Kirghiz revolt signals growing instability in ex-Soviet republics

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The April 7 uprising in Kirghizia (sometimes called Kyrgyzstan), the mass uprising that overthrew the corrupt tyrant Kurambek Bakiyev, himself the beneficiary of a mass uprising five years ago that overthrew his predecessor, Askar Akaev, was a new sign not just of continuing political ferment in that country but of growing instability in the former Soviet Central Asian republics. In the Russian-language Neweurasia.net of April 23, an article written under the pseudonym of Alpharabius compared the Kirghiz event with the Tadzhik civil war, which started in 1992 and lasted for four years.

Tens of thousands of people died in the Tadzhik civil war, and hundreds of thousands fled the country. The defeated opposition was mostly Islamic and included Uzbek Jihadis. Russian President Medvedev declared in the wake of the April 7 uprising that Kirghizia could become “another Afghanistan.” The Russian press in recent days has focused on attacks by Kirghiz on ethnic Russians.

On April 25, Izvestia reported: “On Tuesday, Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev instructed Minister of Defense Anatoly Serdyukov to take steps to insure the safety of Russian citizens in Kirghizia and reinforce the defense of Russian facilities. As the Kremlin press service reported, this decision was taken in response to acts of plunder and raiding in the country. The situation in Kirghizia remains tense. Pogromists killed five people in the town of Maevka [a settlement of Russians] and wounded 28.”

The article went on to report that most of the violence involved attempts by Kirghiz to seize land in the suburbs of the country’s capital, Bishkek, held by Russians and Meskhetian Turks. It claimed that the mayor of Bishkek was trying to negotiate with the “progromists” but had been taken captive by them: “Today in the towns international self-defense units are being set up. They are breaking up stones and acquiring arms. ...To distinguish themselves from the pogromists, they are wearing red armbands. Today, the roads into Bishkek are packed. There are enormous traffic jams of vehicles carrying refugees. The situation is very threatening.”

The article cited an appeal to the new government stressing the threat of an outburst of Kirghiz chauvinism and stressing the multinational makeup of the country. “In the meantime, the inhabitants of the Chu Valley, which has traditionally been settled by people of many nationalities, sent the following appeal to the provisional government: ‘From the middle of the 19th century, Russians, Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, Germans, Poles began settled in Kirghizia. The historical names speak for themselves: Maevka, Aleksandrovka, Petrovskoe: During the Great Fatherland War [World War II] Stalin transferred Chechens, Turks and Greeks to the Chu Valley. Many Chinese live here. … Kirghizia has always been and will always remain a multinational state.”

It is possible that native Kirghiz view settlements of other nationalities as colonies implanted on the basis of their oppression. The Kirghiz were the victims of racist oppression both under tsarism and Stalinism. Settler colonies are a common tool of imperialist oppression and it is frequent in uprisings of the oppressed people that they turn against settlers. In fact, the Russian racist attitude toward the Kirghiz was reflected in the headline of the Izvestia article cited above: “Can the Kirghiz live without a khan?”

8 Socialist Action may 2010 The April 7 revolution seems to have had no political leadership. In its April 23 web edition, Radio Liberty, the U.S. government’s unofficial organ, noted: “Whatever might have been planned, on April 7, when several thousand protesters stormed the government house in Bishkek, there were no opposition leaders commanding their action. Nearly all of them had been arrested the previous night....

“Inspired by the demonstrations in the provincial town of Talas one day earlier, the opposition had reportedly planned to conduct peaceful, nationwide demonstrations on April 7. They were going to demand that Bakiyev fulfill the promises he made in the last revolution almost exactly five years earlier: freedom of speech and media, economic stability, an end to nepotism and corruption, and releasing opposition activists from prison.

“But after hearing about the overnight arrests of opposition leaders, people became aggressive. Witnesses said police appeared to panic when there was no sign of leadership or supervision of the protesters. In several cases, demonstrators wrested the security forces’ weapons away from them.”

An article in the April 25 Washington Post confirmed this scenario: “The roundup decapitated the opposition on the eve of protests scheduled across the country but also provoked a backlash and left young crowds without elders who usually restrained them. ‘We had always been accused of cowardice because we never let people storm government buildings,’ said Omurbek Tekebayev, one of those arrested. ‘But this time, all the opposition leaders were in jail, so there was no one in the streets to stop them.’”

Without a leadership representing the revolutionary masses, the new government seems to have been formed essentially of the old elites who had gone into opposition to the Bakiyev regime on the basis of individual grievances. The head of the provisional government, Roza Otunbayeva, is a veteran political figure already prominent in Soviet times.

An article dated April 8 on the Radio Liberty website described her early background as follows: “In 1986, she was appointed deputy chairwoman of the Kirghiz SSR Council of Ministers, and foreign minister. From 1989 to 1991, she worked at the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow, before returning to Kyrgyzstan in late 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union.” She was the first foreign minister of independent Kyrgyzstan when the Soviet era regime was only slightly reconstructed. And in the 1990s she held top diplomatic posts, including that of ambassador to the U.S.

Despite implication in the various autocratic regimes that have ruled Kyrgyzstan, Otunbayeva has a better personal reputation than other veteran politicians. But some accounts cite doubts that she actually has a political base. And there is no indication so far that any other figure or grouping in the provisional government has any real authority.

The Eurasia-Net website reported on April 25: “While the provisional government can claim to wield the levers of power inside government offices, its authority clearly does not yet extend to the streets. Omurbek Tekebayev, leader of the Ata-Meken (Fatherland) party, appeared on state broadcaster LTR just after 8:30 p.m. and told viewers that the provisional government was in charge of enforcing a curfew in Bishkek. Throngs of citizens disregarded the curfew, however, as widespread looting continued into the night in Bishkek.”

Among the Kirghiz, there is a tradition of grassroots democracy dating back to tribal days, the Kuraltai. Actried for an “illegal privatization” of an electric plant.

Increased electric rates were an immediate cause of the uprising. One of the first acts of the provisional government was to rescind them. The provisional government has also proclaimed that all of the media owned by the Bakiyev family will “become the property of the people.” However, for the privatizations, even the most corrupt ones, to be reversed, the economy would have to be organized according to a socialist plan. Within the context of the restoration of capitalism in the entire former Soviet sphere, that would require a high level of consciousness and boldness. There is no indication that there is any such leadership, now in Kirghizia.

However, there has been very little analysis in the international press (or the Russian and Kirghiz press for that matter) of the internal dynamics of the Kirghiz revolution. The Russian press, as noted, has concentrated on threats to the Russian-speaking population. It has also made dark hints about an alliance between the Byelorussian strongman, Alexander Lukashenko, and Bakiyev, who has taken refuge in the Byelorussian capital of Minsk. Izvestia wrote that the Kirghiz tyrant had “landed under Lukashenko’s warm wing.”

Actually, the Byelorussian dictator proclaimed that he was personally guaranteeing Bakiyev’s safety. It remains to be seen what interest the boss of a small country on Russia’s western frontier has in protecting a fugitive Central Asian tyrant.

The English-language big press has concentrated on speculation about what the revolution means for American versus Russian interests in Central Asia, specifically the future of the American Manas military base, which serves as a conduit for jet fuel to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. One of the major reasons the Russian government and its subordinate media encouraged the opposition to Bakiyev was supposedly that he had reneged on an agreement to expel the Manas military base.

There can hardly be any doubt that the Russian government does not like seeing U.S. bases in its former territories. After all, it has done everything it could to prevent the expansion of NATO to Eastern Europe and Ukraine. But it is hard to know how much of an irritant the Manas base is. The Russian government formally, and to some extent materially (overflight rights), supports the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

One of the major foreign-policy gambits of the Russian strongman, Vladimir Putin, has been to draw the West into an alliance against “radical Islam,” to project the idea that it has an interest in supporting his war against the Chechens and other peoples of Islamic heritage in former Soviet territories, or at least not criticizing it. In fact, Putin rose to power on the basis of anti-Chechen chauvinism, and anti-Islamic drum beating continues to be one of the props of his regime.

An English-language organ, The Times of Central Asia, apparently a pro-U.S. publication, argued in the wake of the Kirghiz uprising that U.S. influence was secure in Kirghizia: “It is no secret that over the past 10 years, the United States has consistently tried to strengthen its presence in the post-Soviet Central Asian republics. Already, it has achieved a lot. The growing American influence in Kyrgyzstan is proven by the fact that U.S. dollars are used here alongside the national currency, the som, with most commercial deals made in dollars.

“The United States has greatly influenced not only Kyrgyzstan’s economy but also the law enforcement agencies and the army. Since 1995, Kyrgyzstan’s Defense Ministry has sent hundreds of servicemen to the United States for military training. There is perhaps not one colonel or general in the Kyrgyz army who has not been abroad via the NATO Partnership for Peace program.

“Over the past decade, U.S. Peace Corps volunteers, teachers, and business people have also been spread(continued on page 10, in “Temple Hospital strikers defeat gag rule, union-busting demands”)

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At the risk of being found in contempt of Parliament, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative minority government still refuses to release documents pertaining to the torture of detainees handed over by Canadian forces to Afghan authorities. If House of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken backs the parliamentary