Kyrgyz president leads in elections opposition calls undemocratic

According to preliminary results, Akayev took 76 percent of the votes cast in the first day of voting Sunday, with about 30 percent of the vote counted. The vote was to continue Monday, but 73 percent of the country's 3 million voters had already cast ballots Sunday, the Central Election Commission said.

Akayev, a mild-mannered physicist, has increasingly cracked down on dissent in recent years, threatening Kyrgystan's reputation as Central Asia's cornerstone of democracy _ and foreign aid that hinges upon it. Akayev faced five challengers in his bid for a third term at the helm of this mountainous nation on China's western border. Deputy parliament speaker Omurbek Tekebayev was in a distant second with 10 percent, the election commission said. Tekebayev is an ally of top opposition leader Felix Kulov. Several opposition leaders were barred from the presidential race for failing a rigorous Kyrgyz language test or on technicalities. International observers protested that the registration process was discriminatory. About 700 ballots marked for Akayev were found in a ballot box before polls opened Sunday in the capital Bishkek, Central Election Commission chair Sulaiman Imanbayev said. The election official for the polling station, Vyacheslav Tsoi, was charged with falsifying ballots. Prosecutors said Tsoi told them that an anonymous caller had threatened him and his family if he didn't produce several hundred pro-Akayev ballots. Akayev insisted that the election was fair. "The Kyrgyz people are having presidential elections today with a real choice," he said as he voted in the capital Bishkek. "I think these are democratic elections." Some 250 would-be observers from Kyrgyz non-governmental organizations said they were barred from monitoring the vote and vote count, though hundreds of others were allowed to observe. Kyrgyz officials decided to hold a two-day election to ensure that voters in remote mountain villages had time to reach the polls. Akayev's opponents were too obscure or lacked the money for an aggressive campaign, and many Kyrgyz voted for Akayev because they fear more change after a tumultuous decade since the 1991 Soviet collapse. Western leaders pinned hopes on Kyrgyzstan as an oasis of stability and plurality in a region ruled by authoritarian presidents, Islamic warlords and drug traffickers.

(AP)