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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Kyrgyzstan
Index
Following a brief period of independence after the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution (see Glossary) toppled the empire, the territory of present-day
Kyrgyzstan was designated the Kara-Kyrghyz Autonomous Region and a
constituent part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union)
in 1924. In 1926 the official name changed to the Kyrgyz Autonomous
Republic before the region achieved the status of a full republic of the
Soviet Union in 1936.
Recent History
In the late 1980s, the Kyrgyz were jolted into a state of national
consciousness by the reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and by
ethnic conflict much closer to home. As democratic activism stirred in
Kyrgyzstan's cities, events in Moscow pushed the republic toward
unavoidable independence.
Ethnic Conflict
The most important single event leading to independence grew from an
outburst of ethnic friction. From the perspective of the Kyrgyz, the most
acute nationality problem long had been posed by the Uzbeks living in and
around the city of Osh, in the republic's southwest. Although Kyrgyzstan
was only about 13 percent Uzbek according to the 1989 census, almost the
entire Uzbek population was concentrated in Osh Province. Tensions very
likely had existed between the Kyrgyz and the Uzbeks throughout the Soviet
period, but Moscow was able to preserve the image of Soviet ethnic harmony
until the reforms of Gorbachev in the mid-1980s. In the general atmosphere
of glasnost (see Glossary), an Uzbek-rights group called Adalat
began airing old grievances in 1989, demanding that Moscow grant local
Uzbek autonomy in Osh and consider its annexation by nearby Uzbekistan.
The real issue behind Adalat's demand was land, which is in extremely
short supply in the southernmost province of Osh. To protect their claims,
some Osh Kyrgyz also had formed an opposing ethnic association, called
Osh-aimagy (Osh-land). In early June 1990, the Kyrgyz-dominated Osh City
Council announced plans to build a cotton processing plant on a parcel of
land under the control of an Uzbek-dominated collective farm in Osh
Province.
The confrontation that erupted over control of that land brought several
days of bloody riots between crowds led by the respective associations,
killing at least 320 Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Osh. The precise cause and
sequence of events in early June 1990 is disputed between Uzbek and Kyrgyz
accounts. Scores of families were left homeless when their houses were
burned out. The government finally stopped the rioting by imposing a
military curfew.
Because the telephone lines remained open in the otherwise blockaded
city, news of the violence spread immediately to Frunze. In the capital, a
large group of students marched on the headquarters of the Communist Party
of Kyrgyzia (CPK), which also served as the seat of government, in the
center of the city. In the violent confrontation that ensued, personal
injuries were minimized by effective crowd control, and the riotous crowd
eventually was transformed into a mass meeting.
Democratic Activism
The Osh riots and the subsequent events in Frunze quickly brought to the
surface an undercurrent of political discontent that had been forming
among both the intelligentsia and middle-level party officials. A loose
affiliation of activists calling themselves the Democratic Movement of
Kyrgyzstan (DDK) began to organize public opinion, calling among other
things for the resignation of Absamat Masaliyev, who was president of the
republic's parliament, the Supreme Soviet, as well as a member of the
Soviet Union's Politburo and the head of the CPK. The DDK called for
Masaliyev's resignation because he was widely viewed as having mishandled
the Osh riots.
Democratic activists erected tents in front of the party headquarters,
maintaining pressure with a series of hunger strikes and highly visible
public demonstrations. The continuing atmosphere of crisis emboldened CPK
members, who also wished to get rid of the reactionary Masaliyev. Four
months later, in a presidential election prescribed by Gorbachev's reform
policies, Masaliyev failed to win the majority of Supreme Soviet votes
required to remain in power.
The Rise of Akayev
With none of the three presidential candidates able to gain the
necessary majority in the 1990 election, the Supreme Soviet unexpectedly
selected Askar Akayev, a forty-six-year-old physicist, who had been
serving as head of the republic's Academy of Sciences. Although he had
served for a year in a science-related post on the Central Committee of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and was a party member,
Akayev was the first president of a Soviet republic who had not held a
high party position.
At the same meeting of the Supreme Soviet, the deputies changed the name
of the republic to Kyrgyzstan. They also began to speak seriously of
seeking greater national sovereignty (which was formally declared on
November 20, 1990) and of attaining political domination of the republic
by the Kyrgyz, including the establishment of Kyrgyz as the official
language.
By mid-summer 1991, the Kyrgyz were beginning to make serious moves to
uncouple the government from the CPSU and its Kyrgyzstan branch. In early
August, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Kyrgyzstan, which governs the
police and the internal security forces, announced a ban of all CPSU
affiliation or activity within the ministry. Events elsewhere precluded a
seemingly inevitable conflict with Moscow over that decision; in August
1991, the attention of the entire union moved to Moscow when reactionaries
in Gorbachev's government attempted to remove him from power.
Unlike the leaders of the other four Central Asian republics, who
temporized for a day about their course following the coup, Akayev
condemned the plot almost immediately and began preparations to repel the
airborne forces rumored to be on the way to Kyrgyzstan from Moscow. The
quick collapse of the coup made the preparations unnecessary, but Akayev's
declaration of support for Gorbachev and for the maintenance of legitimate
authority gained the Kyrgyz leader enormous respect among the Kyrgyz
people and among world leaders. On August 30, 1991, days after the coup
began, Akayev and the republic's Supreme Soviet declared Kyrgyzstan an
independent nation, and the president threw the CPSU and its Kyrgyzstan
branch out of the government. However, he did not go as far as officials
in most of the other former Soviet republics, where the party was banned
totally.
At the same time independence was declared, the republic's Supreme
Soviet scheduled direct presidential elections for October 1991. Running
unopposed, Akayev received 95 percent of the popular vote, thus becoming
the country's first popularly elected president. The so-called Silk
Revolution drew much international sympathy and attention. In December
1991, when the Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian republics signed the
Tashkent Agreement, forming a commonwealth that heralded the dissolution
of the Soviet Union, Akayev demanded that another meeting be held so that
Kyrgyzstan might become a founding member of the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS--see Glossary), as the new union was to be called.
The sympathy that Akayev had won for Kyrgyzstan earlier in his
presidency served the country well once the world generally acknowledged
the passing of the Gorbachev regime and the Soviet Union. Kyrgyzstan was
recognized almost immediately by most nations, including the United
States, whose secretary of state, James Baker, made an official visit in
January 1992. A United States embassy was opened in the capital (which had
reassumed its pre-Soviet name of Bishkek in December 1990) in February
1992. By early 1993, the new country had been recognized by 120 nations
and had diplomatic relations with sixty-one of them.
Akayev's Early Years
Despite initial euphoria over the possibilities of independence and
membership in the CIS, Akayev recognized that his country's economic
position was extremely vulnerable and that the ethnic situation
exacerbated that vulnerability. Thus, the Akayev administration devoted
much attention to creating a legal basis of governance while struggling to
keep the economy afloat.
In the first two years of his presidency, Akayev seemed to work
effectively with the Supreme Soviet that had put him in office. By 1992,
however, Akayev's good relations with the legislature had fallen victim to
the rapidly declining economy, the failure of the CIS to become a
functioning body, and the country's inability to attract substantial
assistance or investment from any of the potential foreign partners whom
he had courted so assiduously.
In advancing his reform programs, Akayev experienced particular
difficulties in gaining the cooperation of entrenched local politicians
remaining from the communist government apparatus. To gain control of
local administration, Akayev imitated the 1992 strategy of Russia's
president Boris N. Yeltsin by appointing individuals to leadership
positions at the province, district, and city levels (see Structure of
Government, this ch.). Akayev filled about seventy such positions, the
occupants of which were supposed to combine direct loyalty and
responsibility to the president with a zeal to improve conditions for
their immediate locales. The system became a source of constant scandal
and embarrassment for Akayev, however. The most flagrant abuses came in
Jalal-Abad Province (which had been split from neighboring Osh in spring
1991 to dilute political power in the south), where the new akim,
the provincial governor, appointed members of his own family to the
majority of the positions under his control and used state funds to
acquire personal property. The situation in Jalal-Abad aroused strong
resentment and demonstrations that continued even after the governor had
been forced to resign.
In 1992 and 1993, the public perception grew that Akayev himself had
provided a model for the tendency of local leaders to put family and clan
interests above those of the nation. Indeed, several prominent national
government officials, including the head of the internal security agency,
the heads of the national bank and the national radio administration, the
minister of foreign affairs, and the ambassador to Russia, came from
Akayev's home area and from Talas, the home district of his wife.
Akayev's loss of momentum was reflected in the debate over the national
constitution, a first draft of which was passed by the Supreme Soviet in
December 1992. Although draft versions had begun to circulate as early as
the summer of 1992, the commission itself agreed on a definitive version
only after prolonged debate. An umbrella group of opposition figures from
the DDK also began drawing up constitutional proposals in 1992, two
variations of which they put forward for public consideration.
Although broad agreement existed on the outlines of the constitution,
several specific points were difficult to resolve. One concerned the
status of religion. Although it was agreed that the state would be
secular, there was strong pressure for some constitutional recognition of
the primacy of Islam. Another much-debated issue was the role of the
Russian language. Kyrgyz had been declared the official state language,
but non-Kyrgyz citizens exerted pressure to have Russian assigned
near-equal status, as was the case in neighboring Kazakstan, where Russian
had been declared the "official language of interethnic
communication." The issue of property ownership was warmly debated,
with strong sentiment expressed against permitting land to be owned or
sold. Another important question was the role of the president within the
new state structure.
The proposed constitution was supposed to be debated by the full Supreme
Soviet (as the new nation's parliament continued to call itself after
independence) and by a specially convened body of prominent citizens
before its acceptance as law. However, some members of the democratic
opposition argued that a special assembly of Kyrgyz elders, called a kuraltai
, should be convened to consider the document. A final draft of the
constitution was passed by the Supreme Soviet in May 1993, apparently
without involvement of a kuraltai .
In drafting a final document, the Supreme Soviet addressed some of the
most controversial issues that had arisen in predraft discussions.
Specific passages dealt with transfer and ownership of property, the role
of religion in the government, the powers of the president, and the
official language of the country (see Constitution, this ch.).
Akayev had spoken of the need to have a presidential system of
government--and, indeed, the constitution sets the presidency outside the
three branches of government, to act as a sort of overseer ensuring the
smooth functioning of all three. However, by the mid-1990s dissatisfaction
with the strong presidential model of government and with the president
himself was growing. With economic resources diminished, political
infighting became commonplace. Although the prime minister and others
received blame for controversial or unsuccessful policy initiatives,
President Akayev nonetheless found himself increasingly isolated
politically amid growing opposition forces.
Although the "democratic" opposition that had helped bring
Akayev to power had grown disenchanted, its constituent factions were
unable to exert serious pressure on the president because they could not
agree on ideology or strategy. In October 1992, the main democratic
opposition party Erk (Freedom) fractured into two new parties, Erkin and
Ata-Meken (Fatherland). More serious opposition originated within the
ranks of the former communist elite. Some of this opposition came directly
from the ranks of the reconstituted and still legal CPK (see Political
Parties, this ch.).
In January 1993, Akayev made an unusually harsh statement to the effect
that he had been misled by his economic advisers and that Kyrgyzstan's
overtures to the outside world had only raised false hopes. The continuing
outflow of ethnic Russians (who constitute the greater part of
Kyrgyzstan's technicians), the war in Tajikistan (which has driven
refugees and "freedom fighters" into Kyrgyzstan), the growing
evidence of wide-scale official corruption and incompetence, rising crime,
and--more than anything else--the spectacular collapse of the economy
increasingly charged the country's political atmosphere in the first half
of the 1990s.
Data as of March 1996
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