Word: akayev
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...Askar Akayev's abrupt departure took everyone by surprise-especially the people trying to oust him. Indeed, the President of Kyrgyzstan fled last Thursday before his opponents could even decide what to call the latest revolution to rock a former Soviet republic-pink? Lemon? Tulip? "We were expecting at least a couple of days of picketing," says Alexander Kim, editor of the main opposition newspaper, MSN. "No one thought [the government] would collapse in half...
...Georgia's rose revolution and Ukraine's orange one, Kyrgyzstan's leader was ejected following protests over contested elections. But where Ukraine's revolution unfolded peacefully over several months, and the Georgian uprising avoided large-scale violence, Akayev's dethronement was nearly instantaneous-the Thursday protest started tentatively-and the denouement was a spasm of rioting, theft and vandalism. But there were important similarities, too. The police no longer see dissidents as the enemy. "When the demonstrators reached the presidential offices, they commiserated with the cops about their $25-a-month salaries, and asked them to let them in without...
...Uzbekistan, where opposition calls for reforms have been repeatedly repressed. Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko put down a protest over the weekend, and some analysts believe the dominoes could even start falling in the Kremlin's direction, though Vladimir Putin's grip seems pretty secure. "Nobody rushed to defend Akayev," says Alexey Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Center. "All these post-Soviet authoritarian regimes are proving colossuses with feet of clay...
...conflict in some of the republics may be resolved only when stable, popularly supported governments take shape. So far, the political scorecard is mixed. Kyrgyzstan's Akayev and Kazakhstan's Nazarbayev have won praise in the West for their eagerness to open up to the outside world. They have tried to forge a policy of "public consensus" in their ethnically diverse states, presiding over what can best be described as "nonparty" systems made up of shifting groups of democrats, nationalists, environmentalists and Old Guard communists. Akayev says his major aim is to create "a strong and powerful middle class that...
With so many suitors, the newly independent states have been wary of making geopolitical commitments. Askar Akayev, President of Kyrgyzstan, wants his country to be "politically like Switzerland, but in the heart of Asia." Foreign Minister Abdu Kuliyev believes Turkmenistan should be "neither Islamic nor Soviet but a secular, democratic state." President Nursultan * Nazarbayev thinks Kazakhstan, which stretches from the Volga region of Russia to the western borders of China, should be a bridge between Europe and Asia. Says he: "We want to enter the democratic world like any other state...