Organized Crime and Coruption Project

The speaker for Kyrgyzstan’s Parliament Akhmatbek Keldibekov has stepped down, facing pressure from rivals investigating his links to organized crime and corruption in the country.

Keldibekov announced his resignation Monday after a string of talks with parliamentarians that went on late into the night.  His departure will facilitate the formation of a new coalition government.

Keldibekov said he would step down on Dec. 14 “in connection with the reformation of the majority coalition and in order to preserve stability.”

The speaker is one of the most powerful members of the Ata Zhurt party, a nationalist party which won the most parliamentary seats in the October elections.  The party largely supports ousted former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, which is why removing Keldibikov was considered the first major political challenge for the recently-elected president Almazbek Atambayev.

One thousand of Keldibekov’s supporters gathered in the southern city of Osh to show their support for the ousted speaker.  Osh was the base of the ethnic violence that killed hundreds in June 2010 after former president Bakiyev was forced to flee.  Smaller groups also rallied to show support in the capital city of Bishkek.

The run up to Keldibekov’s decision to resign threatened to destabilize the predominantly Muslim country whose government fell apart in 2010 after protesters took to the streets complaining about government corruption.

Atambayev was elected in Kyrgyzstan’s recent elections and has vowed to make stamping out corruption his administration’s top priority.  Transparency International placed Kyrgyzstan 164th of 183 countries in its 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index, a distinction it shares with Yemen, Guinea and Cambodia.

The former speaker dismissed accusations that he maintains ties to organized criminal groups and has abused his power but acknowledged that he registered a family member’s car with official government license plates.

“They are accusing me of having links to the criminal world. There is no evidence for any of the accusations against me,” he said after announcing his resignation.

Kyrgyzstan lies along a traditional Afghan heroin drug smuggling route.  Regionally, it is a politically sensitive country that hosts both Russian and American military bases.  The drug trade and growing factions of militant Islamists threaten the stability of a country still struggling to establish a vibrant parliamentary democracy.

The October contest was the first peaceful transition of presidential power since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.