Kyrgyzstan's President Fled Thursday After Opposition Supporters Seized Power

Christian Science Monitor via Yahoo News ^ | 3-25-2005 | Fred Weir

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Kyrgyzstan's president fled Thursday after opposition supporters seized the nation's main seat of power.

MOSCOW - Another post-Soviet regime was crumbling amid popular jubilation Thursday, after crowds stormed Kyrgyzstan's presidential palace and sent longtime ruler Askar Akayev fleeing the country.

Parties loyal to Mr. Akayev officially won 90 percent of the votes in recent parliamentary elections. But the rapid collapse of his security forces and government after about 10,000 opposition supporters massed in Bishkek, the country's northern capital, Thursday suggests a very different reality.

"Akayev's 14 years in power have been a time of mass impoverishment for the people," says Sanobar Shematova, a Kyrgyz journalist who writes for the Russian daily Izvestia. "This revolt spread to the capital from the poorest regions of the country, where people are sick and tired of the corrupt authorities," and needed only a spark to set them off, she says.

Kyrgyzstan's upheaval will echo loudly in the corridors of power throughout the former USSR, experts say. Many post-Soviet governments, including Russia, share similar features to the regimes that have fallen to angry crowds in Georgia, Ukraine, and now Kyrgyzstan, in the past 18 months.

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[starfish923]

If the government leaders had shown even a MODICUM of economic success for its dirt-poor population, this might not have happened.
The unmitigated greed and corruption that was communism has translated into a NON-communist government, just as bad for its population.
Perhaps communism wasn't ever the real problem.
Perhaps the real problem has always been its corrupt society.

Just a thought.