SOVIET ETHNIC POLICIES SPLIT KYRGYZSTAN.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: KYRGYZSTAN

KYRGYZSTAN WAS ALREADY breaking away from the Soviet Union before the latter officially collapsed. A Kyrgyz opposition movement formed in June 1990 and declared full independence in August 1991, four months before USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down. Still, the aftermath of Soviet ethnic policies led to violent upheaval decades down the line.

Former physicist Askar Akayev was Kyrgyzstan's first president. He built a reputation for striving to create a real liberal democracy but shifted into a more autocratic stance as parliament resisted some of his economic policies.

Akayev's rule lasted until 2005, when his administration fell amid a violent revolution. His successor, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was toppled by another uprising in 2010. Tribalism, nepotism, corruption, and the meshing of government with organized crime--the nation produces and is a transit point for heroin in international markets--have been hallmarks of Kyrgyz politics for much of the post-Soviet period.

In the early years of its independence, outside observers praised Kyrgyzstan for having one of the best human rights records and the most convincingly Western-style democracy among the former Soviet states in Central Asia, owing to its multiple political parties and relatively free opposition press. The predominantly Sunni Muslim state was also seen as excelling, at least in Central Asian terms, when it came to freedom of religion. Treatment of ethnic minorities, including the country's Uzbeks, was similarly considered good.

This balance proved fragile or illusory in one terrible week in June 2010, when small gangs of Kyrgyz and Uzbeks began fighting in a casino in the southern city of Osh, home to most of Kyrgyzstan's Uzbek population, sparking days of hideous violence. Instigators set fire to people in the streets. Groups of Kyrgyz moved in from other villages to punish Uzbeks, who at the start likely had some advantage in the fighting. Somewhere around 500 people were killed and more than 100,000--some estimates say nearly four times as many--were displaced.

Over the last decade, the Kyrgyz have suppressed or denied evidence of their complicity in the violence. Although the victims were disproportionately Uzbek, hardly any non-Uzbeks have faced legal penalties for murders committed in those days of chaos. The arrested Uzbeks faced what international observers agree was serious police and prosecutorial misconduct, including torture. Kyrgyz security forces at best did...