At Large

Kyrgyzstan: Not Washington’s Crisis


By 6.17.10

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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:




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.



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."


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."



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."


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. 


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. 


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."




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.



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