I'm sort of catching up on Kyrgyzstan, reading Chingiz Aytmatov again, his 1966 short novel called Farewell, Gulsary! (Proshchay, Gulsary!), life stories of an old man and an old horse.

A very interesting story, very sad. Aytmatov used to be a veterinarian before he became a writer, so the way he writes about animals is amazing: in the novel I read last year, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, there was a camel, and some of the stuff about the relations between the camel and his master were making me laugh out loud; in The Place of the Skull, which I didn't finish because of the Orange Revolution, there were wolves; and Gulsary (translated as 'Yellow Flower') is a horse. There are plenty of people in Aytmatov's works, too, of course - plenty of life, plenty of history.

Aytmatov, currently an ambassador in Brussels, spoke out on the events in Kyrgyzstan, calling it a "real revolution" and saying that Akayev's regime has fallen because of the "all-embracing corruption" in Kyrgyzstan (via Komsomolka, in Russian).

Lenta.ru, however, cites a reproachful comment from Fergana.ru news agency (in Russian) - "Where were you before, Chingiz Torekulovich?":

...the most well-known Kyrgyz of the planet, father of the country's minister of foreign affairs, and simply a person enjoying immense authority among the population of the whole post-Soviet space, was silent during the past few days when the situation began to develop in the south of Kyrgyzstan.