By Anton Evstratov
Former President of Kyrgyzstan Almazbek Atambayev was arrested, on August, 7, after an assault on his residence, which resulted in dozens of wounded and one killed special forces soldier, Lt. Col. Usen Niyazbekov.
Almazbek Atambekov has been charged under 2 articles of the Criminal Code of the Kyrgyzstan republic: complicity in committing a crime and corruption. Initially, the reason for the beginning of the prosecution of the ex-president was the suspicion to have facilitated in 2013 the illegal release of the crime boss Aziz Batukaev. Meanwhile there is no doubt that what happened during the two days of the storming in his residence in Koy-Tash will add episodes to the paperwork regarding the ex-president.
It is noteworthy that the former leader did not appear for interrogations in the Batukaev case, fearing that his status directly in the Investigative Committee would be changed from a witness to a defendant. Now in the aggregate of all violations of the law made, he is threatened with a long, and possibly, life imprisonment. This kind of practice, according to many representatives of the Kyrgyz society, was actively used in the years by Atambayev’s presidency, so he is well known.
There are opinions that Atambayev may be sentenced to capital punishment. However, we are not inclined to share such views, considering the close personal ties of the former president with the current head of Kyrgyzstan, Sooronbay Jeenbekov, as well as the whole political field from which come the former and current authorities.
And this point needs to be considered in more detail, because it is he who fundamentally distinguishes the Kyrgyz case from those that took place earlier in the former Soviet Union. So, for example, in Georgia, the corrupt Shevarnadze government resigned after the November 2003 bloodless “Rose Revolution” led by Mikhail Saakashvili and his political allies, and then Saaakashvili in 2013 had to left the country in much the same way, charged by Georgia’s new government of multiple crimes charges.
The creators of the Rose Revolution had nothing to do with the previous regime. In the same way there was nothing in common between the “Georgian Dream” led by the tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili, which won the 2012 parliamentary election in Georgia, with the government of Saakashvili. Nevertheless, public and criminal persecution of past leaders on charges of corruption and abuse of power in Georgia took place, and it was the first country in this series.
The situation was similar in Ukraine, where the former President Pedro Poroshenko actively and financially supported the Euromaidan revolt between November 2013 and February 2014, winning on May, 25, the presidential election. Also Poroskenko, after the end of his mandate for losing the election in 2019, runs the risk of being prosecuted. But Volodymyr Zelensky, who was elected President of Ukraine on 21 April 2019, beating incumbent President Poroshenko, never and never associated himself with the past leader.
In many respects, the situation was the same in Armenia, where after the Velvet Revolution in 2018, Robert Kocharyan, who served as the second President of Armenia between 1998 and 2008.was prosecuted and arrested on suspicion of attempting to overthrow the Constitutional order. The corruption scandals involved politicians, businessmen and other persons close to Kocharian and his successor, Serzh Sargsyan. Meanwhile, the leader of the Armenian revolution, Nikol Pashinyan, had nothing to do with the regime that he managed to overthrow.
Kyrgyzstan, on the one hand, is among the post-Soviet states that overthrew corrupt regimes, but on the other, its current regime developed after the revolution, and it fostered by the revolutionaries themselves. Atambaev, the current president, Jeenbekov, and the first, and only, female ex-president of Kyrgyzstan, Roza Otunbayeva, acted jointly against Kurmanbek Saliyevich Bakiyev, who served as President of Kyrgyzstan from 2005 till the April of 2010, when large protests forced him to flee the country.
The conflict between incumbent President Sooronbay Jeenbekov and former President Almazbek Atambayev was noteworthy, and accompanied by public criticism of the former regarding the second and reciprocally by the withdrawal of Atambayev’s immunity, which was the threshold of his arrest. And this situation demonstrates the development of the revolutionary movement, its new stage, when the current leaders cease to associate themselves as the opponents of Bakiyev, and they have different goals. In fact, the Kyrgyz political field has been abstracted from a revolutionary discourse, replacing it with a more stable agenda for the country as a whole. Such an agenda poses significant problems for the losers, as Atambayev has become at the moment.
As a separate point should be noted the Russia’s reaction to the events in Kyrgyzstan. It turned out to be similar to the one in Armenia, where Robert Kocharian, who was personally friends with Vladimir Putin, did not receive sufficient support, not only to return to power, but neither to get out of the pre-trial detention center. Moscow, apparently, has learned from the failures associated with strong interference in the affairs of Georgia and Ukraine and the opposition to regimes that won there with wide popular support.
In the case of Kyrgyzstan, Atambaev was not helped by the trip he made on July 24 to meet President Putin in Moscow, nor by the EAEU summit in Bishkek, which took place just in the days of the storming of his residence, nor by the Russian’s comprehensive interest in Kyrgyzstan’s stability.
In the future, most likely, the situation will develop along the lines of further ridding the current regime from Atambayev’s supporters. Depending on the degree of loyalty, they will either simply leave politics or prosecuted. Apparently, Russia will support the Jeenbekov line without risking its influence in Kyrgyzstan, and will try to influence the new president as much as possible.
And if Jeenbekov has supporters and room for maneuver in domestic politics, with reference to the foreign policy, the armed forces of Kyrgyzstan, like the Armenians, are largely subordinate to Moscow, so simply he will not be able to choose any other vector.
For the neighbors of Kyrgyzstan, in particular Kazakhstan, the current state of affairs is generally favorable because the revolutionary example, which had previously crushed the Kazakh political field and inspired its radical opposition, is increasingly disappearing , being replaced by the discourse of the internal confrontation among the Kyrgyz elites.
(The views expressed in this article belong only to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights)