Political dissent a potentially rising tide

The resignation of the Kyrgyz prime minister and his government last week in a move to defuse protests over the deaths of demonstrators, detention of opposition politicians and a controversial border pact with neighbouring China, may have "very serious" implications for the whole Central Asian region, experts said on Tuesday. "I think this will have very serious implications for the country and the region," Central Asian analyst and journalist, Ahmed Rashid, told IRIN on Monday. "Not enough attention has been paid to the origin of political and economic unrest," he added. Rashid maintained that authoritarian Central Asian regimes had used the situation arising after the 11 September events as an opportunity to suppress opposition and political dissent. "Unfortunately, the renewed interest and heightened engagement of the West in the region does not translate into strengthening of democracy and civil society," he said, adding that the resources committed by the US-led coalition against terrorism in the region were exploited by the regimes to perpetuate their rule. The government of Prime Minister Kurmanbek Bakiyev resigned last week after the public reacted with protests to a judicial report on the deaths in March of five demonstrators who were demanding the release of former parliamentary deputy Azimbek Beknazarov in the southern district of Asky. Protesters also demanded an end to the harassment of opposition leaders such as Beknazarov. Like other Central Asian leaders, Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev has remained in power even after a decade of the country's independence following the break-up of the Soviet Union. He now faces even more pressure from the opposition to resign. Adding fuel to the fire was the approval on 17 May of a delimitation of border agreement with China. Under its terms, Kyrgyzstan will transfer up to 100,000 ha of territory to China. The boundary between the two countries has never been clearly demarcated. The response to the agreement was that protesters blocked the main highway from the capital, Bishkek, in the north, to the second city of Osh in the south, for over a week. Then, in a countrywide crackdown, police arrested hundreds of the protesters, of whom dozens are still languishing in prisons. Commenting on the issue, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, Ustina Markus, told IRIN from Osh that the protests were likely to prompt Akayev into viewing the opposition more seriously. "The protests showed that people can be mobilised," she said. Rashid maintained that unrest in one of Central Asia's relatively democratic countries was symptomatic of a much wider underlying crisis in the region. "There will be potentially much bigger protests," he predicted. Markus was less sure. "How far it will go, we will see," she said.