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This article appears in the April 8, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

LaRouche: Project Democracy
Was `Coup-Coup'd' in Kyrgyzstan

by Jeffrey Steinberg

On March 28, Lyndon LaRouche issued his personal assessment of the ongoing events in the Central Asian, former Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan, characterizing the political crisis that erupted there last week as a Moscow-orchestrated "coup-coup" against the Bush-Cheney Project Democracy apparatus that was deeply involved in the so-called "rainbow revolutions" in Georgia and Ukraine.

The U.S.A.-centered Project Democracy apparatus includes the likes of George Shultz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeleine Albright, and the entire neoconservative apparatus ensconced in the Pentagon civilian bureaucracy and the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Events

On March 24, Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev fled the capital, Bishkek, in the face of opposition demonstrations. In a matter of hours, three bold actions had taken place, that led to the Akayev departure and the regime change:

First, former Kyrgyz security chief Gen. Felix Kulov, a longtime KGB asset, was freed from jail. He would play a pivotal role in all the succeeding events.

Next, a group of no more than 200 demonstrators took over the "White House"—the government headquarters building. Eyewitnesses to the events, interviewed by EIR, confirmed that security personnel guarding the building disappeared as soon as the demonstrators arrived, thus offering no interference with the takeover.

Finally, the same group of demonstrators took over the national television station.

The Kyrgyz Supreme Court nullified the results of the recent parliamentary elections of Feb. 27 and March 13, and appointed Kulov and former Prime Minister Kurmanbek Bakiyev to head up a new interim government. After several nights of looting and violence, widely viewed as linked to drug-mafia networks that operate in Kyrgyzstan's southern region, which abuts the Fergana Valley, order was restored to the Central Asian republic. Former President Akayev, who initially fled to Kazakstan, later arrived in Moscow. He has not yet resigned his post, and has challenged the legitimacy of what one observer described as a "palace coup by a faction of the security services."

The Reaction

Following these rapid-fire events, other so-called opposition figures expressed shock at the Kulov-Bakiyev takeover, complaining openly that the government change occurred "too quickly," "depriving" the Kyrgyz people of the kind of slow-motion putsch that had played out in Georgia and Ukraine, under the close sponsorship of such outside meddling agencies as the Soros Open Society Institute, the Eurasia Foundation, the International Republican Institute (IRI), Freedom House, and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI). All of these organizations, according to one well-placed U.S. intelligence official, are now scrambling to figure out what happened, and how they were outflanked so quickly.

In effect, LaRouche concluded, Russian President Vladimir Putin, a renowned black belt in judo, decided to launch a stealth intervention, to preempt the already unfolding Western coup schemes. It was a classic judo move—precisely the kind of asymmetric warfare response to a pattern of U.S.-led Western provocations in Russia's Near Abroad that LaRouche had been anticipating from Moscow. As LaRouche put it bluntly, the Project Democracy effort got "coup coup'd."

Indeed, opposition leaders involved in the March 24 preemptive events, had travelled to Moscow in the weeks preceding the government change, and had met with Kremlin officials. President Akayev, a former student of noted Soviet-era dissident Andrei Sakharov, and a reform-minded politician who openly promoted Kyrgyzstan's role in a new Eurasian Silk Road, had been warning for months that there were plans afoot for his ouster from power. There had been no shortage of warnings, widely acknowledged in Moscow, that Kyrgyzstan had been already targetted for the next Anglo-American sponsored "rainbow revolution."

'The Hindu' Corroborates

On March 29, the prestigious Indian daily, The Hindu, published an article by former foreign service officer M.K. Bhadrakumar, which provided added details, corroborating key elements of the LaRouche assessment. The author began by asserting, "In Kyrgyzstan, there have been deviations from the revolutionary script choreographed in Washington and finessed in Georgia and Ukraine." For one thing, he noted, "the two main protagonists—the leaderships in Bishkek and Moscow—prepared themselves for the revolution."

Bhadrakumar continued, "A crucial factor has been Moscow's approach to the impending revolution. It was flawless. Moscow had evidently drawn its conclusions about what happened in Ukraine. It had no problems with Mr. Akayev remaining in power, but never displayed its options. It took care not to be vilified as being against democracy and liberty in Kyrgyzstan. In fact, Moscow even hosted visits by the Kyrgyz opposition. This inability to monopolize the Opposition deprived the U.S. of a crucial pre-requisite of the 'color' revolution—a unified opposition, as in Georgia or Ukraine, under a single leader."

As Bhadrakumar noted, shortly after Bakiyev was appointed as the interim leader, Russian Prime Minister Putin declared, "We know these people pretty well and they have done quite a lot to establish good relations between Russia and Kyrgyzstan."

'Storm Over Asia'

Despite the setback to the Project Democracy gang, via the Russian-backed "coup-coup," the situation on the ground in Kyrgyzstan is still unfolding, and the "usual suspects" in Washington and London have in no way abandoned their longstanding plans to unleash what LaRouche labelled, in a prophetic 1999 documentary, a "Storm Over Asia."

Both the Soros foundations and the Eurasia Foundation have been heavily investing in the opposition in the southern part of the country, an area increasingly dominated by growing drug mafias linked to the drug lords of Afghanistan, and strong Islamist networks, like the IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) of the neighboring state. Kyrgyzstan neighbors the autonomous region of Xinjiang in China, as well as the Uzbekistan Fergana Valley, the latter recently described by George Soros as the most valuable piece of real estate on the planet.

The Russian move, LaRouche advised, may emerge as part of a larger effort by Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran, to encircle and contain the trouble emanating from the NATO-occupied Afghanistan, which has once again emerged as the opium hub of Eurasia.

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