The Central Asian exception
Askar Akayev was the nicest of the Central Asian strongmen. Dissidents did not get immersed in boiling water in Kyrgyzstan; statues of the ousted leader did not litter the capital, Bishkek, and other cities. During the 1990s, Mr Akayev was even seen as a man with a commitment to democracy and civil rights. Maybe that is why he was overthrown.
He deserved to be overthrown. By the time the crowds in Bishkek invaded his presidential palace on March 24, he was well on the way to turning Kyrgyzstan into just another Central Asian autocracy. February's parliamentary election was so shamelessly rigged that Mr Akayev's supporters won 69 out of 75 seats - with his son and daughter elected.
In style, the almost bloodless revolution that overthrew Mr Akayev was close to the non-violent popular uprisings that brought democracy to two other former Soviet republics, Georgia and Ukraine, in the past 18 months. There was the same revolt against a rigged election, even the same use of a symbolic colour to unite all the strands of protest. And inevitably, the same claims are being made about it.
The Bush administration has yet to officially claim that it is a result of the beacon of liberty that the US invasion has lit in Iraq, but you know that it will. The Russian government, seeing yet another part of the former Soviet 'near abroad' slide out of Moscow's sphere of influence, mutters darkly about illegitimate American influence behind the revolution. And not much attention is paid to the reality of Kyrgyzstan.
The reason all five Central Asian republics ended up being run by tyrants of greater or lesser nastiness after the fall of the Soviet Union was that the same or very similar tyrants were running them before it fell. The bizarre geography of the Central Asian republics, which interpenetrate and wrap themselves around one another, reflects Joseph Stalin's policy of redrawing the borders to ensure that each main ethnic group was split between several different republics. Then, the Communist Party recruited heavily from the leading clans of the majority nationality in each republic, who were generally willing to co-operate to secure their social position among their own people, and their ethnic group's political domination over the others.
Kyrgyzstan was different from the start because Mr Akayev was not a lifelong apparatchik, but a physicist who was chosen by the first freely elected Kyrgyz parliament in 1991. Kyrgyzstan is also extremely poor, without oil, gas or valuable minerals, so it has not attracted the same influx of foreign money, and is significantly less corrupt.
Kyrgyzstan's revolution may succeed, although the conflict that underlies it is partly based on clan, and it could tumble into something quite ugly. But it has virtually nothing to do with events far to the west, in Georgia and Ukraine, let alone far to the south in Iraq - and the likelihood that it will spread to the other 'stans' - Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan - is very, very low.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist
