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17 J. Democracy 132 (2006)
What Really Happened in Kyrgyzstan?

handle is hein.journals/jnlodmcy17 and id is 316 raw text is: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN KYRGYZSTAN? Scott Radnitz Scott Radnitz is a doctoral candidate in political science at the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology. His articles have been published in Demokratizatsiya and Regional and Federal Studies. He is writing his dissertation on networks, mobilization, and the state in Central Asia. It is said that when something happens once it is an accident, twice a coincidence, and a third time a pattern. Many doubted that any country in Central Asia would become part of a pattern of people power revo- lutions spreading throughout the former Soviet Union. Yet when protests over flawed parliamentary elections forced Kyrgyz president Askar Akayev to flee to Moscow on 24 March 2005, he left in his wake the first peaceful-albeit initially extraconstitutional-transfer of power that the five countries of what used to be Soviet Central Asia have seen in a decade and a half of independence. Kyrgyzstan subsequently held a presidential election deemed free and fair by international observers, in which Kurmanbek Bakiyev, former prime minister and one of the uprising's leaders, won 89.5 percent of the vote. A period of euphoria quickly gave way to the messy task of governing. Pundits quickly drew comparisons to the regime changes in Georgia and Ukraine, dubbing the Kyrgyz events the Tulip Revolution to parallel the Rose and Orange varieties. While these comparisons may have been overstated, the events of March 2005 and their pointed lesson that no given autocratic regime need be taken as permanent did offer Central Asians a reasonable measure of renewed hope that democ- racy might have a chance to develop in their countries. That said, the change in Kyrgyzstan had its own dynamics, and these continue to shape it. The forces that drove the Tulip Revolution-inde- pendent business interests, informal networks, and patronage ties-developed under Akayev's 15-year rule, and remained strong af- ter his exit. This helps to explain why Kyrgyzstan has had a putative revolution that in fact has been notable more for continuity than for Journal of Democracy Volume 17, Number 2 April 2006 © 2006 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press

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