Up to 10,000 mourners gathered on the edge of the burned-out Kyrgyz capital at a mass funeral to commemorate at least 78 people who died in protests this week during which troops fired on crowds besieging the presidential headquarters.
"Those who died on April 7 are the heroes of Kyrgyzstan," Roza Otunbayeva, the interim government chief, told the crowd.
"It was our duty to establish justice. Those who are being buried here today are all our children, the children of Kyrgyzstan." Mourners carried coffins draped in the red-and-yellow Kyrgyz national flag and clutched portraits of the dead at a memorial complex built in honor of the victims of mass executions ordered by Soviet leader Josef Stalin in the 1930s.
Relatives lowered bodies into 16 graves lined in rows and joined hands in prayer, while mullahs chanted in Arabic.
Omurbek Tekebayev, a key figure in the provisional government, told the crowd: "Our people defeated the dictator." Mourners showed little sympathy for President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. Kuat Niyazbekov said his brother had died in the uprising.
"We don't even know what really happened on the square, what his last minutes of life were like," he said. "We can't forgive a president like that." The uprising in Kyrgyzstan, where a third of the 5.3 million population lives below the poverty line, forced the president to retreat to his stronghold in the south of the country and has raised doubts over the future of the US air base near Bishkek.
Bakiyev's refusal to step down remains the main question as tenuous calm returned to the streets of Bishkek, still strewn with rubble and broken glass after days of violent clashes.
Otunbayeva has offered Bakiyev safe passage out of Kyrgyzstan if he steps down. His exact whereabouts are unclear.
"We would really like to start negotiations. We will solve everything peacefully," Keneshbek Dushebayev, head of the new state security service, told reporters.
All flights carrying troops from the Manas base, a vital cog in supplying NATO operations in Afghanistan, were suspended from Friday evening, a spokesman for the base said. Troops are using alternative routes in and out of Afghanistan.
"While normal flight operations at Manas were resumed on Friday, a decision was taken Friday evening to temporarily divert military passenger transport flights," the base's spokesman, Rickardo Bodden, told Reuters by telephone.
