Book 1.indb - The Jamestown Foundation

The Tulip Revolution: Kyrgyzstan One Year After
no confidence in the president and the Central Election Commission.
Law-enforcement agencies forcefully suppressed civilian demonstrators during
the protests in Naryn. One woman was reported injured on March 10. The next
day, as a response to the government’s use of violence, protesters from Naryn began to
march toward Bishkek until militia detained their leader, Tursunbai Akun, on March
13. On March 3 a bomb detonated in the Bishkek apartment of opposition leader
Roza Otunbayeva, though no one was injured or killed. The government denied
any responsibility for the incident, claiming that opposition forces intentionally set
off the bomb as an attempt to attract the attention of the international community.
For the first time, the government simultaneously suppressed several
newspapers in Kyrgyzstan, allowing state-financed mass media dominated
election coverage. The only independent radio station broadcasting
throughout the country, Azattyk, was closed on February 24. Two opposition
news websites with servers located in Kyrgyzstan, Moya stolitsa novosti and
Res publica suffered from massive hacker attacks that temporarily blocked ac-
cess. According to the Open Net Initiative, a hacker group named “Shadow
Team” deluged pro-opposition websites located outside Kyrgyzstan with spam. 3
So far, the protests have not damaged Bishkek’s interests abroad. On March 11
the Paris Club of creditors decided to write off about $555 million of Kyrgyzstan’s external
debt. Another € 431 million will be restructured in line with the IMF’s poverty
reduction and economic development program. 4 Kyrgyz-Russian military relations also
received a boost, with the Russian Ministry of Defense announcing its intention to
increase funding of the Russian air defense base in Kant by one billion rubles in 2005.
Nonetheless, the parliamentary elections in Kyrgyzstan received
more international attention than did similar votes in neighboring
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The American ambassador in Bishkek, Steven
Young, publicly expressed concerns about numerous violations of the election
law in the first stage of elections and the two-week gap before the runoff.
The next parliament to be seated in Kyrgyzstan will consist of 75 seats and
be dominated by pro-governmental politicians, including two of the president’s children
and members of the pro-government Alga Kyrgyzstan party. It is too early to tell
if mass protests will continue in the country and if they will lead to any meaningful
changes before the presidential elections in October. The time between the two
rounds of voting showed the potential of the masses to challenge the government in
a peaceful way. But at the same time, the Kyrgyz government responded with a number
of undemocraticmeans to suppress the freedom of speech and prevent unwanted
demonstrations.
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