U.S. Programs Aided Kyrgyz Opposition

By STEVE GUTTERMAN, Associated Press Writer
Friday, April 1, 2005

(04-01) 01:40 PST BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan (AP) --

The speaker of Kyrgyzstan's new parliament traveled to the United States last year on a U.S.-government-funded program to observe the presidential election. So did the acting president.

Newspapers that railed against President Askar Akayev in the months before his ouster last week at the hands of opposition protesters were printed on a U.S.-funded press. Kyrgyzstan has received more U.S. assistance per capita than any other ex-Soviet republic in Central Asia.

The upheaval that swept Akayev's foes to power last week struck a country once squeezed by Akayev's increasingly control-minded regime and now emboldened by a promise of change championed by forces that benefited from U.S. funding.

Among them: a handful of opposition newspapers that have been rolling off a truck-sized printing press marked "United States Government Department of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor," housed at a former laundry on a remote stretch of road in the capital, Bishkek.

The press has operated since November 2003 under a program of the New York-based rights and democracy group Freedom House. The project has received more than $1 million in U.S. government funding.

At least three of the printing press' 60-odd clients, project director Mike Stone said, were opposition papers that fueled growing public anger at Akayev amid the campaign for the late-winter parliamentary elections — a vote whose flaws fueled the opposition push for his ouster.

Those publications embroiled the printing press in a dispute with Akayev's government, which responded with a power cutoff, police surveillance, the confiscation of a truckload of papers and suggestions of censorship from board members close to the president.

The press, meanwhile, received generators rushed over by the U.S. Embassy after the electricity was cut off, allowing it to print 182,000 copies of an opposition paper ahead of the first round of voting Feb. 27.

The battle became part of a war of words waged by Akayev against the West, in which he claimed opposition forces were getting international funding.

The rhetoric is familiar from Russia — where politicians claimed U.S. money was a major force behind the protests that swept Western-leaning opposition leaders to power in Georgia and Ukraine in the past two years.

"Akayev in his waning days was just as anxious to feed that thesis ... because it made him seem blameless," said an informed Western observer who spoke on condition of anonymity. According to Akayev, "it was these pernicious outsiders led by the Americans who were undermining a perfectly happy country," the observer said.

As Kyrgyzstan's biggest donor, the United States is a fat target. U.S. assistance since the 1991 Soviet collapse has totaled nearly $800 million, and funding for democracy development last year was $13.3 million.

The money went in part to U.S. government-funded groups such as the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute. U.S. democracy programs in Kyrgyzstan "focus on improving political processes and accountability of government institutions, strengthening civil society and public advocacy, and supporting independent media," according to a State Department statement.

Those goals dovetailed with the aims of opposition leaders fearing electoral fraud. They also ran up against a government that seemed bent on strengthening its grip in the parliamentary balloting — and possibly even retaining it indefinitely despite term limits that prevented Akayev from running again.

American-funded programs provided training in political organization and campaigning, but the U.S. Embassy stressed that the main pro-Akayev party also took part along with opposition groups. The embassy said U.S. money could not have been used to feed, clothe or transport protesters who seized and swarmed his office because it does not go to specific parties or individuals.

Edil Baisalov, head of a non-government group called For Democracy and Civil Society, stressed it was Kyrgyz people who forced Akayev out, not U.S. cash, but acknowledged that Western democracy groups have played a "very important role" in creating an atmosphere conducive to change. The group worked with the National Democratic Institute and monitored the parliamentary voting.

"The West and the United States were big sponsors of our democratic path of development, supported our democratic aims," Roza Otunbayeva, a former ambassador to the United States and Britain and now acting foreign minister, said Thursday.

Omurbek Tekebayev, the parliament speaker who visited the United States last year under the State Department's International Visitors Program, said other opposition leaders who went included acting President Kurmanbek Bakiyev and a top aide to Felix Kulov, a politician released from jail during the takeover.

"I'm not sure how much this trip influenced us, but I found that the Americans know how to choose people, know how to make an accurate evaluation of what is happening and prognosticate the future development and political changes," Tekebayev said Thursday.

Stone suggested the influence of the printing press was indirect.

"Perhaps the papers — the fact that they existed and were on the street — may have been a sign of hope for the opposition," he said.

He stressed that U.S.-financed groups were promoting "the rule of law, transparent, free elections, free media: a handful of things that we all take for granted."

"That's the goal of these projects — it ain't regime change," he said.

But the regime did change, leaving one end of a cavernous room at the printing press piled nearly ceiling-high with dozens of huge, half-ton rolls of newsprint.

With the opposition claiming Akayev would seek to stay in power past the October election or engineer a succession, the towering stacks are the products of an effort to ensure there was enough paper on hand to prevent the government from shutting the press down ahead of the vote by blocking deliveries from Russia.

"We anticipated supply problems," said project assistant Ruslan Yakhtanigov.