Kyrgyzstan's Forgotten Colour Revolution
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October 5th marked the 25th anniversary of the world’s first “colour revolution”, in Yugoslavia. A lavishly-funded, multi-pronged CIA, NED and USAID campaign exploited civil society actors, in particular youth groups, to dislodge President Slobodan Milosevic from power. Such was the effort’s success, US officials and media openly boasted about Washington’s central role. A slick ‘documentary’ on the unrest, Bringing Down A Dictator, was even produced. Milosevic’s fall also provided a blueprint for countless future ‘soft coups’, which continue to this day.
So it was, one by one in the early 2000s, insufficiently pro-Western governments throughout the former Soviet sphere were toppled using strategies and tactics identical to those deployed against Belgrade. A common ruse was for the US to fund, via local NGOs, a “parallel vote tabulation” to project an election’s outcome in advance, and publicise the data before results were officially announced. As in Yugoslavia, PVT figures differing from formal tallies were the spark that ignited Georgia’s 2003 ‘Rose Revolution’, and Ukraine’s 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’.
Over subsequent years, much has been written by academics, historians and independent journalists about those colour revolutions. Conversely, Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 ‘Tulip Revolution’ has gone almost entirely unremarked upon, and is largely forgotten now. Yet, its destructive consequences reverberate today. Hitherto the freest and most stable state in Central Asia, post-colour revolution Bishkek careened from crisis to crisis, with multiple governments collapsing along the way. It’s only in recent years - following another Anglo-American coup in 2020 - the country has regained its economic, political, and social balance.
Pre-2005, Kyrgyzstan was not an obvious colour revolution candidate. Upon its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union, the country quickly established itself not only as the most democratic and open in the region, but a dependable US ally. President Askar Akayev, a former scientist with zero political background, was organically popular, and moreover made clear his economic policies were informed by arch-capitalist Adam Smith, not Karl Marx. In other words, Bishkek was primed to do business with the West.
Akayev moreover allowed a relatively free media to develop, and welcomed widespread foreign civil society penetration. Thousands of European and US-funded non-governmental organisations duly opened up shop locally. At one stage, the President quipped, “if the Netherlands is a land of tulips, then Kyrgyzstan is a land of NGOs.” His comments proved bitterly ironic, given the title of the colour revolution that eventually unseated him. In another deeply sour twist, it was precisely Akayev’s welcoming of Western financial and societal infiltration that was his undoing.
A self-laudatory USAID factsheet on the President’s removal notes, from 1994 onwards $68 million was funnelled into Kyrgyzstan. This vast windfall was used to train NGOs “to lobby government,” finance “private newspapers” critical of Akayev, establish an “American University” locally, and much more besides. The Tulip Revolution stands today as a stark warning to governments the world over of the dangers of permitting such entities to operate on their soil with impunity - and how often, even pro-Western leaders can fall victim to their mephitic influence.
‘Defeat Dictators’
Despite much goodwill built up since 1991, in October 2003 Akayev angered Washington by inviting Moscow to open an airbase not far from Bishkek, and just a few dozen kilometres from the Empire’s vast Manas military installation, one of a cluster constructed by the US across Central Asia post-9/11 to facilitate the War On Terror. Such insubordination was sufficient to mark the President for removal, and preparations for a colour revolution according to a by-then well-honed formula began almost immediately.
Akayev was not unwise to this risk, warning in December 2004 of an “orange danger” of the kind that had just engulfed Ukraine threatening Kyrgyzstan, in advance of the country’s elections in February the next year. As it was, the results were far too clean to allege rigging or other shenanigans, as with prior colour revolutions. A detailed investigation by the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations in fact praised a “positive…lack of reports of vote-buying, voter intimidation, and harassment of journalists.”
Washington’s vast local standing army of civil society insurrectionists began causing havoc anyway. Some operated under the banner of KelKel, a group directly inspired by US-sponsored revolutionary youth factions in Yugoslavia, Georgia and Ukraine, and trained by their alumni. Moreover, as the Wall Street Journal revealed just before the elections, an ostensibly “independent” local printing company in receipt of Freedom House, NED, Soros and USAID cash was responsible for publishing a panoply of opposition outlets and pamphlets.
Days earlier, the firm’s electricity was cut off by local authorities. Kyrgyzstan’s US embassy “stepped in with emergency generators” to maintain its anti-government propaganda deluge. This included a prominent newspaper that published “front-page photos of a palatial mansion purportedly owned by the President and of a boy in a decrepit alleyway,” highlighting state embezzlement versus citizen poverty. Another was a handbook produced by CIA-connected Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy, dubbed “the bible” of Ukraine’s US-sponsored youth activists at the forefront of the Orange Revolution.
This “manual on how to defeat dictators, including tips on hunger strikes and civil disobedience,” includes guidance “on nonviolent resistance - such as ‘display of flags and symbolic colors’.” However, the protests that instantly erupted after the elections were highly belligerent from inception, with bomb attacks, police pelted with bricks and beaten with sticks, and government buildings torched and forcibly occupied. The New York Times contemporaneously acknowledged broadcasts by US-funded local TV stations inspired violence in certain areas of Kyrgyzstan.
Upheaval raged for weeks, prompting a personal intervention from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who expressed significant alarm over “the use of violence and intimidation to resolve electoral and political disputes.” He welcomed Akayev’s invitation to instigate dialogue with protesters. They demanded he resign instantly - despite the President having already pledged before the election to do so in October that year. In March, Akayev acquiesced and stood down, replaced by Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
‘Terribly Disappointing’
Bakiyev’s seizure of power was initially framed by Western journalists, politicians and pundits as a sparkling victory for people power, and the dawning of a new era of democracy and freedom in Kyrgyzstan. Yet, five years later, he fled the country, following mass protests over his savage, corrupt rule. The tipping point for Bakiyev’s ouster was the April 7th 2010 mass shooting of demonstrators by security forces, which killed up to 100 people and wounded at least 450 more.
As Forbes recorded at the time, the level of graft under his Presidency was “mind-boggling”. Bakiyev appointed close relatives to key positions, allowing his family to profit handsomely from legally questionable privatisation of state industries, and supply of fuel to Washington’s Manas base. Bakiyev’s son Maxim, who oversaw the latter, was described by US diplomats in leaked cables as “smart and corrupt.” By some estimates, companies he ran reaped $1.8 billion from these deals, close to Kyrgyzstan’s total GDP in 2003.
Meanwhile, Bakiyev’s brother Zhanysh ran Bishkek’s security apparatus with an iron fist. Harsh restrictions on political freedoms were enacted, while arbitrary detentions, bogus convictions, torture, and killings of opposition activists, journalists, and politicians became commonplace. For example, in March 2009 Bakivey’s former chief of staff Medet Sadyrkulov died in an alleged road traffic accident. It was later revealed he was brutally slain upon Zhanysh’s order. That December, dissident reporter Gennady Pavlyuk was murdered, thrown out of a sixth-floor apartment with his arms and legs bound.
Bishkek’s Tulip Revolution wasn’t unique in producing such horrors. A March 2013 essay in elite imperial journal Foreign Policy acknowledged the results of every US-orchestrated government overthrow in the first years of the new millennium were “terribly disappointing”, and “far-reaching change never really materialized” resultantly. This is quite an understatement. Most target countries slid into autocracy, chaos and poverty as a result of Washington’s meddling. It has typically taken years for the damage to be corrected, if at all.
Still, despite this disgraceful legacy, US appetite for fomenting colour revolutions - and the willingness of groomed citizens, particularly youth, the world over to serve as Washington’s regime change footsoldiers - remains undimmed. In September, Nepal’s elected government was overthrown by disaffected ‘Gen Z’ activists, with the full support of the country’s powerful military. The palace coup bore all the hallmarks of a colour revolution. Who and what will replace the felled administration still remains far from clear.
As a September 15th New York Times editorial noted, “Nepalis from all walks were ready to reject the system they had fought for decades to achieve,” but lack “any clear sense of what comes next.” There is an extraordinary political vacuum in Kathmandu presently, which elements within the country are seeking to exploit for malign ends. As before, Nepal’s “revolution” is likely to produce a government far worse than that which preceded it.
Though I know these interventions by Empire have been happening, it is jarring to read about the way it gets away with this again and again. Thanks for the reminder, Kit. Knowledge is power.
I traveled to and worked in Central Asia from '97-'99. I was young and naive, and thought we were the good guys helping the 'stans transition to a market economy, that would lift all boats. What I saw there convinced me that we weren't the good guys.