Osh, Kyrgyzstan (CNN) -- When Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbayeva set a two-day limit to get barricades down in Osh, she was testing the limits of her power.
It was the June 18, more than week after violence first flared that she made her initial foray into the seething ethnic tensions in the country's south.
The capital Bishkek, seat of her interim government, is a day's drive, several mountain ranges to the north. She flew into Osh's dilapidated Soviet-era airport a few miles out of town and hopped on a helicopter for the rest of the journey.
Lenin's statue still towers over the square where she touched down; a monument to how far this forgotten corner of the globe has been left behind.
Lenin's successor, Josef Stalin, carved up the region creating countries no rational cartographer would dare. He took a patchwork of ethnic idiosyncrasies, nomadic Kyrgyz, more settled Uzbeks and others drawing lines that would guarantee a tinderbox.
