U.S. Behind Coups In Central America 25 Years Ago, Central Asia Today

by John Laughland

Before his denunciation April 1 of the "prevailing influence" of the U.S. in the "anti-constitutional coup" which overthrew him last month, President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan had used an interesting phrase to attack those who were stirring up trouble in the drug-ridden Ferghana Valley. A criminal "third force," linked to the drug mafia, was struggling to gain power.

Originally used as a label for covert operatives shoring up apartheid in South Africa, before being adopted by the U.S.-backed "pro-democracy" movement in Iran in November 2001, the third force is also the title of a book published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which details how western-backed non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can promote regime and policy change all over the world. The formulaic repetition of a third "people power" revolution in the former Soviet Union in just over one year -- after the similar events in Georgia in November 2003 and in Ukraine last Christmas -- means that the post-Soviet space now resembles Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, when a series of U.S.-backed coups consolidated that country's control over the western hemisphere.

Many of the same U.S. government operatives in Latin America have plied their trade in eastern Europe under George Bush, most notably Michael Kozak, former U.S. ambassador to Belarus, who boasted in the Guardian/UK 2001 that he was doing in Belarus exactly what he had been doing in Nicaragua: "supporting democracy."

But for some reason, many on the left seem not to have noticed this continuity. Perhaps this is because these events are being energetically presented as radical and left-wing even by commentators and political activists on the right, for whom revolutionary violence is now cool.

As protesters ransacked the presidential palace in Bishkek in March (unimpeded by the police who were under strict instructions not to use violence), a Times correspondent enthused about how the scenes reminded him of Bolshevik propaganda films about the 1917 revolution. The Daily Telegraph extolled "power to the people," while the Financial Times welcomed Kyrgyzstan's "long march" to freedom.

This myth of the masses spontaneously rising up against an authoritarian regime now exerts such a grip over the collective imagination that it persists despite being obviously false: try to imagine the American police allowing demonstrators to ransack the White House, and you will immediately understand that these "dictatorships" in the former USSR are in reality among the most fragile, indulgent and weak regimes in the world.

The U.S. ambassador in Bishkek, Stephen Young, has spent recent months strenuously denying government claims that the U.S. was interfering in Kyrgyzstan's internal affairs. But with anti-Akayev demonstrators telling western journalists that they want Kyrgyzstan to become "the 51st state," this official line is wearing a little thin.

Even Young admits that Kyrgyzstan is the largest recipient of U.S. aid in central Asia: the U.S. has spent $746 million there since 1992, in a country with fewer than 5 million inhabitants, and $31 million was pumped in in 2004 alone under the terms of the Freedom Support Act. As a result, the place is crawling with what the ambassador rightly calls "American-sponsored NGOs."

The case of Freedom House is particularly arresting. Chaired by the former CIA director James Woolsey, Freedom House was a major sponsor of the orange revolution in Ukraine. It set up a printing press in Bishkek in November 2003, which prints 60 opposition journals. Although it is described as an "independent" press, the body that officially owns it is chaired by the bellicose Republican senator John McCain, while the former national security adviser Anthony Lake sits on the board. The U.S. also supports opposition radio and TV.

Many of the recipients of this aid are open about their political aims: the head of the U.S.-funded Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society, Edil Baisalov, told the New York Times that the overthrow of Akayev would have been "absolutely impossible" without American help. In Kyrgyzstan as in Ukraine, a key element in regime change was played by the elements in the local secret services, whose loyalty is easily bought.

Perhaps the most intriguing question is why? Bill Clinton's assistant secretary of state called Akayev "a Jeffersonian democrat" in 1994, and the Kyrgyz ex-president won kudos for welcoming U.S.-backed NGOs and the American military. But the ditching of old friends has become something of a habit: both Edward Shevardnadze of Georgia and Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine were portrayed as great reformers for most of their time in office.

To be sure, the U.S. has well-known strategic interests in central Asia, especially in Kyrgyzstan. Freedom House's friendliness to the Islamist fundamentalist movement Hizb ut-Tahrir will certainly unsettle a Beijing concerned about Muslim unrest in its western provinces. But perhaps the clearest message sent by Akayev's overthrow is this: in the new world order the sudden replacement of party cadres hangs as a permanent threat -- or incentive -- over even the most compliant apparatchik.