PARIS - The revolution in Kyrgyzstan aroused concerns around the world Friday as it veered toward violence, with the European Union urging a quick return to law and order.
The new government in the central Asian former Soviet republic sought to restore calm and reassure allies as it cemented its grip on power by naming an acting head of state and top ministers, and announcing presidential elections.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) called for calm and dialogue after a night of looting followed the ouster Thursday of President Askar Akayev.
In a statement, the OSCE regretted the breakdown of public order and called on the new leadership to "take all necessary measures that will normalize and stabilize the situation."
In Brussels, the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, "strongly appealed to the people of Kyrgyzstan to behave responsibly, to ease restoration of law and order throughout the country and to refrain from violence and looting."
The United States said it had not yet made a decision whether to recognize the new interim leadership in Kyrgyzstan or Akayev who is vowing to reclaim power, a State Department official said in Washington.
The official, who asked not to be named, described the situation in the troubled Central Asian state as "fluid and unusual" and added, "Right now we're not becoming involved in questions concerning recognition."
The revolution followed shake-ups in two other former Soviet republics, Georgia and Ukraine, but was accompanied by considerably more violence, with at least three people reported killed and 173 hospitalized as looters ran wild in the streets of the capital, Bishkek.
Kyrgyzstan is a mountainous republic wedged between Kazakhstan to the north and China to the south. There was no immediate reaction from either of those countries, but Russian President Vladimir Putin indicated that Moscow would be able to live with the new Kyrgyz leadership, even though it was regrettable that "in a post-Soviet country the conflict was resolved in an illegitimate way and was accompanied by pogroms and human victims."
At OSCE headquarters in Vienna, Russian ambassador Alexey Borodavkin said the organization was partly to blame for the uprising. Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the OSCE's negative report on recent elections in Kyrgyzstan, which it said failed to live up to democratic norms, had to some extent "triggered the unrest." He said organizations like the OSCE should conduct themselves "responsibly."
The three grass-roots revolutions in the former Soviet bloc follow a pattern -- with the toppling of autocratic pro-Moscow governments and the Western powers exerting steady pressure for democratic change.
But Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili denied that there was any formal link between the uprisings. "We are not exporting revolution, Saakashvili told reporters during a visit to Kiev.
"Our revolutions are similar, not because someone fabricated them somewhere but because people react similarly to injustice in all countries," he said.
At the same time, the Ukrainian deputy prime minister, Mykola Tomenko, said he was sure that the Kyrgyz uprising would not be the last in the bloc of former Soviet republics known as the Confederation of Independent States (CIS). "Our revolution won't be the last," he said. "It is difficult to predict which country will be next, but I may say it is certain there will be a next one" after Kyrgyzstan.
Asked during a visit to Tokyo whether Ukraine would seek to form a new democratic grouping among the CIS countries, Tomenko said it was "possible in the future."
Belarus, a country the United States has described as ripe for a democratic takeover, denounced the events in Kyrgyzstan. The foreign minister said the uprising was "liable to bring pernicious consequences for peace, stability and standards of living for the population in the country and in the whole of central Asia."
Turkey, which cultivates close relations with the Turkic-language central Asian countries, sent a delegation to Kyrgyzstan with the message that "we support the improvement of democracy and freedoms in Kyrgyzstan, but that people should respect the constitutional order and stay on lawful ground so that stability and peace can be restored," a senior diplomat told.