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KYRGYZSTAN’S CHARLES DEGAULLE?
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.
