UN demands a referendum in Kyrgyzstan

The violence in Kyrgyzstan has forced large numbers of refugees into neighboring Uzbekstan. On Tuesday, the United Nations demanded, Kyrgyzstan guarantee a key constitutional referendum, later this month, in order to ease the turmoil. Meanwhile, the son of former Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was arrested in Britain on tax evasion.

Clashes continued in and around Osh on Tuesday, in the southern part of the country.

Uzbeks have mostly backed the interim government, which took over when former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was ousted in an April uprising, while many Kyrgyz in the south supported him.

Unrest has left the country's second largest city, Osh, in ruins and sent a stampede of Uzbek families fleeing towards the border to take refuge in Uzbekistan.

The United Nations urged the country not to allow deadly unrest to derail a key constitutional referendum and parliamentary elections.

Miroslav Jenca, UN representative, said, "The UN is working with the Central Elections Committee, showing support for the preparations for the referendum and election. It is not easy now to deliver aid because of concerns over safety. We are working on this important factor with the government."

Yet the scale of the damage in the south is so great it's hard to see how a legitimate vote could be held in less than two weeks.

Janibek Karibjanov, OSCE Special Envoy to Kyrgyzstan, said, "There has been great bloodshed, a lot of victims and this is obviously a tragedy. The task ahead of us is to first stop the bloodshed and violence."

Meanwhile, the interim government announced former president Kurmanbek Bakiyev's youngest son, Maxim was arrested in Britain. Local residents reacted positively to the news.

British prosecutors alleged that Maxim Bakiyev's companies had avoided almost 80 million US dollars in taxes on aviation fuel sold to suppliers of the US air base near Bishkek.

Source : english.cntv.cn

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New Kyrgyz Leaders Say US Can Use Air Base

by Mohammed A. Salih, April 09, 2010

Kyrgyzstan’s new leaders sought to reassure Washington Thursday that it can continue to use the strategic Manas airbase near the capital Bishkek as a supply link for U.S. operations in Afghanistan.

Roza Otunbayeva, the head of the interim government, told reporters in Bishkek that as far as the base’s fate was concerned, "the status quo would remain."

Otunbayeva’s remarks came amid growing uncertainty over whether the new Kyrgyz authorities would allow the U.S. to use the base.

However, the Kyrgyz leader also said new issues needed to be considered, without elaborating further. That might suggest the new government will seek a renegotiation and possibly increase the annual rent of around 60 million dollars that the U.S. pays to use the airbase.

The remarks by Otunbayeva, a former foreign minister, came after some opposition leaders had called Wednesday for the closure of the base.

U.S. officials say that despite the political turbulence in Kyrgyzstan, the Manas airbase is still operating.

"Currently there are limited operations at Manas airfield," Reuters news agency quoted Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman as saying. "Our support to Afghanistan continues and has not been seriously affected. And we are hopeful that we will be able to resume full operations soon."

On Wednesday, anti-government protestors overthrew the government of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in a brief but violent uprising. Otunbayeva has said that her government is now in charge and has appointed new ministers.

Thousands of people took to the streets in major cities across the country on Tuesday and Wednesday protesting against corruption and increasing utility costs. The protests turned violent, especially in Bishkek on Wednesday, where nearly 40 people were killed and 400 others injured, according to ministry of health sources. However, opposition leaders told the Associated Press that 100 people had been killed.

The exact whereabouts of President Bakiyev is unknown, but according to the BBC Russian service, he is somewhere in his home province of Jalal Abad in the southern part of the country. Bakiyev told BBC Russian that he refuses to "admit defeat in any way" but has acknowledged that he holds no "real levers of power."

The interim leader, Otunbayeva, is a seasoned politician who was a foreign minister before the country’s Tulip Revolution five years ago. She also served in various positions during the Soviet era, including ambassador to Malaysia.

Political turmoil is nothing new to Kyrgyzstan. In 2005, Kyrgyz protestors toppled the government of Askar Akayev following disputed parliamentary elections. Deep public dissatisfaction over corruption and Akayev’s perceived authoritarianism played a major role in his ouster during the Tulip Revolution. He had ruled the country since its independence in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1990.

The close ties between the new Kyrgyz leaders and Russia could be worrying for the U.S. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was the first world leader to recognize the legitimacy of the new government in Bishkek.

The U.S. has so far refrained from any comments on the legitimacy of the new opposition-led government, although the U.S. embassy in Bishkek said on Wednesday it was "deeply concerned" about "civil disturbances" in the country.

There had been concerns in Washington that the opposition takeover would plunge the fate of Manas base into uncertainty.

Last year, the country’s parliament, in which the opposition parties had a powerful presence, voted to close down the base due to a failure of U.S. and Kyrgyz governments to agree on a higher rent for the facility.

But after President Barack Obama’s personal intervention, Washington agreed to triple the rent from less than 20 million dollars per year to 60 million dollars. Kyrgyzstan renewed the contract but renamed the base a "transit center" and imposed a condition on the U.S. to use the Manas base for the transit of "non-lethal" goods to Afghanistan.

According to some reports, Bishkek’s decision to close the base had been motivated by the promise of a lucrative aid package of 2.15 billion dollars from Russia. Moscow has been increasingly concerned about U.S. military’s prolonged stay on its neighbor’s soil. Kyrgyzstan is also home to a Russian base.

Some experts believe the new government cannot afford to shut down the base, especially since it needs international recognition and backing.

"If the opposition talks about closing Manas, they would burn their bridges with the West before building them," Oksana Antonenko, a Russia expert at the London-based Institute of International Strategic Studies, told the Christian Science Monitor. "The people who are putting this unity government together, I don’t think they are corrupt and looking to enrich themselves."

President Bakiyev, who was initially known as a pro-U.S. figure, started to play Moscow and Washington against each other. Although he came to power following the Tulip Revolution with a promise of democratic and transparent governance, he soon turned Kyrgyzstan into a one-party state.

The country was run by a small clique of Bakiyev and his relatives, sparking widespread frustration among Kyrgyz. In recent months, the government had increased its crackdown on the opposition and its media.

"Many political experts in Bishkek believe Moscow is punishing Bakiyev for his administration’s failure to evict American forces from the Manas air base," David Trilling and Chinghiz Umetov wrote Tuesday in the New York-based EurasiaNet, a news and analysis website on Eurasian nations.

Russia had reportedly caused a spike in gasoline and fuel prices in Kyrgyzstan by imposing new customs duties on petroleum products exported to the small central Asian nation.

Kyrgyzstan, one of the poorest republics of the former Soviet Union, has been an economically impoverished nation since its independence in 1990s.

(Inter Press Service)

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Kyrgyzstan: Not Washington's Crisis

By Doug Bandow on 6.17.10 @ 6:09AM
The scenes are sadly predictable. Ethnic conflict. Murdered innocents. Distressed refugees.

We have seen them all many times before around the world. But despite heart-felt pleas for Washington to do something, the Obama administration should keep the troops at home. The U.S. cannot afford another lengthy deployment in another distant and unstable client state.

Kyrgyzstan is one of the Central Asian Soviet republics that won independence when the Soviet Union dissolved. Kyrgyzstan's president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was overthrown in a popular uprising in early April. Some 84 people died in the violence and Bakiyev first fled south, where he retained political support, before going into exile in Belarus.

Bakiyev was an opposition leader when he led a similar uprising against his authoritarian predecessor Askar Akayev, tagged the "tulip revolution." Unfortunately, the tulips soon wilted. A month before he was forced from office the State Department reported:

[R]estrictions on citizens' right to change their government; arbitrary killing, torture, and abuse by law enforcement officials; impunity; poor prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; lack of judicial independence; pressure on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and opposition leaders, including government harassment; pressure on independent media; government detention of assembly organizers; authorities' failure to protect refugees adequately; pervasive corruption.

Few in the West mourned Bakiyev's ouster, though both the Bush and Obama administrations had generally overlooked his flaws in return for access to Manas airbase. Some American defenders of the Afghanistan war spoke darkly of Russian involvement in his overthrow, but the Kyrgyz people had ample reason to dump him.

Since then hope built that the interim administration of Roza Otunbayeva would adopt liberal reforms. A new constitution was to be voted on later in June and a parliamentary election was supposed to take place under that constitution in October.

Now all bets are off. After the uprising there were a series of violent incidents across the country, many Kyrgyz versus Uzbek. Last week in Osh, Kyrgyzstan's second-largest city, the "violence escalated into more extensive fighting, burning, killing, and expulsions," according to journalist Vicken Cheterian.

Officially nearly 200 are dead and 1,600 injured, though unofficial estimates run higher. Uzbeks have been the principal victims, though Tartars and ethnic Russians also have been targeted. Some 80,000 or so people fled across the border into neighboring Uzbekistan before that government closed the border. Thousands more have been prevented from crossing.

The police have been unable to contain the violence; in fact, in some towns Uzbeks accused the security forces of joining in the killing. So the government has mobilized the army. Unfortunately, that force has received no training in dealing with civil strife and there is no guarantee that, if deployed, it would escape ethnic division as well. Mobilization, warned Paul Quinn-Judge of the International Crisis Group, "seems to be another indication that the interim government is running short on options."

The government in Bishkek appealed to the U.S. for military aid, including rubber bullets and by some accounts, denied by the American embassy in Bishkek, troops. Then the Kyrgyz authorities asked Russia for peacekeeping troops. Interim president Otunbayeva said: "we need the arrival of outside forces to calm the situation down." Ousted President Bakiyev seemed to agree, telling a press conference that international peacekeepers were necessary to "bring the situation back to normal."

Both Washington and Moscow said no. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called the atmosphere in Kyrgyzstan "intolerable" but referred the issue to members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, made up of seven former Soviet states. The initial CSTO answer was to offer "comprehensive assistance," including military equipment, but not troops. However, Russian Nikolai Patrushev said that the meeting "did not rule out the use of any means that the CSTO has at its potential, depending on how the situation evolves."

The drumbeat immediately started for intervention. For example, Human Rights Watch proposed a UN-sponsored force, which almost certainly would include U.S. troops.

James Collins and Matthew Rojansky of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace want a joint NATO, CSTO, and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) force: "NATO and the U.S. must immediately engage with regional partners to help restore security." Moreover, "By holding out a hand not only to the Kyrgyz authorities, but to national regional partners, including the CSTO, and the OSCE, the United States and NATO can demonstrate the sincerity of their interest in regional security."

So far the Obama administration has said little. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley endorsed humanitarian assistance and said that "we seek a coordinated international response to the ongoing violence there."

However, the administration hasn't closed the door to military intervention. An unnamed administration official was quoted as saying: "if we get to the moment that unavoidably there has to be troops, we will be doing it in a cooperative way, not a zero-sum way. We'd like the international community to be fully invested and supportive if military intervention happens."

The question, of course, is why anyone in Washington would want to make such an investment.

The violence has at least temporarily ebbed, and Bishkek has withdrawn its request for foreign troops. But no one knows if this is the end of or merely a pause in the violence. Osh is now divided ethnically, as well-armed groups have fortified their respective enclaves. All the causes of the violent spasm remain.

Observers fear that the violence could spread to both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Cheterian calls the stakes "very high, for the country and the region alike." Carnegie's Collins and Rojansky go so far as to claim that the recent events in Kyrgyzstan "pose a defining challenge for mutual security in the Eurasian region as a whole."

Yet the strife, though ugly, is little different from that which routinely breaks out in unstable, divided countries around the world. And there are many potential sparks for violence in the region: drug trafficking, gang disputes, the activity of Islamic militants, squabbles over land or water rights, resistance to other authoritarian regimes, and arbitrary boundaries dividing ethnic groups.

So far the fighting is contained in Kyrgyzstan. Uzbekistan has given no indication that it is inclined to intervene to aid Kyrgyzstan's Uzbeks, which could lead to efforts to create a "greater Uzbekistan." Chaos in Kyrgyzstan could aid Islamic extremists, but all of the region's governments have trained all of their many tools of repression on this movement.

The fighting would have to be truly exceptional to threaten the stability of nearby states. And even if their stability was at risk, that would be of only modest geopolitical interest to major nations, most notably China (which Kyrgyzstan borders), Russia, and the far more distant U.S.

Collins and Rojansky suggest that neither Russia nor the U.S. "can afford to allow the violence there to destroy the vulnerable Kyrgyz state or plunge the region into a wider ethnic war." Yet America's only interest, other than humanitarian, in this obviously vulnerable state is the use of Manas airbase for supplying Afghanistan.

In fact, Manas sits in the north, well away from the fighting. Moreover, Washington knows that the facility, in operation in 2002, is vulnerable to local and regional politics. Last year the Bakiyev government announced that it planned to close the facility after the Russians increased their aid; Bishkek reversed itself after the U.S. agreed to treble its rental payments. Although the interim government said it planned no changes, there are no guarantees for the future. Intervening to save the base would be penny-wise and pound-foolish, especially since the unexpected and unpredictable consequences of acting also could threaten access to Manas.

History and geography give Moscow a much greater interest in Kyrgyzstan. It was part of the Soviet Union, is located close to Russia today, and contains some 750,000 ethnic Russians. Yet despite fears that Moscow is intent on reasserting its authority over the former constituent parts of the Soviet Union, there appears to be no enthusiasm in Moscow for intervening. "This is the last thing that Russia wants to do, get involved in a civil war in a failed state," said Sergei Karaganov, head of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow. A long-term force commitment there also would drain funds from a military modernization program already clipped by lower energy prices.

Washington should stay out of Kyrgyzstan, whether or not Kyrgyzstan's government renews its request for foreign troops. If all that was needed was a temporary garrison to separate potential combatants, then other nations could provide the personnel. The U.S. military is very busy elsewhere.

Unfortunately, a passive occupation probably wouldn't be enough. It would be necessary to resolve numerous deep-seated divisions to prevent a recurrence of violence. And that's not something Washington likely could do. As Russian President Medvedev noted, "all the problems of Kyrgyzstan have internal roots."

Strife between Uzbek and Kyrgyz killed hundreds in 1990 and was only put down with Soviet troops. But abstract ethnic differences were not the only spark for violence. Both Kyrgyz and Uzbeks are largely Muslim and speak a mutually understood Turkic language. Alexander A. Cooley of Columbia dismisses the "narrative of long-simmering ethnic tension."

Kyrgyz tend to be nomads, many of whom lack property while Uzbeks were farmers who have moved into a wider variety of commercial activities. Kyrgyz resentment against the more economically successful Uzbeks is high.

These divisions have spilled over into the political sphere. Many Uzbeks complain of discrimination and are pushing for broader political and cultural rights. Some members of the interim government blame local Uzbek extremists, including leader Kadyrzhan Batyrov, for their inflammatory rhetoric.

Many Uzbeks helped oust Bakiyev, who had used Kyrgyz nationalism to build support. But Bakiyev retained particularly strong support in the south among ethnic Kyrgyz. The interim government accuses him of stoking the violence, which he denies, but there is evidence of his son's involvement, and Bishkek is seeking the latter's extradition from Great Britain.

In short, if Washington intervened, it would have to assume complex nation-building as well as peacekeeping duties. And there is nothing to suggest that its occupation would be short. More than a decade later the U.S. still has troops in Kosovo, which remains a failed state-wannabe. Iraq's future is very much in doubt and American forces remain on station. No one would point to the Karzai government in Afghanistan as a model for anything.

And some people would have the Obama administration now try to fix Kyrgyzstan?

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Kyrgyzstan Revolution Threatens Afghanistan War’s Premier Air Hub

Kyrgyzstan has entered a phase of uncertainty with a new opposition-led government in place following two days of street clashes between police and anti-government protestors. Some opposition leaders have called for the closure of a U.S. airbase in the country that is a supply link for its operations in Afghanistan.

A former Kyrgyz foreign minister, Roza Otunbayeva, told CNN on Wednesday that she is now in charge of an interim government following the apparent overthrow of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. The whereabouts of President Bakiyev is unknown but unverified reports have suggested he might be in the southern city of Osh, or in Manas airbase, the base used by the U.S. military.

Thousands of people took to the streets in major cities across the country over the last two days, protesting against corruption and increasing utility costs. The protests turned violent, especially in the capital Bishkek on Wednesday, where nearly 40 people were killed and 400 other injured, according to ministry of health sources. However, opposition leaders told the Associated Press that 100 people have been killed.

Anti-government demonstrators have reportedly seized the state security headquarters and television as well as other institutions, in what opposition leaders have called a new revolution.

The interim leader, Otunbayeva, is a seasoned politician who was a foreign minister before the country’s Tulip Revolution five years ago. She also served in various positions during the Soviet era, including ambassador to Malaysia.

Political turmoil is nothing new to Kyrgyzstan. In 2005, Kyrgyz protestors toppled the government of Askar Akayev following disputed parliamentary elections. Akayev’s ouster was due to deep public dissatisfaction with corruption and authoritarianism in his government. He had ruled the country since its independence after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1990.

The news of ongoing unrest in the central Asian republic has been received with concern by Washington. The U.S. embassy in Bishkek said it was "deeply concerned" about "civil disturbances" in the country, in a statement released on Wednesday.

Saying that the situation in Kyrgyzstan was "still very fluid", John Kerry, the chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, expressed "regret for the loss of life" in the country and called on all sides to be "calm and refrain from violence". He called upon Kyrgyz parties to address the "underlying political, economic and social issues" in a "transparent process that brings stability and fundamental rights to all."

The U.S. State Department said that transport operations at the Manas military installation outside Bishkek have been "functioning normally." The U.S. military has used the base over the past several years as a staging post for its operations in Afghanistan. Despite the call for the base’s closure by opposition leaders reportedly in charge now, it remains to be seen whether the new government will take practical steps toward that end.

There are worries in the U.S. that the new opposition-led government may increase the rent for Manas base by renegotiating the terms of its agreement with the U.S., according to Foreign Policy’s Cable blog. Such a renegotiation, Cable said, may offer Russia an opportunity to influence an agreement over the base.

Last year, the country’s parliament, in which opposition parties had a powerful presence, voted to close the base due to a failure of U.S. and Kyrgyz governments to agree on a higher rent for the facility. According to some reports, Bishkek’s decision to close the base had been motivated by a promise of a lucrative aid package from Russia.

Moscow has been increasingly concerned about the U.S. military’s prolonged stay on its neighbor’s soil.

But after President Barack Obama’s personal intervention, Washington agreed to triple the rent from less than 20 million dollars per year to 60 million. Kyrgyzstan renewed the contract but renamed the base a "transit center" and imposed a condition on the U.S. to use the Manas base for the transit of "non-lethal" goods to Afghanistan.

Some have speculated about a possible Russian role in the current situation in Kyrgyzstan. Russia had reportedly caused a spike in gasoline and fuel prices in Kyrgyzstan by imposing new customs duties on petroleum products exported to the small central Asian nation.

"Many political experts in Bishkek believe Moscow is punishing Bakiyev for his administration’s failure to evict American forces from the Manas air base," David Trilling and Chinghiz Umetov wrote Tuesday in the New York-based EurasiaNet, a news and analysis website on Eurasian nations.

President Bakiyev, who was initially known as a pro-U.S. figure, started to play Moscow and Washington against each other. Although he came to power following the Tulip Revolution with a promise of democratic and transparent governance, he soon started to turn Kyrgyzstan into a one-party state.

The country was run by a small clique of President Bakiyev and his relatives, sparking widespread frustration among Kyrgyz. In recent months, the government had increased its crackdown on the opposition and its media.

Kyrgyzstan, one of the poorest republics of the former Soviet Union, has been an economically impoverished nation since its independence in 1990s.

READ MORE - Kyrgyzstan Revolution Threatens Afghanistan War’s Premier Air Hub