"Kyrgyzstan at the Crossroads"

The cover boy on the latest issue of Novosti, the newsletter of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, is none other than Askar Akayev. It seems then-President Akaev addressed the Harvard community last fall, and a writeup of his speech was chosen as the front-page story for Novosti.

The newsletter is available here in PDF format , but it takes awhile to download, so I've excerpted the best parts of the article below:

Kyrgyzstan at the Crossroads: President Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan Speaks at Harvard; By Erdin Beshimov [a 1st-year student in the REECA master's program], Novosti, Fall 2004

[...]The President explained the difficulty in finding an appropriate political model on which to build the country. At the early stages of its independence, Kyrgyzstan needed to develop new guidelines of development that would “approximate the Western model of public, social and economic life.” At that time, different developmental models were considered and tried—the Polish, Swedish, and Turkish, in particular—with the Chinese model continuing to be of interest to this day. But President Akaev realized that, as appealing as foreign models were, their implementation seemed internally defective. Instead, Akaev’s administration decided to develop its own model, taking into account Kyrgyzstan’s distinctive national characteristics. According to Akaev, this approach seems to have worked. [...]

Akaev went on to explain that democratization is a difficult process, and that it was naпve to expect a full-fledged democracy so soon after the fall of authoritarianism. He reminded the audience that America needed two centuries after the signing of its constitution to institute a true democracy.

“My democratic creed is based on the principle that there is not, and cannot be, a universal formula for democracy applicable to all countries and peoples.” Democracy, Akaev believes, “should ripen internally in the depth of society itself, and correspond to the historical practice and experience of a country. It should integrate organically into the people’s awareness, and only in this way will it take firm root in the public consciousness.” He reproached those people who “continue to attach labels of ‘non-free’ or ‘not completely free’ country to the Kyrgyz Republic,” warning that judgments of this sort are far from harmless political criticism. On the contrary, they have the potential to result in a discriminatory US foreign aid policy.

Yet Akaev’s speech did not address the issue of what has impeded democracy in Kyrgyzstan. The question remains, Is democracy being suspended in order to carry out painful, rapid and effective economic reforms and to conduct administrative structural changes, or to conceal corruption and mismanagement? [...]

Responding to a question about the pending transfer of presidential power in Kyrgyzstan, a crucial issue to democratization in Central Asia, Akaev announced that he will step down as president. “I am for the people choosing the next president. Therefore, I have not aimed to determine a successor. Our people are educated and wise, and I am convinced that they will choose a worthy next president.”