NIZHNYAYA ALARCHA, Kyrgyzstan —Kyrgyzstan's interim rulers moved on Tuesday to quell ethnic violence threatening their fragile grip on the country after the overthrow of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
Defiant Bakiyev loyalists in the south and lawlessness on the fringes of the capital, Bishkek, are challenging efforts to restore order after an uprising this month that ousted the president and left at least 85 people dead.
On Tuesday, some 300 riot police and troops confronted a crowd of several hundred people on the outskirts of Bishkek in an area where five people died Monday when looters attacked homes belonging to mainly ethnic Russians and Meskhetian Turks.
A tense standoff was under way.
Led by Roza Otunbayeva, the interim government that took power on Bakiyev's ouster has played down the unrest, blaming it on thugs trying to exploit a security vacuum to grab property illegally.
But continued instability is a worry both for Russia and for the United States, which earlier in the crisis curtailed operations at its Kyrgyz air base supplying operations in Afghanistan.
The Interior Ministry said its forces had arrested a number of rioters in a swoop operation in the suburbs after nightfall. The night appeared to pass without major unrest.
The new authorities on Monday pledged fast reform to strengthen the role of the parliament at the expense of the president and to hold free parliamentary and presidential elections in September or October.
But they face resistance in the south.
In Jalal-Abad, a southern city in Bakiyev's tribal heartland, loyalists of the ousted leader have installed a pro-Bakiyev governor after seizing a regional government office at the weekend, intensifying a standoff with the self-proclaimed government in Bishkek.
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