Struggle for power continues in Kyrgyzstan

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Struggle for power continues in Kyrgyzstan
By Niall Green
9 April 2010

Two days after the main opposition groups in Kyrgyzstan claimed to
have overthrown the government of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, control
over the impoverished country remains in dispute.

Opposition leader Roza Otunbayeva, head of the self-proclaimed
provisional government, said Bakiyev is organizing resistance in the
southern city of Jalalabad. Otunbayeva and her backers control a
number of government buildings in the capital, Bishkek, and other
provincial cities. The opposition claims to have won the backing of
most of the army and police.

The criminality of the Bakiyev regime was demonstrated in its massacre
of protesters who marched on the presidential headquarters in Bishkek
on Wednesday. Riot police fired point blank into thousands of
demonstrators, mostly workers, killing at least 74 and injuring over
400 others.

The mass protest in the capital followed similar demonstrations in
outlying cities earlier in the week. A major spur to the eruption of
popular rage at the Bakiyev government was the regime’s imposition of
sharp increases in the prices of basic commodities. The government
increased the price of water and gas twofold, at a time when most
workers and the rural poor have been hit hard by the global recession.

Many Kyrgyz families rely on remittances from relatives working
abroad, especially in Russia. However, as jobs have been cut these
itinerant workers have been among the first to be laid off.

Kyrgyzstan is one of the poorest countries in the region, with a per
capita gross domestic product one-ninth that of neighbouring
Kazakhstan. Average daily wages are around $5.

The opposition leaders who are claiming to head a new “people’s
government” do not represent the Kyrgyz masses. For the most part,
they are former officials in the regimes of Bakiyev or his
predecessor, Askar Akayev. The latter was overthrown in the 2005
US-backed “Tulip Revolution,” which installed Bakiyev in power.

As in the other countries that had Washington-backed “colour
revolutions”—Georgia and Ukraine—the supposedly democratic leader
supported by the US and other Western powers continued the
anti-democratic methods of the ousted regime and intensified the
economic attacks on the working population.

The Obama administration bears major political responsibility for
Bakiyev’s massacre of workers on Wednesday. The popular movement
against the American-backed despot has exposed the utter hypocrisy of
US foreign policy and the predatory aims that underlie the war in
Afghanistan.

A major reason for US support for Bakiyev has been his willingness,
despite popular opposition, to allow the US military to continue using
the Manas base near Bishkek as the central staging ground for moving
US and NATO troops into Afghanistan and supplying the
counterinsurgency operation.

US imperialism, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, has
supported the Bakiyev administration despite its well-known record of
human rights abuses. The regime has been internationally condemned for
the detention, intimidation and killing of its political opponents.

On a recent trip to the country, United Nations Secretary General Ban
Ki-Moon was forced to acknowledge that Kyrgyzstan failed to meet basic
international standards of democratic rights, especially with regard
to freedom of the media. Dozens of journalists who have voiced
criticism of Bakiyev and his cronies have been assaulted or killed
over the past five years, while several independent media outlets have
been censored or closed down.

Last year, Bakiyev organized a presidential election that was widely
seen, in Kyrgyzstan and by international election monitors, as rigged.
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe election monitors
declared that the Kyrgyz vote “fell short of key standards” and the
Bakiyev government had employed “ballot stuffing,” “multiple voting,”
and physical threats against monitors.

Washington remained virtually silent on the election fraud. Indeed,
Obama subsequently praised Bakiyev.

The blatantly fraudulent 2009 vote in Kyrgyzstan took place just weeks
after the Iranian presidential election was condemned by
Washington—without any substantive evidence—as rigged. The difference
in Washington’s attitude to the two elections was not based on any
objective appraisal of the electoral standards in either country. The
Bakiyev regime was an ally in Washington’s occupation of Afghanistan,
and so could rig the vote as it wished, while the government in Tehran
is a prime target for US aggression and “regime change.”

The explosive events in Kyrgyzstan have evidently taken Washington by
surprise. Bakiyev’s son, Maksim Bakiyev, was scheduled to meet with
administration officials in Washington on Thursday, but the meeting
has been postponed. The elder Bakiyev named his son to head the
Central Agency on Development, Investment, and Innovation last October.

The US military also announced that it had suspended flights in and
out of the Manas base.

At the same time, the head of the provisional government, Roza
Otunbayeva, has longstanding and close ties to the US. A former high
official under Akayev, she was the first ambassador to the US from
Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic, after the dissolution of the
Soviet Union. A key leader of the Tulip Revolution, Otunbayeva served
briefly as foreign minister under Bakiyev.

Although some opposition leaders have called for the closure of the US
military’s Manas base, Otunbayeva has hastened to reassure Washington,
declaring that the provisional government will maintain the status quo.

Washington has reacted cautiously to the events in Kyrgyzstan,
publicly calling for “restraint” from both the government and
opposition sides. The US will seek to pressure whichever political
formation consolidates power to ensure the continuation of US military
operations at the Manas base.

The threat of civil war in Kyrgyzstan has been heightened by the
nepotism of the Bakiyev regime, which has used state power to line the
pockets of Bakiyev’s sons and brothers at the expense of rival
factions of the local elite. The president’s family has monopolized
“practically all the country’s resources,” causing friction between
pro-government clans from the south of the country and groups from the
traditionally more developed northern regions, according to Andrey
Ryabov of the Carnegie Moscow Centre.

Ryabov also stated, “Russia, the US, China and the European Union are
interested in keeping political stability in the country and prevent
it from falling into chaos that may give an opening to Islamic
radicalism in the south.”

The US elite also fears that other despotic allies in the
region-—including the puppet regime of Hamid Karzai in
Afghanistan—could be threatened by popular uprisings. The scale and
anger of the protests by the country’s impoverished masses pose a
threat to all sections of the local elite and to the major powers.

Notwithstanding their conflicting geo-political and economic interests
in Kyrgyzstan, Moscow and Beijing, like Washington, view any sign of
popular revolt with fear and hostility. The Stalinist regime in China,
which shares a border with Kyrgyzstan, recently violently suppressed
expressions of opposition in its western province of Xianjing, while
the Russian elite is fighting a low-level but brutal war against a
growing insurgency in its Muslim-majority North Caucasus region.

In a move that indicates its concerns about a further deterioration of
the security situation in the country, Moscow has recognized
Otunbayeva as the head of a “government of national confidence.”
Moscow is expected to pressure Bakiyev into entering negotiations
leading to his resignation.

“The worst [outcome] for the US, Russia and China is instability and
clan warfare,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the magazine Russia in
Global Affairs. “If Bakiyev tries to get support in the south, that’s
the path to civil war.”

Seeking to shore up its position, Russia on Thursday sent an
additional 150 paratroopers to its air base in Kyrgyzstan. Russian
state television reported that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told
Otunbayeva yesterday that the Kremlin was ready to provide Kyrgyzstan
with “humanitarian aid.”

The Russian elite wants to limit the role of US imperialism in Central
Asia, a region traditionally within Moscow’s sphere. However, the
primary aim of Moscow, as well as its rivals in Washington and
Beijing, is to ensure that the mass movement of workers and poor in
Kyrgyzstan against the Bakiyev regime is brought rapidly under control.

The major powers will all seek to impose their will on whatever new
government emerges, at the expense of their international rivals and
the Kyrgyz masses.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/kygr-a09.shtml

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