I found this recently:
KARA SUU, Kyrgyzstan (AFP) - Many say people power brought down the regime in Kyrgyzstan last week. But Bayaman Erkinbayev, a lawmaker, martial arts champ and one of the Central Asian nation’s richest men, says it was his small army of Kung Fu-style fighters.
In southern Kyrgyzstan, where the protests that brought down the Askar Akayev’s 15-year regime first flared, the name of 37-year-old Erkinbayev seems to be on everyone’s lips.
Erkinbayev is the wealthy playboy head of the Palvan Corporation, who led 2,000 fighters trained in Alysh, Kyrgyzstan’s answer to Kung Fu, to protests launched after the first round of a parliamentary election on February 27.
A hero in his hometown Osh, he is generally considered to have financed the protests and sent his martial arts trainees to the front lines of the demonstrations, including in the capital Bishkek.
“When our old men were beaten and thrown out of the regional administration building, my fighters were on the front line. And during the siege in Bishkek, my fighters went in first,” Erkinbayev told AFP in his gymnasium in Osh.
The demonstrations led to the toppling of Kyrgyzstan’s veteran leader Askar Akayev, the third such “revolution” in an ex-Soviet nation in less than two years, after Georgia’s “rose revolution” in 2003 and Ukraine’s “orange revolution” late last year.
People in Kyrgyzstan’s south say Erkinbayev threw his men and money behind the opposition to prepare voters for his candidacy in an upcoming presidential election.
Whether or not he was the driving force behind the toppling of the government, he is certainly regarded as such in his hometown.
When some 20,000 people gathered in Osh’s main square over the weekend to celebrate the regime’s fall, the crowd cheered Erkinbayev who had just returned from the capital Bishkek, and locals jostled to get a closer look at him and shake his hand.
Erkinbayev is not shy about taking credit for the tumult that led to Akayev’s overthrow.
“I went out and rallied the people,” he said, cracking his knuckles as he struggled to compose sentences in Russian, his muscled build showing through his pin-striped suit.
“The city of Osh, the capital of the south, played the most important role in the destruction of Akayev’s regime.”
Erkinbayev said he invested “an impressive amount” of money in keeping protesters in Jalal-Abad and Bishkek well fed and warm as they picketed and eventually stormed government buildings in this poor, mountainous state on China’s western border.
He said the Kyrgyz revolution started in the small town of Kara Suu, where Erkinbayev’s former boss and mentor Arap Tolonov was shut out of a parliamentary seat after a candidate loyal to president Akayev allegedly armed busloads of high school students with absentee ballots to stuff boxes.
Pupils from Erkinbayev’s Alysh martial arts school in Osh were sent to protect demonstrators protesting the contested ballot in the Kara Suu bazaar.
Afterwards demonstrations with the participation of Erkinbayev’s trainees spread to the southern cities of Jalal-Abad, Osh, and Batken. They captured government sites, burnt down police stations and blocked key highways in the lead-up to the chaos that deposed Akayev in Bishkek.
Erkinbayev won’t say how much he is worth, but he is generally regarded as one of Kyrgyzstan’s wealthiest people, especially in the impoverished south of the country.
A decade ago he was an underling at a tobacco factory, but today he owns the Kara Suu bazaar, a cotton processing business, a shoe factory, entertainment complexes and several other businesses.
He said his prowess in Alysh helped him progress.
“I have always been a champion, so the people love me. This helped me get involved in politics personally,” said the three-time champion of Central Asia.
Erkinbayev is no stranger to election scandals.
In the parliamentary elections of 2000 he is said to have spent two weeks on the run from the police after allegedly beating a judge who ordered him to drop out of the race for failing to disclose some of his wife’s property in his registration form.
The ruling was later overturned under unclear circumstances and Erkinbayev described it as an “untruth.”
“When I met the judge later he retracted his accusations,” he said.