Opposition demonstrators in Kyrgyzstan are celebrating after unseating an unpopular president, but the daunting work of reforming their impoverished and corrupt country still lies ahead.

Is the opposition movement sufficiently unified and organized to meet the challenge?

Kyrgyzstan has once before experienced the euphoria of revolution. The so-called Tulip Revolution in 2005 unseated an earlier unpopular president, Askar Akayev, replacing him with Kurmanbek Bakiyev. But nothing much changed.

Protesters pose in the cabinet room of former Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev following their successful revolt on Thursday. An opposition coalition in Kyrgyzstan said it has formed an interim government that will rule the turbulent Central Asian country for six months. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press)

One of the poorest of the Central Asian countries of the former Soviet empire, Kyrgyzstan nonetheless remains vitally important to the world's great powers — Russia, China and the United States.

Its strategic location and proximity to Afghanistan has led to the establishment of an important U.S. and five Russian airbases there. And the fate of these bases is something the outside world is keenly watching as events unfold.

Eugene Huskey, an American political scientist at Stetson University in DeLand, Fla., first started travelling to Kyrgyzstan in the post-Soviet era. Since then he has written extensively about the country, and in April 2009 interviewed key members of the opposition, including the new interim leader Roza Otunbayeva.

Huskey spoke with CBC News producer Jennifer Clibbon about the suddenness and violence of the protests, and the opposition leaders who now lead the country.

Clibbon: What was behind the palpable anger that fuelled the opposition demonstrations in Kyrgyzstan earlier this week?

Huskey: Living standards in the country are perilously low. A sizable minority of the population has had to seek work in other post-Communist countries, especially Kazakhstan and Russia, and the recent economic crisis has brought many of them back to Kyrgyzstan, where they are unemployed.

Strategically located Krygyzstan. (CBC)

Add to this a recent increase in utility rates, and you have an explosive situation on the economic front alone.

Also, politically, the Bakiyev regime employed a level of repression that most Kyrgyz find intolerable.

The campaign of fear waged against opposition journalists and politicians — and even their families —marks a break with earlier Kyrgyz traditions.

Are there other elements as well?

The revolution originated in the northern regions of Kyrgyzstan, which have suffered under the presidency of Bakiyev, a southerner. Part of the rage is a northern revolt against a regime that has favoured southern personnel in key government posts.

It got to the point that, in the northern city of Bishkek, the capital, some taxi drivers refused to pick up a southerner.

This regional divide, of course, has implications for the post-revolutionary regime. If there is not a sensitivity to the interests of both north and south in the forming of a new government, you can be sure that southerners will refuse to accept the legitimacy of the leadership.

You have written that the events of this week are a powerful indictment of American policy in this part of Central Asia. What do you mean?

Unfortunately, the United States has been so concerned to acquire and maintain military support bases in Kyrgyzstan for the war in Afghanistan that it has turned a blind eye to the harsh rule of Bakiyev.

Political scientist Eugene Huskey enjoys dinner in a Kyrgyz yurt in 2009. (Courtesy of Eugene Huskey)

Early last year, Russia gave Kyrgyzstan $2 billion in assistance. The same day Bakiyev announced, from Moscow, that the Western airbase near Bishkek would be closed.

The Americans began urgent negotiations to keep the base open, and the ultimate price for this was a far higher rent and a virtual carte blanche for Bakiyev in domestic affairs.

U.S. comments on the president elections last summer were muted and, for the first time since Kyrgyzstan became an independent country, the American embassy shunned the Kyrgyz opposition.

From the standpoint of the American military, the approach seemed to be working. Last month, Bakiyev announced that the U.S. would be granted yet another installation, this one an "anti-terrorist centre" in the remote southern city of Batken.

Now that policy has backfired, and the new government is likely to be far more friendly to Moscow than Washington.

Kyrgyzstan was once considered an oasis of stability, a "political miracle" of Central Asia in the post-Soviet era. What went wrong?

In the early 1990s, Kyrgyzstan and Russia were the most open and pluralist of the post-Soviet countries outside the Baltic. The first president of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akaev, was the darling of the West and the recipient of extensive financial assistance and loans.

But as political and economic conditions worsened, he fell back on authoritarian solutions.

When parliament started to constrain his freedom to manoeuvre in 1994, he engineered its dismissal. Then, when serious challengers emerged in presidential election campaigns, he monopolized the media, had opponents disqualified, and mobilized the agencies and personnel of state behind his campaign.

But Akaev was a soft authoritarian who employed anti-democratic tactics reluctantly.

Kyrgyzstan still had a vibrant civil society under Akaev, and when the people came out against him in the Tulip Revolution, he stood down without using force.

Bakiyev is an altogether different, and harsher, leader: witness the dozens of persons killed in Wednesday's revolution.

You interviewed this year several Kyrgyz opposition leaders. What were their primary concerns?

Over the last two years I have done lengthy interviews with about three dozen leaders of the Kyrgyz opposition — politicians, journalists and activists. They were concerned in part about their personal safety.

The leader of one party pulled a pistol from his pocket and showed me an automatic weapon that he kept in the corner.

Kyrgyzstan's interim leader Roza Otunbayeva is a former ambassador to the U.S. and Canada. (Courtesy of Eugene Huskey)

Another refused to meet me in a building and insisted on having the interview in his car. The fear of the authorities was palpable among many, but not all.

The major concern, though, was the evolution of the regime in Kyrgyzstan into a personal fiefdom of the Bakiyev family. Bakiyev has six brothers and two sons, and they are all active in public life.

The belief of some was that ridding the country of the Bakiyev "clan" would set right the ship of state.

The problem, of course, is that there is much work to be done to rid the system of corruption, cronyism and other pathologies, and if the new government is to be successful, it will need to do more than bring in a new leadership team.

Did Russia have a role in encouraging the revolt?

Russia had grown disillusioned with Bakiyev. He reneged on his promise to kick the Americans out of the base near Bishkek and even offered them another military facility. He was in the process of reneging on a promise to grant Russia an anti-terrorist base in the southern city of Osh.

There were accusations that Bakiyev was allowing Russian aid to be diverted into private hands, and the Russians realized that his family-based rule was alienating the population.

The Russians, in this sense, were much smarter than the Americans; they did not want to be associated with a failing regime.

As a result, they began last month to signal their frustration with Bakiyev in broadcasts on state-controlled Russian media, which are followed closely in Kyrgyzstan.

Putin may protest that Russia was not involved, but it is difficult to imagine that members of the Kyrgyz opposition would see it that way. They no doubt welcomed Russian intervention, and now Moscow stands to gain from its tacit support for change.

Is the opposition likely to be much better than Bakiyev?

Much depends on who emerges at the top of the leadership.

Roza Otunbayeva, the former foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S. and Canada, appears to be the interim leader and she is smart, sophisticated and eminently decent, with enormous experience in Kyrgyzstan and throughout the world.

She also worked as ambassador to the U.K. and as an envoy for the UN in Georgia. If politicians of her type dominate the leadership, then Kyrgyzstan could make enormous strides in a short period.

She or others will need to do battle against some very entrenched problems, such as corruption and localism, by which I mean the tendency of persons to exhibit greater loyalty to their village and district than to their country.

If Kyrgyzstan is to avoid a return to the problems of the past, it will want to consider abandoning the super-presidential system in place since the mid-1990s and replacing it with a parliamentary order.

It is never possible to constitutionally engineer countries out of their difficulties.

But limiting dramatically the powers of the presidency or, better still, concentrating powers in a prime minister who is subject to a parliamentary majority, will serve as a necessary check on the accumulation of power in the hands of any single individual, family, or region.