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Askar Akayev, Kyrgyzstan’s former president, made a rare public appearance at the Carnegie Moscow Center on February 14, where he delivered a thirty minute speech and took an hour of questions from an assembled audience of about sixty journalists, scholars and policy analysts.
While Akayev has given occasional interviews since moving to Moscow, this was probably the first time he had consented to such an open format. No preconditions were given to Aleksei Malashenko CMC scholar in residence, the event organizer.
Akayev, accompanied by daughter Bermet, argued that despite claims to the contrary he had no interest in returning to power and that he was happy returning to teaching math and science at Moscow State University, and writing scholarly articles. But for someone who allegedly departed the political scene, he had some fairly cutting things to say about the current government.
Avoiding ever mentioning President Kurmanbek Bakiyev by name, Akayev depicted his own ouster as a blow to democracy in Kyrgyzstan, offering analogies to the French “revolutions.” It took a while for the audience to realize that Akayev was talking about France of the mid-twentieth century, not the late eighteenth century.
Akayev argued that it sometimes took a long time for a country to create a constitutional order that really worked for its polity, using the failures of the fourth republic, 1946-1958, and the unpredicted success of the fifth republic, now roughly a half century old, and showing no signs of faltering as evidence of the degree of experimentation that is sometimes necessary.
Akayev described his government as Kyrgyzstan’s first revolution, and the current government, which he described as much more chaotic and undemocratic than his own, as the second republic, predicting that Kyrgyzstan had no hope of stability until after 2010 when a third and hopefully more democratic and stable third republic would be formed.
While Akayev never said so specifically, it seemed clear that he believed Kyrgyzstan was better suited to strong presidential system rather than a parliamentary one. But the parliament needed to serve as a way of bolstering the development of a mature political party system, and he conceded in response to a questioner, that it had been a mistake not to use a party list system for choosing members of parliament, a long-standing demand of the opposition that Akayev had refused to agree to.
Some of the most interesting questions related to former Prime Minister Feliks Kulov, who had just announced his formal opposition to Bakiyev. Akayev believes that Kulov could have forced Bakiyev’s resignation had he resigned in protest during the November 2006 constitutional crisis, and that Kulov would then likely have replaced Bakiyev as head of state. Instead Kulov stayed on, and wound up losing parliament’s confidence. Akayev’s demeanor suggested sympathy for his former Vice President, a man who spent the last years of Akayev’s rule in jail.
Hearing Akayev speak and then having had the opportunity to talk with him privately, I find it hard to believe that Kyrgyzstan’s former president is interested in returning to power. Although the same was said of DeGaulle, who retreated to his farm in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, where he spent most of the 1950s “licking his wounds,” but then enthusiastically answered the “popular” call to return to power. While there may be some crisis severe enough to convince Akayev to return, unlike with DeGaulle, there may be no circumstances under which Kyrgyzstan’s political elite would be willing to accept him.
But spending time with Akayev was a reminder of just how great the cost the Kyrgyz are paying for the way Akayev was ousted, a situation which he in no small part contributed to himself, through his management or mismanagement of Kyrgyzstan’s political scene in his last few years, and because of how the 2005 parliamentary election campaign played out.
In my opinion, though, Kyrgyzstan would have been a lot better off if Akayev had been able to get to the end of his term in late 2005, when, hopefully, he would have left office as he had promised. Kyrgyzstan would likely have had the same president that they have today, as Kurmanbek Bakiyev was already a front runner. But had Bakiyev taken power through the constitutionally mandated process, the country would have had an easier political transition, and would have served as a much needed Central Asian example of an orderly transfer of power.
Martha Brill Olcott
Senior Associate
Comments
On March 15 at 18:35, Komron commented:
Very interesting articles and sources, good job. Very useful web-site, will definitely recommend it to all my friends from Central Asia.