Kyrgyzstan and the United States

The BBC reports today that Kyrgyzstan will be shuttering the United States air base outside the capital city of Bishkek. This is pretty big news any direction that you cut it, but given our new "focus" on fixing things in Afghanistan, the closing of the Manas base is really, really, really important. You can check out my paper about Democratization in Kyrgyzstan on GoogleDocs; it has a few bits about the air base and its importance.

We've never really treated our Central Asian presence as seriously as I would have hoped for, and it shows. The turning down of American interests in Central Asia is to be expected, even in the face of President Obama's hopes for changing the perception of America. Russia has come out ahead, largely because they have decided to pay the Kyrgyz for the privileges of hanging out.

This sucks, yes, and I don't know how to recoup these losses. Between Manas and the Kharshi-Khanabad "issue" in 2005, the United States is being edged out of one of the most important places on earth.

russia, kyrgyzstan, central asia, manas, bakiev

Kyrgyzstan Deux

The research apparently did its job - I received an "A" in the course. Now it's a matter of diving back into it and seeing where I screwed up. There will obviously be many such locations.

Although the ouster of Akaev might not have been entirely expected by the opposition, those individuals involved did organize themselves as the opposition in a well-functioning democracy might, “by becoming cohesive, advocating for competition, and pursuing (and attaining) political goals (Akin 2007, 19). Still, the Tulip Revolution was more "a shift in power among clans than a democratic breakthrough." The newly-elected parliamentarians were allowed to keep their offices after the revolution, which effectively eradicates the rationale for the demonstrations in the first place (Beissenger 2006, 22). This is perhaps the saddest(but at the same time hopeful) outcome of the revolution; it would be akin to the newly-created United States of America fighting their Revolutionary War and then installing King George III as President. It should be noted that the parliamentarians did in fact gain their seats legally, if not unfairly. Allowing them to keep their offices could be a mark of reconciliation.

Like most of my larger research projects, the findings did not entirely sync up with what I started with. I only find this moderately troubling. Watch this space for a full posting of the finished piece once it's ready.

Kyrgyzstan

I have finished and submitted my term paper for Democratization in the Middle East. Naturally, I did a democracy assessment for Kyrgyzstan. While not in the Middle East per se, it is a majority Muslim country that before 1991 had never been.

The research was the most fascinating thing. Taking my conversations with people about the nature of Central Asian identity beyond the talking and finding what actual scholars had to say was a real treat. I didn't find anything particularly shocking, really. In fact, most of what I thought I would find, I found. Still, it was good to see the process in action.

Conclusions: Slow and steady wins the democratization race. The final piece including bibliography came out to be just shy of 50 pages. As I understand it, the instructor only wanted 20-25. Ho hum.

It will be posted here when I've edited the little bugger sufficiently. Perhaps someday I'll turn it in to the big project that we always dreamed about.

Santa Claus

It's quite possible that I have no idea what is going on here:

http://morrire.livejournal.com/427196.html

Or it might be just what I think it is. A study by the Swedish consulting firm SWECO late last year determined that for Kris Kringle to maximize his gift-delivering to all the billions of young people across the world, he should be based in Kyrgyzstan.

The rest is at the BBC. What it boils down to is that the Kyrgyz government hosted a big celebration full of Santa Clauses and Ayaz Atas (Snow Father) and Ded Morozes (Grandfather Frost) and planned to name a mountain between the Osh and Naryn Oblasts as Santa's "new" home. RFE/RL also ran a big story about it.

While discussing the story with a friend in Kyrgyzstan, he lamented that this was just the sort of problem that the Central Asian Republics are trying to deal with: the question of identity in the wake of the collapse of the USSR. I suspect that the celebration and the naming of the mountain, just like the study that preceded them both, was slightly more benign than that, but the thought was now officially out. That friend and I, as well as two other people, are collaborating to research questions of identity just like this. We feel that it is important for some reason. Watch this space.

For me, though, the story illustrated an important point about religious identity, which just happens to be one of my research interests. In a nation whose population is probably 75% Muslim, this seems to be a cute little interfaith excursion. Of course, Kyrgyzstan is close to 20% Orthodox Christian, too, and even the Muslims there are mostly adherents of the Hanafi school, which distinguishes them from other, more strict denominations. Still, that Father Christmas can be revered in a Central Asian country is a good indicator that all hope is not lost, and that there are still options for getting along.

Or something slightly less sappy, but equally useful.