Kyrgyzstan! Excitement! Adventure Tourism at its Finest!

I’ve received no less than four messages in the last two days from people telling me how glad they are that I am not in Kyrgyzstan right now.
Thanks, but… I wish I was in Kyrgyzstan right now. What a time to be there!

Not that I’d be able to experience any of it from within the confines of Manas Air Base, the US Air Force’s outpost north of the capital Bishkek. I’ve spent some months there and visited the city a number of times on deployment with the Air Force. It is hard for me to adequately describe the city to someone who’s never been there, certainly not in this forum. It would need to be done in person, with pictures. Nonetheless in the next few days I’ll try to give some description of the place.

Anyway, I just wanted to put in some disjointed ramblings and link to lots of articles for people who are interested. This is… well, it’s not an unqualified good, but one has to have great hope here. I really would like to see this first person. In a way I really envy the expats I met at the Metropolitan bar in downtown Bishkek, the guys (and women, some of them) who worked for NGOs or were hangers-on at the State Department or had some other role—often with the independent press—and were just there, living in Bishkek, and are watching this now. I hope they’re all safe. I imagine most of them are smart enough to have stayed home and not gotten involved.

Oh, and Kyrgyzstan’s digraph is KG, so when you read KG here, think Kyrgyzstan.

This article is from before the real overthrow; it talks about how the opposition took control of the city of Osh. Good reading. Worth pointing out that the 12 hour bus trip from Osh to Bishkek is a testament both to the ruggedness of terrain as well as to the country’s poor infrastructure. There is exactly one road from Bishkek, north of the Tien Shan mountains, across those mountains and into the south of the country, toward Osh. This road is a wonder of engineering, and I’ve always (well, since I saw it) wanted to drive it. Maybe in a few decades I will. Nonetheless, Osh and Bishkek are less than an hour apart by air and, I would estimate, are probably no more than 300 miles apart. Think about that next time you’re stuck on the interstate; 300 miles in 12 hours! Eesh.

This article is also from yesterday. It’s from the Russian news agency, and takes a dimmer view of the proceedings. Worth noting that Russia’s minister to the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) blames election monitors. Russia doesn’t like having election monitors in their own elections, and they have to blame outsiders because they don’t want this happening in their own country. It may anyway, though. Also, I love this quote, because I know the actual purpose of the air base in Kant: "The command of the base in Kant constantly informs us on the state of things.” No shit. That’s all they’re there for, folks. Spying, on both us and the Kyrgyz.

This is a charming article that shows how inept our own intelligence gathering operations are in the country, as it is from only about 12 hours before Akayev fled the country. Considering how close it came to the end, I like the note about the new interior minister and security forces being ready to crack down on protesters if it came to that. Ha ha ha! You guys suck! Looks like the protesters did the cracking. Also, I hate this description of KG as being about the size of South Dakota, which comes from the CIA World Factbook. South Dakota is a square. KG is more like this bracket: > Well, not really, but sort of. Anyway, it’s much larger than South Dakota in some respects, smaller in others since about 40% of the territory is too mountainous for any economic activity other than ski resorts.

This looting stuff is just sad. I bet I know exactly which department store they’re looting too: the new Dordoi. There’s nothing in there the average, or even the above average, Kyrgyz citizen could afford anyway. Hell, that place seemed expensive to me.

Here we have a note from Novosti, the official mouthpiece of Russian state-run media. It is surprisingly not alarmist about the revolution. However, it also quotes a leader of one of the many divergent opposition groups as saying that regardless of who runs the place, KG will retain a pro-Russian tilt. This begs the question, exactly who is Imanaliev, what bloc does he represent, will he have any role in the government, and does he speak for any but himself and his supporters? Interesting questions.

This is worth reading. It discusses the official media (all state-run) reportage about the Kyrgyz revolution in the other former Soviet states of central Asia. Essentially, there was none. Not a big surprise.

One of the best general pieces on the overthrow. I’d like to point out that though KG “lies in an energy-rich region,” it has no actual energy resources of its own aside from, possibly, hydropower. However, the Soviets, who liked a good dam better than anyone else on Earth, never built major hydropower dams in KG, which is a likely sign that there are no good sites for them. Anyway, don’t think of KG as some little energy-rich potentate a la Turkmenistan or Kuwait. The only resources in the country are some deposits of minor elements and the unfreakingbelievable scenery. (Personally, I doubt Akayev went to Kant Airbase, as is suggested in this story. I strongly suspect he fled to Kazakhstan, if he’s not still in KG. That’s just a gut feeling, though.)

If I was being responsible, I’d mostly agree with this article, which is mostly SecState Rice’s comments on the situation. But I’m not in a responsible mood, so… notice how when the Bush administration doesn’t cause a major international crisis, it only “might” be a good thing? But when they cause an unmitigated disaster, well, it’s a totally positive event. No question. On a neutral note, this article also contains the only direct quote about Manas Air Base of any of the articles I’ve read. And, that information is essentially, nothing. CENTCOM isn’t going to talk. You can rest assured the base is locked down tighter than a drum, and these guys don’t mess around when it comes to security.

The headline says it all on this article, and it’s the single biggest problem KG faces on the way forward. To a man, the Kyrgyz I met are decent, upstanding people who won’t stand for a collapse of the movement they’ve created. But then, I didn’t meet them all, and I surely didn’t meet any of the opposition leaders, though I also didn’t meet anyone who really supported the Akayev regime, though they’d only say that in private settings. This is a good article that needs more depth but has additional info on Manas and raises a significant topic that will be the focus of news from this region for the next several weeks.

This is from New Kerala, an Indian news agency. It doesn’t have a lot of new info, but it does make me further question Mr. Imanaliev’s background and positions.

This wire brief has a picture of riot police getting creamed by demonstrators. This isn’t necessary. Where’s Rodney King when we really need him?

China has a lengthy border with KG and, being a repressive and paranoid authoritarian regime, I’d think they’d be interested in this story. Then again, like the other central Asian states, I would not be surprised to find that the Chinese press have simply not covered this story at all. This article from Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, is the only thing I’ve seen from Chinese press. It isn’t interesting except as regards how very little it says about the events.

This may be the best article of the bunch, but that isn’t saying a lot as most of these are fairly thin (not too many news organizations have field offices in KG). It has some descriptions of the events not found in other articles, many of which clearly draw from the same sources.

Being that it’s from Novosti, I question the slant of this little wire brief, but it does have the latest news. If it’s entirely accurate, it’s distressing.

Until tomorrow’s Times, this will be far and away the most in-depth article about the events. A must read, even with the Jewish slant.