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The Osh Team and the Bishkek Team
// The Dirty Side of the Tulip Revolution
A year and a half ago, on March 24, 2005, I was on Bishkek's Ala-Too Square. The same square where the Kyrgyz opposition had gathered the night before. For the first half of March 24, they were there again. They gave speeches and demanded the resignation of Askar Akayev.
It wasn't riot police, but rather military units in the employ of one of the criminal bosses (now dead) sympathetic to Askar Akayev who tried to disband the meeting. The frenzied horde almost succeeded in disbanding the ten-thousand-strong crowd. But then military units under the control of a different criminal boss (also now dead), this one sympathetic to the opposition, appeared. These fellows, backed up by the crowd, proved braver. They first ran off their opponents, then the riot police, and then they turned to storm the presidential palace. The opposition protestors stayed on Ala-Too Square, appealing to the people through a nonfunctioning microphone and trying to convince them not to storm the palace. Meanwhile, the two teams of muscleheads who had just been facing off against each other had joined forces and were ransacking the presidential palace.
I went into the palace right behind them. It soon became clear that the difference between these "thugs" (as Askar Akayev called them later) did not lie in who was for the opposition and who was for the government. The difference was between a team made up of guys from Bishkek and a team from Osh. The Bishkekers, i.e., the northerners, should have been protecting the president. The Osh fellows, the southerners, should have been the ones storming the palace. But after the raid, they together broke open the presidential refrigerator and called to me, "take a look, dude, there's champagne in there!"
The "Tulip Revolution" wasn't made by the opposition. Its leaders – Kurmanbek Bakiyev, Almaz Atambayev, Roza Otunbayeva, Azimbek Beknazorov – entered the White House when the curtains had already been torn down, the furniture smashed, and the first floor flooded with a fire hose. The leaders of the revolution wandered through the building, lost and dispirited. They couldn't understand what was going on. And they still didn't know that power had fallen upon them like a stone from the sky.
March 24 was not a revolution per se. It was a strange dismantling, as a result of which the government was swapped. But the subsequent 18 months have run time backwards: now it is as though March 24 never happened. Almaz Atambayev, Roza Otunbayeva, and Azimbek Beknazarov have quit their ministry posts and are standing on the square again. The president's family (not Akayev anymore, but Bakiyev) is being accused of corruption. The head of the government himself, having made a speech before parliament, is running out the back door. The only difference is that on March 24, 2005 the Osh fellows were for the opposition. Now it's the other way around.
The opposition, of course, is making plans – last time they gathered to turn Ala-Too into Maidan [the square in Kiev where protestors gathered during Ukraine's Orange Revolution] and to stand there as long as Askar Akayev didn't leave. But that time the riled-up ruffians spoiled the pretty celebration of street democracy. I am certain that they are right this minute sitting in buses in one of the neighboring streets. And the question is only this: with what goal will they be let loose? In order to throw stones at the riot police, or to trash a supermarket and give the authorities a reason to disperse the demonstration?
Mikhail Zygar
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 03, 2006
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