Lincoln Mitchell

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Tagged with: Kyrgyzstan

Our Dangerous Mistake in Ukraine →

The challenge for the new Ukrainian leadership is not to strike a decisive victory for the West and democracy and somehow defeatRussia, but rather to build a new consensus in the country that doesn’t treat half the population as absolute winners and the other half as absolute losers. Ukraine has to move beyond the cycles of alternating victories for forces from western and eastern Ukraine, ephemeral wins that have stymied the political development of the nation in the past decade.

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Democracy and Military Bases in Kyrgyzstan

The election of Almaz Atanbaev as president of Kyrgyzstan in what has been recognized by western observer groups and governments as a relatively free election has been generally viewed as a sign that democracy may have a future in Kyrygzstan. Atanbaev’s election also provides another example of how the spread of democracy and the short term goals of the U.S. are often in conflict.

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Sometimes an Election is Just an Election

The recent election in Kyrgyzstan presents somewhat of a Rorschach test to observers of political development in Central Asia and democracy generally. The election of Almaz Atanbaev as Kyrgyzstan’s president is another chapter in the country’s political evolution and, not insignificantly, the first peaceful of transfer of power since Kyrgyzstan was part of the Soviet Union. This election was probably the best in recent Kyrgyz history and perhaps the best ever in post-Soviet Central Asia. For these reasons, it is possible to view democracy as moving forward in Kyrgyzstan, which may perhaps have an effect on the region more broadly.

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The Arab Spring and the Future of Democracy Assistance

With regards to North Africa, western democracy assistance proved to be a minor player in the recent breakthroughs. Although democracy assistance organizations were active in Egypt and elsewhere in the months and years leading up to the Arab Spring, support for these organizations was outweighed by such a substantial degree by western support for the authoritarian regimes, that the west, and the U.S. in particular, has been broadly viewed in the region, probably accurately, as being responsible for keeping the old regime in place for so long rather than for helping accelerate its downfall.

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Lessons for Authoritarians from the Arab Spring

It is still too early to know whether or not the extraordinary events earlier this year in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere in North Africa will lead to meaningful and enduring advances for democracy, but the resignations of Hosni Mubarak and Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and the threats to the leadership other autocrats in the region have not been lost on authoritarian and semi-authoritarian leaders seeking to remain in power in other parts of the world.

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Obama's Baffling Response to Egypt

The Obama administration is behind the curve and sounds strangely out of it with regards to the developing situation in Egypt. Although this is not altogether surprising, it is still disappointing. The U.S. policy towards Egypt, as well as other countries in that region — essentially providing financial and other support to non-democratic leaders in exchange for some stability and cooperation on some security related interests — was always a short term strategy which could never last for very long. In fairness to the administration, this policy has been a bipartisan problem which has gone on for decades, but, it has exploded now during the Obama administration’s watch.

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North Africa Through the Lens of the Color Revolutions

While civil society advocates all over the world should be happy to see Ben Ali and Mubarak depart from power, celebrating recent events in North Africa as a democratic breakthrough is premature. There is still a lot of hard work to be done. For the United States, viewed as the deus ex machina in the Color Revolutions and as the dictators’ patron in North Africa, the challenge will be to find a way to become part of this process, and to become relevant to political development in post-Mubarak Egypt and post-Ben Ali Tunisia.

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Russian Spheres of Interest and the Question of Kyrgyzstan

Georgia, naturally, sharply disagreed with this view on the very reasonable grounds that as an independent country, they had the right to chart their own foreign policy and that they wanted to become closer to the U.S. and Europe. For Georgia accepting Russia’s sphere of privileged interest would have meant giving Moscow veto power over Georgian foreign policy. The notion of spheres of privileged interests for Russia was also clearly rejected by western powers who shared Georgia’s view, not only with regards to Georgia, but with regards to all countries. Critics of U.S. foreign policy have, not without reason, pointed out that the U.S. rejection of the spheres of privileged interests does not stop the U.S. from believing it has its own spheres of privileged interests, but that has not prevented the U.S. from strongly disagreeing with Russia on this.

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The Belarus Dilemma

The cooling of relations between Belarus and Russia is good news for the west, but it has not changed the nature of the authoritarian regime in Belarus. This raises something of a dilemma for the US and Europe who are now caught between wanting to continue to encourage the nascent rift between Belarus and Russia while also encouraging political liberalization in the former country. Of course, pushing too hard for this liberalization, which the Lukashenka regime has consistently resisted, will very possibly also push Belarus back to Russia, while backing away from supporting and calling for freedom in Belarus will encourage the dictators in Minsk to simply continue their domestic policies.

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Kyrgyzstan and the Cost of Not Supporting Democracy

The decision by the U.S. to effectively end meaningful efforts to support Kyrgyz democracy sometime in 2006-2007, is coming back to haunt the U.S. today. Through its Kyrgyzstan policy, the U.S. put itself in the awkward and predictably unsustainable position of supporting an authoritarian regime in one country as part of an effort to cultivate democracy in Afghanistan, which is only a few hundred miles from Afghanistan.

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A Second Chance in Kyrgyzstan

Regardless of how events play out in Kyrgyzstan, it is now clear that US policy there in recent years has been misguided. The U.S. allowed itself to be manipulated into supporting a government that was not only corrupt and undemocratic but also weak and incompetent because of the strong need to have access to the Manas Air Force Base which is only a few miles from Bishkek. It is worth noting that the U.S. had to provide Bakiev thugocracy a contract worth roughly $180 million, in the form of loans, grants and contracts, all of which was looted by the ruling clique, in exchange for access to the base.

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Is the Orange Revolution Over or Did It Never Happen

In other words, maybe the Orange Revolution never really happened at all. Obviously, the events on Kiev’s Maidan in late 2004 happened, leading to Yuschenko’s becoming president, but it is possible that in the excitement of the moment, too much was read into these events. The victory in December of 2004 by a former prime minister under Leonid Kuchma over Kuchma’s sitting prime minister may simply not have been the pivotal and revolutionary moment which it looked like at the time. Rather, it may have been another stage in Ukraine’s continuous path from Soviet republic to something else.

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Ukraine's Election and the Value of a Divided Electorate

Speculation about who will win the election, and how that person will govern, can overshadow the democratic advances Ukraine has made since the Orange Revolution of 2004, particularly when contrasted with Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, the other two post-Soviet countries to have Color Revolutions in the last decade. All three Color Revolutions were, at the time they occurred, hailed as democratic advances, but Ukraine is the only one of the three countries that can accurately be said to have experienced greater democratization since those dramatic events. According to Freedom House, for example, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan have the same level of democracy as they did before the Rose and Tulip Revolutions, while Ukraine has become more democratic that it was before the Orange Revolution.

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Afghanistan's Presidential Election: Why It's a Problem that Karzai is a Sure bet to Win

The election in Afghanistan on Thursday will be watched closely around the world. It will be a critical moment for Afghanistan’s future as well as for American efforts in that country. The election will be a test for the nascent Afghan state, the ability of American and other forces to maintain peace in the country, and for Afghan unity. It is also an election, at least at the presidential level, where the outcome is a foregone conclusion. It is almost certain that Afghan president Hamid Karzai will be reelected.

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Kyrgyzstan: How America Gained a Base and Lost a Country

The democratic hopes–as well as the more widespread, but less focused, hopes that Akaev’s resignation would lead to a better life for the Kyrgyz people–had melted away almost entirely. Instead, government, political, and civic leaders whom I spoke to, many of whom I had last seen four years earlier when a sense of real change was possible, talked sadly of lost opportunities, the rise of a more repressive regime, and the violent nature of Kyrgyz politics. Few had much hope for the future. The presidential election, which was only a few weeks away at that time, was broadly understood as a foregone conclusion. Most people assumed that the intimidation and fraud which had already begun would only get stronger as the voting got closer. They were right–the election saw Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev reelected with about 88% of the vote in a deeply flawed election that was neither free nor fair.

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Kyrgzstan: How Trading Democracy for Stability Actually Doesn't Work

Stability is the last refuge of many non-democratic leaders, but there’s little evidence that these leaders can ensure stability in their own countries or internationally. As Rice pointed out, supporting stability over democracy in the Middle East has often led to greater instability. The Shah was supposed to bring stability to Iran and to the region at large, but many of the region’s current problems are actually linked to that regime and to U.S support. Throughout the Arab world, authoritarian regimes have also shown that they are unable to deliver stability. This isn’t only true in the Muslim world. Does anybody think that the strongman regime of Vladimir Putin has brought stability to the former Soviet Union? Stability in Russia itself is far from guaranteed, particularly given recent events in the North Caucasus.

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