Although I’ve been deeply interested in Central Asia for many years, it’s been difficult to get inordinately excited about events in Kyrgyzstan, given that I don’t yet know just who composes the opposition. There’s not much to be gained from replacing one dictator with another, and there’s certainly always room for things to get worse. It seems that the previous president was a Soviet holdover, but a less ruthless one than his neighbors in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. I’m always ready to be enthusiastic about revolutions that bring democracy, especially when the protest babes start showing up. Background, in the brown sweater. Grrrrrrr, baby!
OK, so I’m a little enthusiastic. Yet something gives me a queasy feeling that not everyone in the opposition has innately democratic instincts:
A prominent opposition leader, Felix Kulov, who was released from jail by his supporters earlier in the day, was named the head of the country’s security ministries. The 56-year-old is the former head of National Security Ministry – the successor of the Soviet-era KGB. He had been a vice-president to President Akayev before being jailed in 2000.
Nor is Kulov the only Soviet holdover in the new power structure. Worse yet, disorder is breaking out, which often means that someone is looking for an excuse to impose authoritarian rule:
Despite appeals for calm, jubilation turned to violence as gangs of young men raided shops and set buildings alight. In a large store on the main street, Beta, looters carted out everything from mattresses, coat hangers and mirrors, to crates of food, juice and cookies, the Associated Press news agency reported. “There are looters and there are no police to stop them,” Mr Kulov told Reuters news agency.
And of course, the ease with which the opposition stormed the “White House” arouses some suspicion. The New York Times suggests that the looting is less widespread and less senseless than the BBC report leads a reader to believe:
But there was some looting, inside the abandoned presidential compound and at the Beta Stores shopping center, widely believed to be controlled by Mr. Akayev’s once-powerful and unpopular wife, Mairam. Looters could be seen cheerfully carting away an array of items, including groceries to furniture.
In contrast to belated Russian calls for a return to law and order, the United States, as far as I can see from the media sources that really count, has been silent here. There is much, much more that our country should be doing to see that a democratic state arises in Kyrgyztan; nothing I have seen suggests that the people are unready for it, and the momentum is still strong enough to overcome an attempt to “hijack” this revolution.
Even if it means the loss of our military’s basing rights, one more democratic state formed with U.S. encouragement is a better friend than a dictatorship with which we have cut another unsavory deal. What’s more, basing rights hardly seem to be much of an issue, given our access to fine Soviet-built airfields in Bagram and Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan.
Prescription: contingent upon some significant support from the Kyrgyz opposition for such a move, the U.S. should call for elections six months in the future, so that opposition parties have sufficient time to organize and campaign. The U.N. could then make itself useful by organizing international monitors. If Russia or France (France was at it again today) tries to block that, the United States could organize another “coalition of the willing” to do it. One delicious irony would be to invite substantial contingents of election observers from Afghanistan and Iraq.