Kyrgyzstan's authorities have declared a disputed parliamentary election valid amid violent protests in the south and international criticism over the results.
Protesters kept up their pressure on President Askar Akayev today, retaining control of two southern towns and asserting their authority by organising joint patrols with police.
The protests against elections in the former Soviet Central Asian country, deemed flawed by international observers, have forced the veteran leader on the defensive. He sought to defuse the crisis yesterday by saying he was prepared to negotiate with the opposition.
But central election authorities, ignoring the criticism, said officially published results validated 69 out of the 75 seats elected to parliament in the February and March polls.
"Today a new parliament has been born," the chairman of the central election commission, told reporters in the capital, Bishkek.
The violent anti-Akayev protests followed peaceful revolutions in two other former Soviet republics - Ukraine and Georgia - that brought Western-leaning leaders to power.
Mass protests against the polls that routed the opposition have been confined to the ethnically mixed south, which is poorer than northern regions around Bishkek. The capital has been quiet.
On Monday, tens of thousands of protesters armed with petrol bombs and sticks drove police out of Osh, Kyrgyzstan's second city, having earlier gained control of nearby Jalal Abad.
Osh is located in an area that brings together an ethnic cocktail of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz and Meskhetian Turks and was itself the scene of ethnic clashes in the early 1990s in which hundreds of people were killed.
Mr Akayev has said attempts to copy Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" could lead to civil war in the mountainous state.
Unlike the upheavals in Ukraine and Georgia, however, the unrest in Kyrgyzstan appears to lack a central opposition rallying figure, and demonstrators have resorted to violence.