On April 7, Roza Otunbayeva was nominated the Kyrgyz premier by the opposition which has taken control over Kyrgyzstan seizing the key government buildings to oust Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
Following is a brief biography of Otunbayeva.
Otunbayeva was born on August 23, 1950, in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh.
She graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at Moscow State University in 1972.
Otunbayeva held posts at Kyrgyz State National University where she worked as a senior professor and head of the philosophy department for six years.
Her political career began in 1981, when Otunbayeva served as the Communist Party's second secretary of the Lenin regional council (raikom) of Frunze (currently Bishkek).
Otunbayeva repeatedly held the position of Kyrgyz foreign minister, being the first and the only female foreign minister in the history of modern Kyrgyzstan. She resigned from the Foreign Ministry in 1997.
In 1998-2001, Otunbayeva served as the first Kyrgyz ambassador to the United Kingdom after the fall of the Soviet Union.
In 2002-2004, her name was often related to the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict in 2001, as she was the deputy head of the UN special mission to Georgia. In 2005, Russian paper Vremya Novostei quoted Otunbayeva as saying that during that conflict she was illustrated in papers holding a rifle as if she was connected with the Kodori Gorge shootout.
Otunbayeva was one of the key figures of the so-called tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, which led to the overthrow of then President Askar Akayev. Commenting on those events, Otunbayeva said in Vremya Novostei's interview in 2005 that she and her team wanted to stand quietly on the square and wait as long as necessary to drive Akaev out of the government. "We wanted our revolution to be beautiful. In Osh, we searched for tulips everywhere, but the stores and markets were closed. Osh does not import Dutch tulips..." Otunbayeva said in 2005.
In December 2007, Otunbayeva became a member of the so-called Jogorku Kenesh, the Kyrgyz Parliament.
She is married and has two children.
Recent reports on April 8, say that Otunbayeva dismissed parliament and took over from the president and the government. She said the provisional government will be effective for six months.
MOSCOW, April 8 (RIA Novosti)
