl said,

Otunbayeva, the first senior Kyrgyzstani official to visit Washington since that rebellion drove autocratic president Askar Akayev into exile, had two points to underline during a hurried trip: Her government is determined to hold free and fair elections for president on July 10, and the new democratic regime will want to preserve a finely balanced security policy that involves alliances with both the United States and Russia. "The 10th of July election is our most challenging final examination, which we have to pass in order to prove our intention to become a democratic country," Otunbayeva told a group at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "We want to debut a new country and a new attitude of the world toward us."

Diehl said Otunbayeva said she had met with "a lot of skepticism" in Washington about whether the attempted transformation will take hold.

Her response was to ask Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for help: help in funding fledgling independent media, help in training Kyrgyzstan's security forces. She praised U.S. Radio Liberty for its role in the democratic uprising and begged that it not be cut back -- as has happened to American radio broadcasts in much of Eurasia. In short, she asked "for the United States to protect democracy and build democracy."

Under the Soviet Union

She was the Kremlin's chief delegate to UNESCO in Paris and then ambassador to Malaysia.

Education

• Philosophy department, Moscow State University during the standstill years of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in the 1970s