Kyrgyzstan's Tulip Revolution and the Habit of Revolt
Kyrgyzstan's president fled the country in March 2005 after crowds took the government building in Bishkek. Askar Akayev had governed since 1990 and had been the only Central Asian leader who was not a former communist party boss — a physicist who had presided over the region's most open press and its earliest privatisation, and who had then extended his own term twice by referendum and installed his relatives in business and parliament. The trigger was the parliamentary election of February and March 2005, in which opposition candidates were disqualified and the president's son and daughter both won seats. The protests began in the south, in Jalal-Abad and Osh, where local grievances about land and jobs were sharper and where regional resentment of a northern-dominated government was long-standing. Government buildings in both cities were taken and held. The crowd reached Bishkek on 24 March, entered the White House with little resistance, and Akayev left for Kazakhstan and then Moscow, resigning formally in April. Looting followed in the capital for two nights. The revolution is counted with Georgia's and Ukraine's as one of the colour revolutions, and it has a worse record than either: Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who replaced Akayev, was himself overthrown in 2010 in violence that killed some ninety people, and ethnic pogroms against Uzbeks in the south that June killed several hundred more. A third president was removed by protests in 2020. Kyrgyzstan is nonetheless the only Central Asian state where governments change. The tulip in the name was Akayev's own image, used in a speech warning that no colour revolution would happen in Kyrgyzstan. The opposition adopted it, which is a small demonstration of how quickly a government loses control of its own vocabulary.
- Year: 2005 CE
- Category: Political
