Kyrgyzstan edging toward more
turmoil By M K Bhadrakumar
Kyrgyzstan's location between the
sensitive Ferghana Valley and China's Xinjiang
region; the presence of Islamic militants and
Uighur separatists; its use as a transit route for
drug traffickers from Afghanistan; its being a
cauldron of ethnicity and sub-nationalism; as a
country flanking Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan: all
this makes Kyrgyzstan a pivotal state in Central
Asia.
In addition, it is a neighbor to
Tajikistan, which is still recovering from the
wounds of a bloody civil war. It hosts the the
sole remaining US military base in Central Asia at
Manas, and it is an
operational area for the
Collective Security Treaty Organization
(CSTO) and a "founder-member"
of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
A coalition of political forces opposed to
the leadership of President Kurmanbek Bakiev and
Prime Minister Felix Kulov has been in the making
ever since last July's presidential election. An
anti-Bakiev coalition, called the People's
Coalition of Democratic Forces, has coalesced
around pro-American political parties, "civil
groups" and "non-governmental organizations".
It has called for mass protest rallies all
over Kyrgyzstan this Saturday. The agitators have
openly invoked the spirit of "color revolutions"
of Ukraine and Georgia and the country's own
"Tulip Revolution" in March of last year. Even so,
Kyrgyzstan is beset with problems. Not
surprisingly, criminal elements gained ascendancy
when state institutions crumbled in the anarchy
that followed.
Despite Russian and Chinese
help, the Kyrgyz economy is nowhere near recovery.
Foreign debt accounts for 80% of the country's
gross domestic product (GDP), this despite Moscow
writing off half of the debts Kyrgyzstan owed to
Russia. The extremely low level of demand in the
domestic market makes revival of business very
hard to achieve in the short term. The remittances
from more than 300,000 Kyrgyz migrant workers in
Russia, exceeding US$200 million annually,
correspond to the size of the Kyrgyz government
budget.
Kyrgyzstan's internal sources for
capital are too meager to generate meaningful
investment, so it depends on neighbors. Russia
drew up a plan of economic recovery for
Kyrgyzstan, which was discussed during the visit
of Bakiev to Moscow last September.
Russia
agreed to invest more than $1 billion in
Kyrgyzstan by undertaking to build two major
hydroelectric projects and invest in industries,
such as aluminum and cement, that could use the
power generated in these projects. China hopes to
purchase Kyrgyzstan's surplus electricity and has
also proposed infrastructure projects that would
generate economic activity.
The
Russian-Kyrgyz economic commission that met in
Bishkek last Thursday discussed Russian
participation in several projects, including: a)
construction of a $100 million airport terminal;
b) a $300 million project for tourism development;
c) revival of the famous Kara-Baltinsky Mining
Combine, a Soviet-era uranium-processing facility
with a capacity of 2,000 tons annually.
Russian-Kyrgyz trade turnover (which
accounts for almost 30% of Kyrgyzstan's trade) is
showing a 40% annual growth rate currently and may
exceed $1 billion.
The United States,
however, is not eager to endorse Bakiev's
policies. Speaking in Bishkek on April 11, Richard
Boucher, US assistant secretary of state for South
and Central Asian affairs, said: "There are a lot
of very positive things here; there is a free
press, a strong civil society, a definite
direction to Kyrgyzstan's democracy. But there is
a lot of work still to be done, not only on roads
and power lines, but also on laws and reforms.
They can both benefit the economy and also improve
the health of your society."
Six days
later, on April 17, in an extraordinary outburst
for a diplomat, US Ambassador Marie Jovanovich
condemned the Bakiev government: "Journalists are
scared. Members of parliament are openly stating
that they are scared. Threats against the Central
Election Commission are worrisome. Even the police
are frightened. Investors and donors are raising
objections about the direction in which Kyrgyzstan
is moving ... The judiciary must be free from
corruption. We keep saying that the state must
take decisive measures against organized crime."
What happened? To be sure, there
are any number of things going wrong in
Kyrgyzstan. But even by US accounts, Bakiev
obtained a popular mandate. His term in office
began only in August. The problems that Jovanovich
harped on are hardly Bakiev's creation. They are
the problems of any impoverished, exhausted
country that had a high level of social formation
but found itself suddenly at a crossroads, groping
in the dark for a way forward. (Kyrgyzstan isn't
alone in these problems; Mikhail Saakashvili's
Georgia fares no better in comparison.)
Once it became evident that the
Bakiev-Kulov team was not at Washington's beck and
call, the US turned on Bakiev and began to try to
destabilize his government.
Washington's
antagonism took many forms - creating a rift
between Bakiev and Kulov; instigating members of
parliament (elected during the regime of former
president Askar Akayev) to challenge Bakiev's
authority; spreading insinuations that Bakiev was
conniving with the mafia; inciting clan rivalries;
and funding "pro-American non-governmental
organizations that combine a democratic agenda
with moral support for the US military presence in
Kyrgyzstan" - to quote a US commentator recently.
All this took place while Washington got
away with a token payment of $2 million annually
to use the Manas air base on the specious excuse
that the base was integral to the "war on terror"
in Afghanistan, and that the war was for the
collective good of all Central Asians.
Bakiev insists that an enhanced rent of
$200 million for the Manas base would be fair, and
he has now gone on record saying that unless
Washington agrees to enhanced rent by June 1, he
will evict US forces from Kyrgyz soil.
Washington is furious. Two hundred million
dollars is a lot of money. Besides, June 1 is just
a fortnight ahead of the SCO summit meeting in
Beijing. (At its summit meeting in Almaty last
June, the SCO called for a timeline for removing
the US military presence in Central Asia.)
The SCO is, generally speaking, bad news
for Washington - now more than ever. The
organization may induct new members (specifically,
Iran) and may accord observer status to Belarus -
a decision that brings the SCO to the very
frontiers of the European Union and North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO).
Meanwhile, for
the first time, SCO member countries' defense
ministers were to meet in Beijing this Wednesday.
Russia's permanent envoy to the SCO, Grigory
Logvinov, said in the Chinese capital on April 18:
"The SCO has no intentions of transforming into a
military bloc. However, as threats of terrorism,
extremism and separatism have increased,
substantial involvement of armed forces is
necessary for combating them effectively."
Logvinov meaningfully added, "We are
really contributing to the formation of a
peaceful, open, developing and harmonious Eurasian
continent."
He spoke on the eve of the
Russia-Belarus joint collegium at Minsk last
Friday held at the level of defense ministers to
finalize plans for large-scale military exercises
in June by the CSTO "in the Eastern European
direction" (to quote Russian Defense Minister
Sergei Ivanov).
Units of Russia's crack
land forces guarding the Moscow Military District,
Tu-160 strategic bombers, Su-27 fighters and AWACS
(Airborne Warning and Control System) aircraft
will apparently take part in the exercises.
Washington has evidently concluded that
the time has come to draw a battle line in the
post-Soviet space - and confront Russian President
Vladimir Putin's policies since 2000 in garnering
all available centripetal factors serving the
integration of countries in the Commonwealth of
Independent States. During the 2000-04 period,
mutual trade among the CIS countries increased
more than twofold and crossed the $100 billion
level.
Russia's cooperation with its CIS
partners involves: a) formation of joint-stock
companies out of existing industrial facilities
and infrastructure; b) direct investment of
enterprises; c) purchase of property in the CIS
countries; d) transfer of production to the CIS
countries; e) purchase of share capital of
indebted enterprises in the CIS countries; and f)
vertically integrated transnational companies and
bank subsidiaries.
The Eurasian Economic
Community (comprising Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) has
harmonized about 90% of its import-export duties
and is forming a customs union. It aims at forming
energy, agriculture and currency markets. A
free-trade zone is virtually in existence already.
Russia's parallel efforts in streamlining
the CSTO have also gathered momentum since the
unprecedented meeting of the CSTO Council of
Foreign Ministers and Defense Ministers in Moscow
last November. Bakiev's "strategic defiance" of
the US thus comes as the proverbial last straw
that broke the camel's back. Washington proposes
to force the issues of post-Soviet space.
If Bakiev's authority crumbles in Bishkek,
Kyrgyzstan will fall into the downward-spiraling
vortex of political uncertainties, and all sorts
of tantalizing possibilities may arise, including
installation of a pro-American successor regime.
In such an eventuality, the forthcoming
SCO summit would have to holster its guns. The
CSTO too would look foolish. Moscow would look
indecisive. On the other hand, if Bakiev were to
prove decisive, the Kremlin would be seen as
backing yet another "authoritarian" ruler.
The United States has just notified Russia
that the agenda in the July Group of Eight summit
in St Petersburg ought to include "issues
pertaining to conflicts very close to Russia's
borders", as US Under Secretary of State Nicholas
Burns put it in Moscow on April 19.
But
Washington must factor in yet another possible
outcome of upheaval in Kyrgyzstan. In a statement
at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
meeting on February 2, the director of national
intelligence, John Negroponte, said: "In the
worst, if not implausible, case, central authority
in one or more of these states could evaporate as
rival clans or regions vie for power - opening the
door to an expansion of terrorist and criminal
activity on the model of failed states like
Somalia and, when it was under Taliban rule,
Afghanistan ..."
With the White House in
such visible disarray, it is unclear whether
Negroponte is in the loop as regards the United
States' Kyrgyzstan policy.
M K
Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the
Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years,
with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan
(1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).
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