Book 1.indb - The Jamestown Foundation

The Tulip Revolution: Kyrgyzstan One Year After
diate talks between the government and opposition. Prime Minister Nikolai Tanayev
is currently visiting Osh, but it is yet unclear with whom he is planning to meet.
At the first session of the new parliament, 10 deputies out of the total 71
refused to appear in a showing of solidarity with the opposition and protesters.
According to the Chair of the Central Election Commission, Suleiman Imanbayev,
the new parliament is comprised of 19 members of the pro-governmental Alga
Kyrgyzstan party and five from Adilet. 17 This means at least one-third of the parlia-
ment belongs to the pro-presidential coalition. Akayev
recently appointed a new
interior minister, three deputy interior ministers, and a new attorney general. 18
In the Russian Duma, Dmitry Rogozin of Rodina and deputy speaker
Vladimir Zhirinovsky made a proposal to send peacekeeping troops to Kyrgyzstan
in order to prevent the escalation of violence in its southern cities. Existing agreements
within the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Russian air base
near Bishkek facilitate fast, legitimate troop movements in times of emergency. The
mood in the Duma was echoed in the Russian mass media. Komsomolskaya Pravda,
for example, published an article entitled, “Are We Loosing Kyrgyzstan?” Unlike in
Georgia and Ukraine
, the Kyrgyz public shares generally positive feelings toward
Russian influence in their country’s political, economic and cultural spheres. The
Russian language is widely used and, in some cases, more popular than Kyrgyz.
So far, Kazakhstan, Japan, Russia and the United States
have all called for
a peaceful resolution of the crisis and urged against resorting to military force.
Uzbekistan tightened control at the Kyrgyz border, citing the need to prevent the
possible spillover of destabilizing elements. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili
and the Ukrainian ambassador in Bishkek both expressed support for Akayev’s regime
and spoke of their hope for an “evolutionary” resolution of the situation.
U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns, in a meeting
with Kyrgyz Presidential Adviser Alibek Jekshenkulov, stated that the U.S. govern-
ment encourages immediate dialogue with the opposition. 19 Some Kyrgyz ex-
perts believe that Jekshenkulov may well be Akayev
’s chosen political successor.
On March 23, the French newspaper Liberation harshly criticized the Kyrgyz
government’s use of force in the southern cities, calling it an “extremely unpopular
regime” with a highly mobilized opposition in a small, poor country. According to
Oliver Roy, a French expert in Central Asian affairs interviewed by Liberation, “The
Kyrgyz political regime is not capable of reform,” to which a Russian columnist
from Vremya novosti, Arkady Dubnov, suggested that the post-election tensions in
Kyrgyzstan are “the result of the Kyrgyz government’s low political professionalism.” 20
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