Until even a month ago few would have imagined that Askar Akayev, the father of independent Kyrgyzstan, and its two-term elected president, could be swept from power in a people’s revolution.
Of the five Central Asian republics that emerged from the debris of the USSR, Kyrgyzstan, although the poorest, was, by all accounts, the least repressive. Experts believed that if anyone were to face revolution it would be Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov who has been facing a full-scale rebellion in the Ferghana Valley for years. The next candidate for facing a revolution was Turkmenistan’s Safar-Murad Niyazov who heads what is arguably the most repressive regime in the region.
And, yet, it was Akayev who had to go first. Why?
I first learned of Akayev’s existence in the 1980s when researching my book on Muslim peoples in the Soviet Union.
At the time Akayev was known as a fighter who wanted to free his people from the Soviet yoke and lead it into the modern world. He represented one face of a coin whose other face was Chengiz Aitmatov, Kyrgyzstan’s greatest writer. By the mid-1980s Akayev had come to the conclusion that no amount of good will and reform could save communism from its contradictions. Aitmatov, however, continued to cling to the idea of “socialism with a human face”, and supported Mikhail Gorbachev’s cosmetic reforms.
The collapse of the Soviet empire persuaded many Kyrgyz that Akayev had been right and Aitmatov wrong. In 1990 when Kyrgyzstan won independence Akayev was its natural leader. In 1995 he was elected to a second five-year presidential term that was renewed in 2000. Last year he announced that he would retire in 2005 at the end of his third term as president. The revolution denied him the chance of a graceful departure from the scene.
So, why did Akayev suffer such a fate?
The first, and perhaps the most important, reason is that he developed a system torn between totalitarian temptations and liberal aspirations. In other Central Asian republics, notably Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the post-Soviet leadership has maintained the power structures of the Soviet era under a different label. Kyrgyzstan, however, developed a multiparty system in which opposition groups could function in a more or less normal way. In Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and, to a lesser degree, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan the entire system is based on the cult of the leader, recalling Stalin’s cult of personality, albeit on a smaller scale. In Kyrgyzstan, however, Akayev, though the subject of exaggerated deference, was never elevated into the position of a demigod whose worship is the first duty of everyone in the land.
The system Akayev created resembled the kind of soft dictatorships that Latin Americans contemn as “dictablanda”.
A system of “dictablanda” is contemptible because it has most of the disadvantages of a real dictatorship, known to Latin Americans as “dictadura” or “hard dictatorship”, without its consistencies. In “dictadura” the average citizen knows where he stands. He knows that if he says something that the rulers don’t like he will have his mouth smashed. In “dictablanda”, however, the citizen is never sure when to open his mouth and when to keep it shut.
Dictablanda regimes are almost always overthrown by revolutions that produce even greater tragedies.
Louis XVI’s regime in 18th century France was a dictablanda and thus could be overthrown with relative ease, triggering the so-called Great Revolution that led to the worst massacres and the bloodiest wars ever in French history. The Shah’s regime, also a dictablanda, was swept away without a fight in four months, with the consequences for Iran that we know. Under Gorbachev the USSR was turned into a dictablanda that was destroyed through a series of mini-revolutions.
Dictadura regimes, however, cannot be overthrown by revolution.
Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein were invulnerable to internal challenges because they were ready to kill people on a scale that no dictablanda leader dares imagine. The idea of an internal revolution against Idi Amin or Khmer Rouge belonged to black humor rather than serious politics.
Such regimes could only be destroyed by foreign armies in a war.
Napoleon was captured and sent into exile when the Cossacks came to sleep in the Elysee Palace. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker hours before the arrival of an American commando to arrest him. Stalin and Ayatollah Khomeini died in their beds. Idi Amin was chased away when the Tanzanian Army reached his palace in Kampala. The Khmer Rouge fled to Thailand when the Vietnamese Army marched on Phnom-Penh. Saddam Hussein hurried to find a hole to hide in when the American troops appeared in Firdaus Square in Baghdad.
The second reason for Akayev’s speedy demise was the rampant corruption, an inevitable accompaniment of all forms of dictatorship. The difference is that in dictadura no one dares raise the issue while in dictablanda the scale of corruption is widely exaggerated to support calls for the overthrow of the regime. Akayev’s regime was certainly the least corrupt of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. Nevertheless, the fact that most big contracts went to personalities in the regime or their relatives created the impression that the country was in the hands of a Mafia of businessmen-politicians. Most of the shopping malls and hotels that were ransacked and looted during the Bishkek riots of last month belonged to Akayev’s relatives or members of his entourage.
Both forms of soft and hard dictatorship use business as a means of building support that should normally come through popular elections. We now know that Saddam Hussein was at the center of a network of business interests. In Pakistan one of the first programs of the late military despot Zia ul-Haq was to create a business empire, not for personal gain but as a means of securing his regime. In Sudan, Hassan Al-Turabi paid more attention to weaving a cobweb of business interests than to creating a political organization. Visiting Indonesia in 1998 I realized that virtually all the taxis I took, the hotels I stayed in, the office blocks and shopping centers I visited, and even the airports I flew in and out of belonged to President Suharto and his family.
Most discussions of Muslim countries include the issue of separating the mosque and the state. But a more politically relevant issue is the separation of politics and business.
Akayev, like others who run a dictatorship, could not separate the two. And that created resentment not only among businessmen denied a chance to seek a share of the cake but more significantly among the people at large who believed that they were being robbed on a daily basis.
To counter balance that feeling Akayev tried to appear increasingly pious. Although a secularist of long-standing he started to pepper his speeches with religious clichés, encouraged the building of new mosques, and made a hurried visit to Makkah. The more corrupt his regime became the more mosques it built. Last time I saw him in Davos, Switzerland, a couple of years ago he was fondling an amethyst rosary, and appeared to be trying to grow designer stubble. All that should have warned me that Akayev, the man I once admired and fought to have released from prison, was on a wrong track.
