Just like the old days?

Kirgizstan

Jul 14th 2005 BISHKEK
From The Economist print edition

Now President Bakiev has to govern

ALMOST four months after Kirgizstan's “tulip revolution”, which led to the overthrow of the government of Askar Akaev, the interim leader, Kurmanbek Bakiev, won a landslide victory in the country's presidential elections on July 10th. Although he received what at first glance looks like a Soviet-style 89% of the votes in a field of six candidates, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe gave a positive assessment and declared that the vote had made “tangible progress” towards meeting OSCE and international standards for democratic elections. Mr Bakiev had teamed up with his most serious rival for the presidency, Felix Kulov, by promising him the position of prime minister, and thus secured victory.

But now that his position has been legitimised, the real problems begin. Analysts say that Mr Bakiev has only a few months, until winter, at most, to address enormous political and economic challenges, or the unrest may start again. After all, they note, it took only a few thousand people to storm the Kirgiz White House and chase out the previous leadership.

People's foremost concerns are poverty, high unemployment and corruption, which increased exponentially during the last years of Mr Akaev's 15-year rule and impeded the development of even the smallest businesses. At least 500,000 people out of a population of just over 5m have had to seek work in Russia or in neighbouring Kazakhstan.

Surprisingly, though, the macro-economy has done quite well over the past few years, with real GDP growing at 7.1% in 2004 and a stable exchange rate, according to the International Monetary Fund. Kirgizstan's external debt was reduced from 130% of GDP in 2000 to around 85% today, with the remainder likely to be paid off in the next five years, says Michael Mered, the IMF's representative in Kirgizstan.

Although the March revolution has affected production, GDP still grew by 2.4% during the first half of this year. Even so, good monetary or fiscal policy is not enough. “If you don't clean up corruption, the benefits to the people are going to continue to be limited,” says Mr Mered. The potential dangers of such unequally distributed benefits were dramatically illustrated in mid-June, when a wealthy, disqualified and therefore disgruntled presidential candidate organised an unsuccessful attempt to take over the seat of government, by paying a few dollars each to hundreds of poor people.

Mr Bakiev, of course, has vowed to create jobs and to eliminate corruption. But how he plans to do this is not clear; different people in his interim government have said different things. The same ambivalence marks his policy on the pressing question of what to do with the hundreds of Uzbek refugees who fled to Kirgizstan in May after the Andijan massacre, where Uzbek authorities shot and killed hundreds of demonstrators. The foreign ministry has said that international conventions will be observed; the acting procurator-general has said otherwise. Four asylum seekers have already been deported. The result has been to make the new president look indecisive.

Mr Bakiev's views have been slightly clearer on the presence of the American military base in Kirgizstan, set up in 2001 to support American-led coalition forces in Afghanistan; the American arrangements, he says, now ought to be reviewed. He has also pledged to reduce the extensive powers of the president, seen as the root of Kirgizstan's corruption, by shifting some functions to the prime minister. “The record is already mixed,” says Michael Hall of Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank, “but there is goodwill and a desire to trust him.” Quite how long Mr Bakiev's political honeymoon lasts, though, is another question.

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