Aftershocks of Ukraine and Georgia are stirring up rallies in Central Asia.
By Fred Weir, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Democracy rising in ex-Soviet states
February 10, 2005

MOSCOW – The peaceful street revolts that recently brought democratic
change to Georgia and Ukraine could spawn copy-cat upheavals against
authoritarian regimes across the former Soviet Union, experts say.

Waving orange scarves and banners – the colors of Ukraine’s revolution
– dozens of Uzbeks demonstrated in the capital Tashkent last week
over the demolition of their homes to make way for border fencing.

According to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, the protest
compelled the autocratic government of Islam Karimov, widely condemned
for human rights abuses, to pay compensation.

In Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, hundreds of pro-democracy activists
rallied on Saturday to demand that upcoming parliamentary elections
be free and fair.

>> From Kyrgyzstan on the Chinese border to Moldova, where Europe’s
only ruling Communist Party faces elections next month, opposition
parties are eagerly studying Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” and Ukraine’s
“Orange Revolution,” which led to the triumph of pro-democracy
forces. Opposition groups are even selecting symbols for their banners
when the moment arrives – tulips for the Kyrgyz opposition, grapes
for Moldova’s anticommunists.

“The recent events in Ukraine have made people everywhere understand
that taking to the streets gets the authorities’ attention,” says
Tatiana Poloskova, deputy director of the independent Institute of
Modern Diaspora, which studies Russian minorities in former Soviet
countries.

Georgian President Mikhael Saakashvili and newly inaugurated Ukrainian
President Viktor Yushchenko were clearly addressing their former
Soviet colleagues last month when they hailed their revolts as the
leading edge of “a new wave of liberation that will lead to the final
victory of freedom and democracy on the continent of Europe.”

The prospect has sent shudders through the Kremlin, still smarting from
the “loss” of pro-Moscow regimes in Georgia and Ukraine, and reeling
in the face of its own grass-roots revolt by pensioners protesting
cuts in social services. For Russia, where authoritarian methods have
been taking root under President Vladimir Putin (news – web sites),
the prospect of pro-democracy rebellions sweeping the former Soviet
Union seems to threaten the underpinnings of domestic stability. The
pro-Western bent of the new regimes in Ukraine and Georgia may also
threaten the economic ties Russia has built with post-Soviet regimes
from Armenia to Uzbekistan.

First in line could be Kyrgyzstan, where any official attempt
to rig parliamentary elections slated for Feb. 27 could trigger
Ukrainian popular action. Strongman Askar Akayev, who’s ruled the tiny
central Asian state for the past 15 years, has already faced street
demonstrations over a failed attempt to ban his chief opponent from
the parliamentary race. Mr. Akayev has pledged to step down in October,
and appears to be grooming his daughter, Bermet, to succeed him. After
a recent Moscow visit with Vladimir Putin, Akayev warned that if the
opposition takes to the streets, “it would lead to civil war.”

But some Russian experts see a “Tulip Revolution” in the near
future for Kyrgyzstan, which hosts both Russian and US military
bases. “Akayev is lost,” says Alexei Malashenko, an expert with the
Carnegie Center in Moscow. “The opposition is strong, well-organized,
and has international as well as domestic backing.”

The Kremlin may fear that political ferment in Kyrgyzstan could spread
to more important allies in central Asia. The long-time leader of
oil-rich Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has fixed elections
and changed the Constitution to extend his rule, last month dissolved
the leading opposition party after it sent a delegation to Ukraine
to study the Orange Revolution. He also moved to close down a local
institute funded by global financier George Soros, who has backed
pro-democracy movements in Ukraine and elsewhere.

In Uzbekistan, which also hosts a key US military base, President
Karimov, a former Soviet politburo member, has ruled with an iron fist
since the demise of the USSR. Karimov recently jeered publicly at those
“who are dying to see that the way the elites in Georgia and Ukraine
changed becomes a model to be emulated in other countries.” He warned
bluntly: “We have the necessary force for that.”

Some experts argue that, while velvet revolution may be possible in
semi-authoritarian Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, it is a very distant
prospect in Uzbekistan because democracy and civil society are barely
developed there. Last week’s protests in Tashkent, though based on
a narrow economic issue, hint that instability may lie just beneath
the regime’s tough and orderly surface.

Uzbekistan’s gas-rich neighbor, Turkmenistan, is run by a North
Korean-style dictatorship that permits no dissent of any kind. “In
absolutely authoritarian regimes like [Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan]
the threat of ‘Orange Revolution’ is just used by the leaders to
crack down harder,” says Masha Lipman, an expert with the Carnegie
Center in Moscow. “There is no chance for the opposition to actually
organize anything, much less a revolution.”

That paradox may help to explain why Georgians were able to rally
successfully against the lethargic regime of Eduard Shevardnadze, when
it attempted to rig the 2003 parliamentary polls, while protesters
in neighboring Azerbaijan were put down when the much more efficient
dictatorship of Gaidar Aliyev imposed the succession of his son,
Ilham, through fraudulent elections just a month earlier.

Ukrainians were able to successfully mobilize against vote-rigging late
last year in part because Ukraine had relatively free institutions,
including a parliament and Supreme Court that the president was not
able to control. In next-door Belarus, which US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice (news – web sites) has labeled “the last outpost
of tyranny in Europe,” dictator Alexander Lukashenko has crushed the
opposition and banished nongovernmental organizations, and looks set
to be handily reelected in showpiece elections later this year.

But an upsurge looks increasingly likely in ex-Soviet Moldova, where
Communist President Vladimir Voronin has lost Moscow support. He faces
a strong challenge in next month’s parliamentary elections from the
pro-Western Christian Democrats, who reportedly are sporting orange
scarves and flags in the capital.

“The Kremlin suddenly finds itself severely challenged to change its
strategies, both at home and in former Soviet countries,” says Sergei
Kazyonnov, an expert with the independent Institute for National
Security and Strategic Research in Moscow. “It can go on depending
on political manipulations and under-the-carpet deals with local
elites. But it is already becoming obvious that there are just too many
different realities here, and an unworkable multiplicity of carpets.”