POLITICS

Askar JAKISHEV, Zaynidin KURMANOV

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Askar Jakishev, Ph.D. (Hist.), associate professor at the American University in Central Asia (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan)

Zavnidin Kurmanov, D.Sc. (Hist.), professor, independent researcher (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan)

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The final split in the camp of those who won the “revolution” was a major political event in 2006. For the first time in the history of its independence, the country acquired an ideological opposition to the president in the form of the For Reforms movement. It detached itself from the People’s Coalition of Democratic Forces (which included twenty parties and other structures, as well as democratic NGOs). A nationwide democratic opposition was an absolutely new political phenomenon in a country that had so far known only an opposition based on clans and regional groups.

The “winner takes all” was the outcome of the March crisis: despite the Bakiev-Kulov tandem, southerners filled all the ministerial posts in the first post-revolutionary Cabinet. The victors were obviously unwilling to share power to save the regional-clan balance. The second president of the Kyrgyz Republic, Kurmanbek Bakiev, was accused of deliberately postponing the already promised constitutional reform expected to destroy the authoritarian system and its legal foundations. This was how the split was explained to the nation. The For Reforms movement organized a series of mass acts of defiance to insist on constitutional reform, which brought thousands into the streets. On three occasions the………….

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