IBADAT JALBORSOVA shook her head as she sat on the grass next to the ruins of the Kyrgyz President’s headquarters sharing a loaf with her friends.

“I’m happy, but it wasn’t supposed to be like this,” the 55-year-old former teacher who runs a vegetable stall said.

Like many here, her joy at the ousting of President Akayev was tempered yesterday by the looting that ravaged the capital afterwards, leaving three people dead. She had come to Bishkek in a group of 300 people from the southern city of Jalalabad to join protesters demanding Mr Akayev’s resignation. She had watched in horror as protesters ransacked the presidential headquarters. Now she fears a power struggle between Kyrgyzstan’s various tribes and a free-for-all among its many disenfranchised.

“Getting rid of Akayev was easy. They didn’t shoot in the end,” Mrs Jalborsova said. “The next stage could be bloodier.”

Kyrygyzstan’s new leaders have promised to eradicate the corruption and autocratic ways that tainted Mr Akayev’s reputation as the most liberal Central Asian leader.

But they face a daunting task in a country struggling to shake off the legacies of Soviet political culture and a deeply entrenched clan system. Kyrgyzstan had never even been an independent state, let alone a democracy, until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

For thousands of years the mountainous region was inhabited by Turkic-speaking tribes.It was annexed by Russia in the 19th century. Bishkek was little more than a village until Soviet planners built a capital of boulevards and neoclassical buildings in the 1920s and 1930s.

They also brought forced migrants, leaving a complex ethnic mix of roughly 65 per cent Kyrgyz, 14 per cent Uzbek, 13 per cent Russian and pockets of Ukrainians, Germans and others. On this cultural potpourri President Akayev tried to impose a Western model of parliamentary democracy and liberal market economics.

He failed, unable to resist the cultural pressure to bestow favours on his own family. “Of course, in the absence of party politics there are some clans who breed politicians and promote their own people,” said Edil Baisalov, the head of the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society.

Aslan Atambulov, 42, a one-time engineer who now sells paint in a market, said: “We don’t need democracy. We’re not American or German. We have a different mentality.”

In parliament yesterday, deputies appealed to the Speaker and to opposition figures to show strong leadership to curb the looting. Behind the scenes each was jockeying for position.

“Nothing is being done because there is a parliament with three heads,” Azimbek Beknazarov, the newly appointed Prosecutor-General, said. “Each deputy is trying to promote his own people and stopping us from restoring order.”

The regional factions were evident in the groups outside the presidential headquarters.

Mrs Jalborsova’s came from Jalalabad, another from Osh, another from Karakul. Each was celebrating the departure of Mr Akayev but promoting its own representatives, who were expected to provide them with food and shelter. Mrs Jalborsova said that she favoured Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the interim President, because he came from the South, like her.

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