US Lost Sight of Enduring Democratic Values in Bishkek - Experts

The perception of impropriety played a significant role in the downfall of Kyrgyzstan’s former president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, experts testified on April 22 at a US congressional hearing into Pentagon contracting practices at the Manas Transit Center outside Bishkek.

The hearing, entitled Crisis in Kyrgyzstan: Fuel, Contractors, and Revolution along the Afghan Supply Chain, was convened by the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The United States, some of the expert witnesses asserted, allowed strategic exigencies to subsume enduring democratic values in its dealings with Kyrgyz leaders. As a result, US diplomats and military planners fell into a trap in which they believed the Bakiyev administration’s authoritarian tendencies could ensure the political stability needed for Manas to function. Manas is a key US logistics hub supporting military operations in Afghanistan. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

Eugene Huskey, a professor at Stetson University, offered a harsh assessment of the US Embassy in Bishkek, asserting that American diplomats "shunned" opposition members and made non-governmental organization representatives feel as though they were "untouchables."

The current US ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Tatiana Gfoeller, allegedly refused to meet Almazbek Atambayev, a former prime minister and now a leading figure in the provisional government, while he was a member of the opposition during the Bakiyev era, Huskey contended.

"The United States betrayed its principles in order to curry favor with a despotic dictator who held the keys to the base [...] Changes have to be made at the embassy," he said.

In his written testimony, Alexander Cooley, a Barnard College professor at Columbia University, said; "Once vocal defenders and staunch supporters of Kyrgyzstan’s democratic development, the United States stopped publicly criticizing the country’s growing democratic shortcomings." [Editor’s Note: Cooley is an Open Society Fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York. EurasiaNet.org operates under OSI’s auspices].

Baktybek Abdrisaev, a lecturer at Utah Valley University and a former Kyrgyz envoy to the United States (1996-2005), said embassy personnel should not bear the brunt of responsibility for American policy. "It would be difficult to blame the ambassador for changes in policy. The United States probably already decided not to treat our country as a fellow democracy, but as a corrupted and failed state," he said.

Sam Patten, Eurasian Senior Program Manager at Freedom House, stressed that US policy in Kyrgyzstan was widely viewed as skewed in order to support military objectives in Afghanistan, not promote country-specific good governance.

"There are multiple instances of American diplomacy becoming hostage to the whims of authoritarian regimes because of our security imperative to maintain military bases in non-democratic countries," Patten said in written testimony submitted to the subcommittee.

"Blaming the Department of Defense is short-sighted, and its contribution to a ’whole of government’ approach is too often out-sized only because other government entities - including the Department of State - lack either the resources or the will to be as vocal as necessary from their seat at the table," Patten added.

Scott Horton, a professor at Columbia Law School, testified that fuel contracts at Manas raised "red flags" deserving further investigation. What relationship, if any, existed between two major suppliers -- Red Star Enterprises Ltd and Mina Corp -- and the Pentagon needs to be established, he insisted. [Editor’s Note: Horton is a member of the board of the Open Society Institute’s Central Eurasia Project. EurasiaNet operates under OSI’s auspices].

"The transactions surrounding the Manas contracts raise a significant number of red flags, starting with the presence of Red Star, a company which appears out of nowhere to administer hundreds of millions of dollars in supply contracts and which appears to have no significant customers besides the Defense Department," he submitted to the hearing.

"In the end, how our Defense Department contracts for services at Manas makes a statement about how we view Kyrgyzstan," Horton continued. "The solution to this problem is the one I understand that Kyrgyzstan’s interim leader, Roza Otunbayeva, put to Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake in their recent meeting: ’Clean up your act at Manas.’"

"The United States doesn’t need new laws or rules. It simply needs to abide seriously by the laws that are now on the books," Horton added.