Stalled Progress in Kyrgyzstan

In late March 2005, The Economist ran an article on Kyrgyzstan’s ongoing Tulip Revolution. In the intro, the question was asked: “Could Ukraine-style people power be coming to one of the least democratic parts of the world? Or might the protests spiral into chaos?” Reality came to rest somewhere in between.

Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 revolution followed after Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution and Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, seemingly another domino of authoritarianism falling over in the former Soviet Union. But like the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, a decade later Kyrgyzstan has not really lived up to the high aspirations of many.

Askar Akayev, the first president of independent Kyrgyzstan, was elected to the post during the dying days of the Soviet Union. He won a third five-year term in 2000, although the election was criticized by Western observers. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) noted in a statement after the election that while democratic developments in the country remained “comparatively viable,” they were “increasingly challenged.”

Flawed parliamentary elections in February 2005 served as a catalyst for the upending of the Akayev regime. Protests first emerged in towns in southern Kyrgyzstan, the core of support for many opposition candidates who felt robbed in the election, and then moved to the streets of Bishkek. The revolution culminated with President Askar Akayev’s early April resignation announced from Moscow, where he had fled with his family in late March.

The opposition at the time was headless, though consolidated somewhat under former Prime Minister Kurmanbek Bakiyev and former Foreign Minister Roza Otunbaeva. Bakiyev was appointed interim president and won by a landslide in the July 2005 presidential poll.

The real tragedy of Akayev was the wasted potential of his regime. Despite introducing multi-party democracy soon after coming to office and signing up for an economic-reform plan backed by the International Monetary Fund, Akayev stumbled. As the years passed, the Akayev government became intolerant of opposition, fearful of dissent.

This scenario replayed itself five years later in 2010, when Kurmanbek Bakiyev was pushed from office by protests and Roza Otunbaeva stepped in. Unlike the Tulip Revolution, Kyrgyzstan’s second, unnamed, revolution was not sparked by an election and also resulted in ethnic violence that had been largely absent from 2005.

Demonstrations in early April 2010 by opposition parties in the western city of Talas lashed out at the government for corruption and the country’s economic hardships. The winter had been difficult that year, with rising energy costs and rolling blackouts. The government’s reaction – clamp down on the protests – only stoked the fire of opposition that ended with Bakiyev resigning and then fleeing with his family, eventually, to Belarus. But first Bakiyev fled to Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan, sparking rumors that he was trying to rally support there and leading to clashes between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, a long-simmering Fergana Valley rivalry suddenly brought to boil.

After leaving the county, Bakiyev would later try to argue that his resignation was not valid. But by then, even Russia had abandoned him.

“I know only one thing: that Mr. Bakiyev faxed his resignation back to Bishkek, so this document cannot be rejected by a verbal statement,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at the time.

Bakiyev, as Akayev before him, and like leaders throughout the former Soviet Union, had walked a line between Russia and the United States. American interest in the country was tied directly to the Manas Transit Center outside the capital, which it used until 2014 to move troops and equipment into Afghanistan. In 2003, Russia signed a lease with Kyrgyzstan to base Russian Air Force units at the Kant Air Base. Kant hosted a Soviet air base and pilot training school from 1941 until 1991 when it reverted to Kyrgyz control upon dissolution of the Soviet Union. Russia maintains three other military facilities in Kyrgyzstan, including an underwater weapons testing ground in Karakol and a military communications center in Kara-Balt. In 2012 Kyrgyzstan raised the rent on those three facilities.

Kyrgyzstan was, for a time, the only country in the world to simultaneously host Russian and American military bases, an outward sign of its very real balancing act between the two great powers. Bakiyev, for his part, played the same game his predecessor had – accepting the mantle of shining star for progress in the region from the United States without rudely jerking itself completely out of Russia’s orbit. Kyrgyzstan was, and is still, the most democratic and open society in the region.

But times are changing. With the closure of the Manas Transit Center in 2014 and the prolonged but deliberate winding down of the American war in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan has swung politically toward Russia once more. Nowhere is this more evident than in the country’s active plans to join the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Signing accession agreements in late 2014, Kyrgyzstan should join the EEU as a full member by May 2015.

The active NGO presence and vibrant civil society Kyrgyzstan had previously been praised for is under threat. A “foreign agents” law, which NGOs say will curtail their activities due to cumbersome reporting regimes and an anti-gay propaganda law are moving through the legislature. Both laws mirror Russian dictums passed in 2012.

As the anniversaries of both Kyrgyz revolutions pass by this April, the seeds of unrest remain ever present in the country. Interethnic tensions between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, which flared during the 2010 revolution, continue to bubble across the Fergana Valley. Similarly to the state of affairs preceding the 2005 revolution, energy prices and supply issues have plagued the country this winter. In April 2014, Uzbekistan cut off gas supplies to southern Kyrgyzstan due to a contract lapse, the flow was not restored until December. Additionally, general economic miasma – in part an effect of Russia’s shaking ruble – covers all of Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan.

This April may not see another Kyrgyz revolution, but democracy has hardly moved from the OSCE’s 2000 assessment that democratic progress, though viable, remains challenged. In the meantime, Kyrgyzstan’s star continues to dim.