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THE PROBLEMS OF FORMING A POLITICAL OPPOSITION IN KYRGYZSTANElvira MAMYTOVA
Elvira Mamytova, Ph.D. (Econ.), associate professor, director of the Eurasia Research Center, vice-president of the Kyrgyzstan Association of Social Science Researchers.
Party opposition is the main channel for expressing social discontent against the powers-that-be and the most efficient way to acquaint the official authorities and the broad public with a particular point of view. But when analyzing political opposition during social transformation, we would do well to depart from the classical definition prevalent in western political science, where the opposition is a permanent institution. It should be kept in mind that this definition was mainly formulated based on data from the industrial countries of North America and Western Europe of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Opposition in the case of states undergoing transition should be understood as antagonism between the strategic and tactical goals of different political parties, movements, and blocs and the strategic and tactical policy of the power institutions.
What is more, we believe that the classification of political opposition used in western political science is applicable only to developed democracies and a high standard of civilian society. Kyrgyzstan is only beginning to develop the infrastructure of a civilian society capable of providing conditions for the formation of concerned groups, associations, and parties which could represent the interests of this society in the power structures. We agree with those researchers who maintain that in all post-communist countries there is a yawning gap between the liberal market-cosmopolitan and the authoritarian state-nationalistic parties. Therefore, during the transition period from authoritarianism to democracy, the opposition as a democratic institution does not exist, and the schism runs along the coordinates of communism and nationalism.
As a result of the socioeconomic changes in the U.S.S.R. which occurred after the April 1985 C.P.S.U. Central Committee Plenary Meeting, Kyrgyzstan was able to restore a multi-party system, in which 30 political parties are now officially registered. But this opposition camp is extremely variegated and splintered according to regional, political, and tribal principles, which, frankly speaking, is characteristic of all political organizations at the early stages of democracy. In organizational terms, the political opposition, with the exception of political clans, has not get formed in Kyrgyzstan.
When analyzing the reasons for the appearance of the political opposition and the degree of its influence on society, it is important to take a look at the way in which a multi-party system develops. In so doing, in the newly independent states, it is customary to single out several stages, which qualitatively differ from each other. The first stage, the so-called “informal wave of theoretical discussion,” is characterized by the appearance of various sociopolitical organizations under the complete dominance of the C.P.S.U. In Kyrgyzstan, researchers include the discussion club Demos, organized in Bishkek in 1987 at the editorial board of the newspaper Komsomolets Kirgizii, the political club Sovremennik, the cinema club Poisk, and so on, among such independent organizations.
However, real participation of these organizations in public life was extremely restricted, and none of them attempted to oppose the powers-that-be. To be honest, they were formed artificially, on orders from above, and only, as Mikhail Gorbachev conceived, to create a “pocket opposition.” He needed this kind of opposition, first, to combat those members of the Soviet party apparatus, and managerial and power structures who opposed the ideas of perestroika, and second, to shake up that part of the population which had not become involved in the transformation process. It would have been possible to break the resistance of………………….
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