Kirgiz voters were naturally interested in candidates who promised to improve the economy and reduce unemployment.
Kazakh businesses and banks have been steadily buying up the shares of Kirgiz enterprises.
Under Soviet rule, Central Asia was carved into the Kazakh, Kirgiz, Tajik, Turkmen and Uzbek republics.
In Kirgizstan, questions were asked in parliament this week about the arrests of Kirgiz citizens by Uzbek police.
But after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Kirgiz beers declined in quality.
The long epic records all the major historic events of greatest importance for the Kirgiz people and crystallizes their traditions and beliefs.
In 1990, just before the Soviet Union broke up, at least 200 people died in clashes between Kirgiz and Uzbeks in this area.
One of the three major epics of China , it is both an outstanding artistic creation and an oral encyclopaedia of the Kirgiz people.
Kirgizstan's government, in a distinct hardening of attitude, recently arrested four men who, it said, were recruiting Kirgiz youths for training abroad in anti-state activities.
Two years ago, Mr Steinbach felt there was a market in Kirgizstan for good beer, not only among the remaining Germans but among the Kirgiz.
Yet there is in Bishkek, the Kirgiz capital, a place that is forever Germany, the brewery and restaurant of Alexander Steinbach, an ethnic German who stayed.
Nevertheless, many Kirgiz complain that their economy is being undermined.
Like the Uzbeks, the Kirgiz government is worried about fundamentalism.
So far, says Muratbek Imanaliev, a former Kirgiz foreign minister, America's and Russia's interests in the region have been closely aligned because they are both committed to fighting terrorism.
However, the Kirgiz, and their neighbours in Kazakhstan, both formerly nomadic people, have always been less religious than the Uzbeks, who were more settled and practised a more conservative form of Islam.
The Kirgiz ethnic minority in China, concentrated in the Xinjiang region in the west, pride themselves on their descent from the hero Manas, whose life and progeny are celebrated in one of the best-known elements of their oral tradition: the Manas epic.
But over the weekend, the people of Korasuv, a town on the Uzbek-Kirgiz border, went on a rampage, beating up the mayor, torching cars and rebuilding a bridge link to Kirgizstan which had been destroyed two years ago by the authorities to prevent imports.
应用推荐