Kyrgzstan

You've heard the saying attributed to Andy Warhol that eventually everyone
will be famous for 15 mins, well here is the geographical equivalent, every
place will eventually become the center of the world's attention for a short
time span.
It started during WWII with the development of communications when some
obscure places saw their profile raised, such as Yalta, Monte Cassino and
Guadalcanal, to mention just a few . Then some names that had hardly been
heard of before popped up and grabbed the headlines, Saigon,
Sharm-al-Sheikh, and more recently Kabul. Now its the turn of Kyrgyzstan in
Central Asia with Bishkek (!) its capital.
Kyrgyzstan is the third former Soviet Republic that achieved independence,
after Georgia and more recently Ukraine, to undergo a popular uprising,
truly a revolution. The main difference is that whereas the two previous
"people power" uprisings were peaceful, this one turned out to be violent.
The anti-Government uprising started in the south against the recent
probably fraudulent re-election of Askar Akayev as President again after
about 12 years in power. Although Akayev started out as a liberal
communist, he has retained power through a combination of corruption and
intimidation, and the economy of the country has stagnated. The people of
Kyrgyzstan are impoverished and want a better future.
The irony is that of the ca. 5 million population 70% are Muslim. Years ago
when the USSR was breaking up some of us predicted that Central Asia would
become the focus of extremist Muslim activity and would follow Iran to
become Islamist States. The opposite seems to have happened. If Kyrgyzstan
does not descend into chaos with the removal of Akayev, then the people
there clearly want greater democratization.
The main threat to stability now is the lack of an obvious candidate to be
the new leader, and the possibility of inter-ethnic strife, given that
Kyrgyzstan has a number of large minorities (Russian, Uzbek, Tajik, etc.).
The US is interested in Kyrgyzstan because it has a large air base there
supporting the actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Russia is certainly
interested in seeing stability in Kyrgyzstan. The question is if it does
indeed stabilize and become more democratic, will this affect the fate of
the authoritarian rulers in other Central Asian and former Soviet Republics.
Who could have predicted this spreading outcome? Bush more than Lenin.