Thursday's presidential election in Kyrgyzstan, in which incumbent Kurmanbek Bakiyev was set to claim victory, "was undermined by an overall uneven playing field," an official from the election monitoring mission of the Organization for Security and Co- operation in Europe said Friday, according to dpa. The OSCE - a regional security organization of 56 participating states, including Kyrgyzstan - said in a statment that the presidential election "failed to meet key OSCE commitments, despite some positive elements." Bakiyev, 59, received 87.79 per cent of the votes with more than half the ballots from election counted, Kyrgyzstan's Central Election Commission said. His strongest competitor, opposition leader Almasbek Atambayev, 52, a former premier, received 6.29 per cent of the votes. Canadian Senator Consiglio Di Nino, the special co-ordinator of the OSCE short-term observers and head of the delegation of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, said in a statement: "We are pleased to see some political pluralism and an active civil society, but this was undermined by an overall uneven playing field in which the distinction between the ruling party and the state was blurred." Election observers saw instances in which opposition campaign events were obstructed and opposition supporters were subjected to pressure and intimidation, the OSCE said. "Sadly, this election did not show the progress we were hoping for, and it again fell short of key standards Kyrgyzstan has committed to as a participating state of the OSCE," said Radmila Sekerinska, the head of the election observation mission of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.
