IUF
Uniting Food, Farm and Hotel Workers World-Wide
The Future of Kyrgyzstan's 'Tulip Revolution'
Posted to the IUF website 01-Apr-2005Share this article.
The IUF Eastern Europe and Central Asia Coordination Office contributed this editorial.
The recent events in Kyrgyzstan were both unexpected and foreseeable. Unexpected, because among the Central Asia republics Kyrgyzstan had been considered the most open and democratic. Foreseeable, because democracy in Kyrgyzstan was essentially hollow. The missing element in this pseudo-democracy was democratic institutions rooted in civil society. The government was therefore incapable of mobilizing the country's resources and initiative around a program of sustainable development. In practice this meant handing over all responsibility for economic and social problems to a variety of international organizations.
Kyrgyzstan became the first republic of the former USSR to join the World Trade Organisation. It was probably the only state in the world that joined the WTO without even attempting to negotiate the conditions of accession. The government of Kyrgyzstan, a predominantly agrarian country, voluntarily renounced its right to regulate and protect its internal market and production. International institutions and organizations were given the job of supporting farmers and small production, establishing consumer cooperatives, and developing national programs to address major issues like poverty, child labour and crime. These programs could not and cannot substitute for a consistent national policy of sustainable development, because this is the proper task of government.
By renouncing responsibility for alleviating poverty the government established the conditions for a spontaneous social explosion. President Akaev gave the spark to ignite it when he falsified the February election results to install his son and daughter in parliament, thereby signalling his intention to stay in power by manipulating as well the forthcoming presidential election.
The opposition did not originally intend to take power. The authorities themselves, by their crude efforts to disperse the March 24 mass demonstration on the capital's central square, provoked the crowd into storming the government headquarters. Since there was no opposition at that point prepared to assume leadership, the demonstration degenerated into rioting and the looting of supermarkets in the centre of Bishkek directly linked to the ruling elite.
The Kyrgyz trade unions called on all sides in the political conflict arising from the falsified parliamentary election to enter immediately into negotiations for a peaceful solution to the crisis. The ruling powers did not respond to this call, and the people in the streets settled the issue by chasing them from office. The inevitable question now, of course, is: what is the new government's political and social program?
The leaders of Central Asia are now publicly musing about the �failure� of �democratic experiments�. However, the experience of Kyrgyzstan teaches a diametrically opposite lesson. It is not democracy, but authoritarian regimes operating through a pseudo-democratic facade which inevitably generate spontaneous, undirected and chaotic protest. The suppression of democratic rights, not the encouragement and development of democratic initiative, leads to riots and looting.
Only democracy offers the people of Kyrgyzstan the possibility of achieving stability by overcoming poverty. Democratic development must be built on self-organisation rooted in the structures of civil society: independent trade unions, a politically and financially independent mass media and a political opposition which is able to offer credible alternative models of economic development and real national independence. So far there has only been a rotation of elites. Democracy is the essential precondition for moving beyond a palace coup to a tulip revolution.