Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-11-Speech-3-047"
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"en.20050511.4.3-047"2
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"Mr President, the positive domino effect that began with the democratic awakening in Ukraine and Georgia has now spread to a third country. What has happened in Kyrgyzstan is another good example of the way in which the post-Soviet
is falling from power, even though the events in these three countries are not necessarily comparable. The Akayev regime collapsed without any outside intervention, as a result of a spontaneous popular uprising. The public’s patience had quite simply been stretched too far by such things as electoral fraud and the enormous fortunes amassed by a nepotistic political family that treated the country as though it were its own private property.
The Soviet Union collapsed almost 15 years ago, yet this was not a geopolitical disaster, as the Russian President, Mr Putin, would have us believe, but a geopolitical opportunity. The much-needed action taken by the OSCE and the ODIHR, an OSCE agency currently headed by an Austrian, is the only external factor that can be said to have had any influence on events.
Putin would appear to have learned from the mistakes he made in Ukraine, and the Kyrgyz opposition also acted shrewdly by giving him advance notice of the then Head of Government’s imminent overthrow. It was for this reason that Putin neither intervened as a supporter of the system, nor backed the wrong horse, as he had done in Ukraine, even though President Akayev sought refuge in Moscow after he was toppled from power, and was in fact smuggled out of the country in a rolled-up carpet. Stable and non-corrupt democracies can only be good news for Russia.
What lessons should the EU learn from all of this? The first is that we must support democratisation in this area, and the second is that we should ensure that democracy is strengthened and civil society supported, particularly in Kazakhstan, so that financial assistance does not fall into the wrong hands. Kazakhstan is much larger, richer and a great deal more important in geopolitical terms than Kyrgyzstan, which, although scenic, is only a small country."@en1
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