Opposition protesters, using clubs and petrol bombs, seized Kyrgyzstan’s second city, Osh, Monday as increasingly violent unrest swept the south of the country aimed at forcing President Askar Akayev to step down.
An obviously stolen election sparked the protests, which now appears to be a serious uprising, if not a revolution yet the Bushies are saying nothing about how fair elections must be conducted. Why is this? Probably because a new government will be less friendly to the U.S.
The current government is friendly to the neocons.
Their Vice Prime Minister “readily acknowledges that his country has some political conflicts. While the nation’s top goal is to decrease poverty among its people, not everyone agrees with the western-style reforms as the best tool to accomplish this.”
Yeah I guess so, considering police stations have been burned and cities have fallen to the insurgents. Sure sounds like ‘political conflicts’ to me!
There’s no pipeline or plans for pipelines, it’s too mountainous, however a Canadian firm owns a big gold mine there.
The mine, which accounts for 40 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s industrial output and the same share of exports, is several hundred kilometers east of the center of the violence in the city of Osh, where police clashed with about 1,000 young men.
Kyrgyzstan’s geostrategic significance: tilting eastward
Although Kyrgyzstan lacks the oil and gas reserves of its neighbors – particularly, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan – it has geostrategic importance in the new great game for spheres of influence in Central Asia that pits Moscow and Beijing against Washington and Brussels.
(Akaev) accepted aid from all sides and has tried to avoid having to choose among them. In 2004, however, Akaev began to come under pressure from the two leading interested powers and started to tilt towards Moscow.
The U.S. Secretary of State has done little except issue a tepid statement calling for “dialogue” with no mention of the obviously fraudulent election, no howling for fair elections like they did in similar situations recently in Georgia and Ukraine.
There is no strong pro-Western slant to the protests in Kyrgyzstan which is bordered by three other Central Asian countries and China.