Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev, whose 15-year-rule is being questioned amid weeklong protests over a parliamentary election, has long been considered the most liberal leader in post-Soviet Central Asia.

Compared with the authoritarian Soviet apparatchiks that assumed power in other republics in Central Asia, the 60-year-old Akaeyv was considered a gentle intellectual with his higher education degree in physics and knowledge of classical music and painting.

He made his way into the Kyrgyz Communist party's central committee in 1986 as the head of the scientific department, before he was elected three years later president of the republic's academy of sciences.

In October 1990 the soft-spoken, ever-smiling Akayev became the leader of this small mountainous impoverished nation when the national parliament elected him president.

Akayev promised to encourage foreign investment in the landlocked nation of five million -- where livestock outnumber people two to one -- that is sandwiched between Kazakhstan, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

He was the first leader in the former Soviet Union to leave the ruble zone and launch a national currency, and in 1998 became the first to allow private land ownership.

But Kyrgyzstan, where 55 percent of the labor force is in agriculture, remained an impoverished state, more some 50 percent of people living below the poverty line. Many of these live in the nation's southwest that is now engulfed in protests.

Although he quickly agreed to host an American military base, which Washington used for attacks on the hardline Taliban regime in nearby Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks, Akayev conserved friendly relations with Russia.

Unlike in other Central Asian states, Russian was reinstated as an official language in December 2001. And in the fall of 2003, Moscow opened a military base in Russia opened a military base 25 kilometers down the road, the first military base that Moscow had opened outside its territory since the Soviet collapse in 1991.

It is partly because of such moves that the opposition has accused Akayev of trying to make the country "more pro-Russian than Russia itself."

Elected to a third five-year term in October 2000 with 74 percent of the vote in a ballot that Western observers criticized for irregularities, Akayev has publicly promised not to run in the upcoming presidential poll in October.

But, after a national referendum that was launched on Akayev's initiative significantly expanded presidential powers in February 2003, the opposition has accused the leader of a creeping authoritarianism and a hidden agenda to remain in power after his mandate expires.

Such suspicions were reinforced after his older daughter Bermet, 32, and son Aidar, 29, secured parliamentary seats -- and therefore immunity from prosecution -- in this year's election.

As in neighboring Kazakhstan, Akayev's family is thought to have played an influential role in the nation's economy.

According to analysts, Bermet's husband, Kazakh businessman Adil Toigonbayev, controls the country's chief economic sectors -- gold extraction, alcohol, tobacco and telecommunications -- as well as the chief state-owned publisher, Uchkun, where he publishes his wife's fairy tales and his mother-in-law's scientist biographies. 

(Agencies)

livestock: not used technically; any animals kept for use or profit（家畜，牲畜）

ruble: the unit of monetary value in Russia（盧布）

referendum: a legislative act is referred for final approval to a popular vote by the electorate（公民投票）