Central Asia's French Revolution

Kyrgyzstan’s political tensions had been rising long before the riots that were broadcast all over the world and across Central Asia news stations, showing images of an angry mod swarming the street, and the dramatic moment at which a van was sent crashing through the ornate main gates of the Presidential Palace.

While President Bakiyev was forced to flee his capital, and ultimately the country, the reactions of Central Asian countries surrounding Kyrgyzstan have said much about the politics and human rights record of the region, when referring to the region it is taken for the purposes of this article to constitute Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

Central Africa is one of the most impoverished regions of the world, with a GDP per capita of just $2700. Poverty makes authoritarian leadership easy, as if the population is more concerned with surviving than politics, the leadership won’t have to be too concerned about sticky issues like human rights, with which Central Asia has a poor record.

It the Soviet legacy of this region that holds it back from true democracy. Autocratic models of leadership and politics were cemented here by the USSR when it annexed almost the entire region, and these have been difficult to shake off.

So far, Uzbekistan is only country out of the five former Soviet states to make anything akin to progress, and even then it still has an executive branch with a vast degree of power – parliament does not even have the authority to propose or draft legislation.

The reactions of the leaders of these countries to the crisis were telling then, in some cases they refused to acknowledge it. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have isolated themselves from the political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan, and images of democracy at work on TV, by not speaking about it at all, and preventing their state-run televisions from reporting on it in any depth.

Kazakhstan, on the other hand, a regional powerhouse with a vested interest in the stability of region, put pressure on the interim government in Kyrgyzstan to restore order so that continued acknowledgement of the near-revolution would not be necessary, and so that opposition forces in Kazakhstan couldn’t get any ideas in their heads.

At the same time, it issued a thinly veiled warning to the population of Kyrgyzstan, advising them not to put their hard-won freedoms and relative economic prosperity at risk. As a regional power, Kazakhstan has the power to take this away.

Tajikistan in the meantime could only watch what was occurring and wring its hands, offering sympathy to the people of Kyrgyzstan, while calling, rather softly, for a return to order. Tajikistan is the poorest, and therefore weakest, of the former Soviet countries in Central Asia, and has little clout when it comes to regional politics.

The diversity of these reactions supports what one commentator, Aitolkyn Kourmanova, has said, "The region is different in the level of political freedoms and liberal movements." It is not just a homogenous territory, which is what foreigners often think because of the commonality of “stan” on the end of each country’s name.

Aitolkyn Kourmanova is the executive director of the Institute for Economic Strategies of Central Asia, she told Central Asia news media that the differences in reaction reflect the differences in levels of political freedoms.

Kazakhstan has made some progress toward functional democracy, and so it was able to offer its ‘soft’ power approach, calling for calm, issuing veiled warnings while expressing sympathy for the people of Kyrgyzstan and brokering a peace deal at the same time so that the ousted president could be removed from the country in order to calm the waters.

Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan used ‘hard’ power, warning any would-be protestors that they would be met with the full force of the law, or what might otherwise be called brute force.

The political crisis in Kyrgyzstan was a nightmare scenario for the leaders of these countries, who have made little progress in political reform, and show little interest in stepping up the pace.

There was a time, a few days around the middle of April, when it seemed the ‘power of the people’ might spill over into neighboring countries with emotive force, but it now seems to have all calmed down.

The region can return to the status quo. Until the next time the people are pushed too far, that is.