Kyrgyzstan: One down, four to go

Revolution reaches the steppe

WAS it people power, mob rule, an insiders' stitch-up or just a mess? Almost certainly, Kirgizstan's “tulip revolution” (also known as the daffodil, pink, silk and lemon revolutions) was an unsavoury blend of all four - hence the colour confusion. The one thing it certainly wasn't was a glorious democratic victory. But not many revolutions are.

As the dust starts to settle around the presidential palace in Bishkek a few things, however, are clear enough. First, that a corrupt and autocratic ruler has been ousted, almost bloodlessly. Askar Akaev may have been the least repressive despot in a bad neighbourhood, but he, his family and his cronies had monopolised power, and the state's meagre resources, for far too long. Whoever ends up ruling Kirgizstan next (presidential elections may be held in June but that is by no means certain) will be powerfully aware of his fate - however it was brought about. So even though it looks as though Mr Akaev's successor will almost inevitably be an insider (rather than, say, a dissident absurdist playwright), there is some hope that he will feel constrained to behave better.

Second, it is inevitable that the fall of Mr Akaev will send a powerful message to democrats and the merely dissatisfied in the rest of Central Asia, that depressing collection of Soviet-era relics that specialists call “the Stans”. With the exception of anarchic Tajikistan, at the time of Mr Akaev's fall all of the Stans were still ruled by whoever happened to be the local boss when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. An autocratic decade and a half on, none of the Stans has managed to acquire either the democratic freedoms and relatively good governance of the European parts of the old empire, or the get-ahead economic dynamism of Asia: they have, in a literal sense, the worst of both worlds. But revolution is contagious, as eastern Europe and much of East Asia is well aware. It was only a matter of time before the virus that has successfully claimed the rest of the Russian periphery, bar Belarus, arrived from Ukraine on the Central Asian steppe.

The most likely place for it to strike next is Kazakhstan, where Nursultan Nazarbaev and his daughter enjoy the same kind of unfettered personal rule as Mr Akaev did. The other candidate is Uzbekistan: people there are much poorer than in oil-endowed Kazakhstan, but Islam Karimov runs so repressive a regime that the courage to overthrow him may well prove lacking. Tajikistan is surely too much of a warlord-ruled narco-state for any form of a revolution - revolutions usually require an engaged middle class. In Turkmenistan, which is probably, with North Korea, the world's most totalitarian state, literally anything could happen. But a coup against the demented Turkmenbashi (“the Father of Turkmen”), who has renamed January after himself and April after his mother, seems more likely than an uprising.

A last thing that seems clear is that this revolution will be no panacea. When despots fall, there is often nothing very suitable to replace them: the whole point about dictatorship is that it does not tolerate alternate sources of legitimacy. The transition towards democracy may be rapid, as in most of eastern Europe, or difficult and bloody, as in Indonesia, or both bloody and extremely protracted, as it shows every sign of being in Iraq - or just glacial. An absolute precondition, though, is to get the autocrats out of power. In most cases, what follows will be better. There is reason to hope that this will be so in Kirgizstan. Raise a cup of fermented mare's milk.

Editorial discusses the 'tulip revolution' in Kyrgyzstan (sometimes spelt Kirgizstan).