Kyrgyzstan Needs Carefully Considered Foreign Policy
Diplomacy must stay on track as country experiments with parliamentary democracy.
Kyrgyzstan Needs Carefully Considered Foreign Policy
Diplomacy must stay on track as country experiments with parliamentary democracy.
A leading Kyrgyz diplomatic expert says that as the country’s new coalition government formulates its foreign policy, it would do well to seek consistency and continuity in relations with the United States and other states.
Ishenbay Abdurazakov, a former State Secretary of Kyrgyzstan and now chairman of the Kyrgyzstan-Japan Association, told IWPR he did not foresee significant changes in the relationship with the US, which has had an airbase in the Central Asian state since December 2001, supplying military operations in Afghanistan. Recent years have seen a number of attempts by Kyrgyz politicians to end the US presence, but these have ended in agreements allowing it to continue, albeit with some renegotiation of the terms.
The latest controversy surrounding the Manas airbase concerns Mina Corporation, the company that holds the main fuel supply contract. The Pentagon’s contracting practices at Manas were the subject of a US Congressional subcommittee last year, which failed to find evidence of corruption.
Abdurazakov said fuel supplies to the airbase had in the past been managed, on the Kyrgyz side, by “clan groupings” that he said siphoned off revenues that should have gone to the state.
“This provoked public outrage,” he said. “So now we have to make supply, contracts, and other infrastructure issues genuinely transparent.”
The analyst took a positive view of Kyrgyzstan’s sometimes fraught relationship with neighbouring Uzbekistan. He dismissed suggestions that Uzbekistan was prone to using its role as gas supplier to Kyrgyzstan as political leverage, and praised President Islam Karimov’s measured response to the violence around Osh and Jalalabad last June, which led to tens of thousands of ethnic Uzbeks fleeing to the border.
At the same time, he said, Uzbekistan was naturally keeping a close eye on the developing political situation in Kyrgyzstan, and he warned against allowing “nationalist sentiment” to gain the upper hand at home.
Dina Tokbaeva is IWPR’s Regional Editor for Central Asia, based in Bishkek.
This article was produced jointly under two IWPR projects: Building Central Asian Human Rights Protection & Education Through the Media, funded by the European Commission; and the Human Rights Reporting, Confidence Building and Conflict Information Programme, funded by the Foreign Ministry of Norway.
The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of IWPR and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of either the European Union or the Foreign Ministry of Norway.
