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KYRGYZSTAN has become the third post-Soviet republic after Georgia and Ukraine, where the regime was brought down in the past 18 months by a "velvet revolution" sponsored by the West.
The Kyrgyz Opposition, which won just six of the 75 seats in the parliamentary elections on February 27 and March 13, launched protests against alleged vote-rigging. Armed with sticks, stones and Molotov cocktails, the demonstrators seized government buildings and the airport in Osh, the country's second largest city, and in nearby Jalal-Abad, in the country's south, before moving on to the capital Bishkek in the north.
On March 24, angry crowds stormed the presidential compound in Bishkek. President Askar Akayev fled the country, and a coordination committee of Opposition parties took power.
Why Kyrgyzstan? Ironically, because it had the most liberal regime among the five Central Asian states. Akayev, a 60-year-old physicist whom the last Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, made Kyrgyz President in 1990, the year before the Soviet Union collapsed, promoted multi-party democracy and a free press and initiated pro-market reforms under the patronage of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
As in Russia, the IMF-advised reforms aggravated the economic crisis that hit Kyrgyzstan after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and put the country in financial bondage. The IMF was instrumental in destroying Kyrgyzstan's Soviet-era industry by demanding that it shut down all losing enterprises before gaining access to credits. There were practically no profit-making factories in Kyrgyzstan in the early 1990s as cooperative ties with Russia and other former Soviet republics were disrupted.
De-industrialisation has led to a massive loss of jobs and widespread poverty, while the bulk of foreign loans were squandered. Thanks to the IMF, Kyrgyzstan has accumulated a foreign debt of $2 billion, equivalent to its gross national product. The country has the largest per capita debt in Central Asia. Gold mining, which accounts for 40 per cent of Kyrgyzstan's exports and the same share of its industrial output, is controlled by Canada's Cameco Corp. and contributes precious little to the national budget. More than 700,000 people out of a population of five million have left the country to look for jobs in Russia and Kazakhstan.
Despite his democratic credentials, Akayev eventually became a captive of the clan structure of Kyrgyz society. Nepotism flourished under his rule, with his family and relatives controlling most of the businesses in Kyrgyzstan. Akayev, who was to step down in October, was also seen manoeuvring to hand over power either to his eldest son, Aydar, or his eldest daughter, Bermet, both of whom won seats in this year's parliamentary elections.
Grinding poverty and disillusionment drove the anti-Akayev protests, but the United States played a key role in fomenting the Kyrgyz `tulip revolution', as it had done in Georgia and Ukraine. An array of U.S. foundations, deployed not only in the capital but in every provincial town, cultivated and financed Opposition groups. A printing press operated by the U.S. State Department in Bishkek since 2002 has been printing some 60 publications, including Opposition newspapers. The U.S. Agency for International Development spent at least $2 million in Kyrgyzstan in the run-up to the parliamentary elections.
In an interview earlier this year, Akayev explained why Kyrgyzstan had been picked for a "velvet revolution". He said: "I am sure this technology will not work in [dictatorial] Turkmenistan, but it may work in Kyrgyzstan, which has established such fundamentals of democracy as numerous opposition parties, free media and over 5,000 non-governmental organisations." Indeed, recent parliamentary polls in authoritarian Uzbekistan and Tajikistan predictably resulted in the re-election of compliant legislatures.
In January the Kyrgyz President's office served warnings to 10 Western embassies in Bishkek to stop meddling in the country's affairs. A day before the revolt in Bishkek, Akayev told Parliament that the Opposition's push to stage a coup in Kyrgyzstan was "financed and orchestrated from abroad" and was linked to "coloured revolutions" in other former Soviet states.
Washington denied any involvement in the Kyrgyz upheaval, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed the hope that it would become "a democratic success story". "This is a process that's just beginning," the Associated Press quoted Rice as saying. "We know where we want to go."
They certainly do. Akayev was admittedly the most enlightened political leader not only in Kyrgyzstan but in the whole of Central Asia. If Washington's sole goal was to ensure a democratic transfer of power in Kyrgyzstan, it should have worked jointly with Moscow. Instead, the Americans wanted to replace Akayev, who despite his multi-vector foreign policy was committed to strategic alliance with Russia, with a pro-Western leader - as they did in Georgia and Ukraine.
Kyrgyzstan is strategically located between Kazakhstan, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The Americans maintain a major air base in Manas, outside Bishkek, where they have deployed transport and refuelling aircraft and are planning to base F-15 and F-18 multi-role fighters. Washington set up military bases in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan ostensibly for anti-terror operations in Afghanistan, but has said that it will not leave the region as soon as the Afghan campaign is over.
Apart from control over oil and gas flows from the region, the encirclement of Russia and containment of China are Washington's other priorities in Central Asia. Two years ago Russia opened an air force base in Kyrgyzstan that gives it strategic control over much of Central Asia. China is also extremely sensitive to the situation in Kyrgyzstan whose Uighur minority may re-ignite separatism in its westernmost Muslim-dominated province, Xinjiang.
The change of regime in Kyrgyzstan may help the U.S. to split or weaken the two existing regional security organisations - the post-Soviet Collective Security Treaty Organisation and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in which China is a key member. Kyrgyzstan is a member of both, and its withdrawal would undermine the positions of Russia and China in the region.
However, the U.S. game may throw one of the poorest ex-Soviet states into turmoil similar to the 1992-97 civil war in Tajikistan that claimed tens of thousands of lives.
Unlike in Georgia and Ukraine, the Opposition in Kyrgyzstan is fractured and could unite only for the ouster of Akayev. Politics in the country is driven by clan interests. Akayev belonged to a northern clan, while the new Acting President and Prime Minister, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, represents southern clans. For all its seeming spontaneity, the Kyrgyz revolt was incited by southern clans which consider themselves short-changed during the 15-year rule of the northerners.
The heart of the poor and depressed south lies in the hugely overpopulated Fergana Valley, a fertile, mountain-ringed 300 sq km oasis, which the late Soviet leader Josef Stalin arbitrarily divided between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. As a result, the ethnic Uzbek population constitutes the majority in Kyrgyzstan's southern regions. It is one of the most explosive regions in Central Asia.
Long-standing ethnic tension between Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities erupted into violent clashes over land allocation in 1990, in which hundreds died. In recent years, the Fergana Valley has grown into a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism. In 1999 and 2000, when the Taliban was in power in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden's close associate Juma Namangani, himself an ethnic Uzbek, invaded southern Kyrgyzstan as part of his plan to establish a fundamentalist Caliphate in Central Asia. The attacks were repelled, but there are still many Namangani sympathisers in the region.
The Fergana Valley is also a major conduit for the narcotics trade from Afghanistan and Tajikistan to Russia and Europe, which has soared since the U.S. displaced the Taliban regime. Some of the Opposition leaders in Kyrgyzstan are said to figure in police records as drug-traffickers.
If the southern and northern clans fail to reach a power-sharing arrangement, Kyrgyzstan may split along the Tian Shan mountain range, which divides the country into two parts linked by a single road.
While the U.S. hand was heavily felt in the Kyrgyz revolt, Russia's influence remains dominant. Russia is Kyrgyzstan's biggest trade and defence partner and Russian companies control commanding positions in the Kyrgyz economy. Mindful of its fiasco in Ukraine, where it had put all its eggs in the basket of a losing presidential contender, Russia took care to engage the Opposition, hosting its leaders in Moscow ahead of the parliamentary polls. President Vladimir Putin moved swiftly to accept the outcome of the revolt, while also giving shelter to Akayev. For their part, the new leaders have vowed to deepen strategic ties with Russia and asked for Putin's help to stabilise the situation in Kyrgyzstan.
The ruling elites in neighbouring Kazakhstan, the least authoritarian of the remaining Central Asian regimes, are already bracing themselves to resist the U.S. "liberty crusade". Two main pro-government parties in Kazakhstan recently formed a coalition to foil any revolution, promising to defend the country's sovereignty with "arms".
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