Soviet Union versus independence

After having visited Tajikistan we look forward to explore Kyrgyzstan. Therefore we will travel north. Kyrgyzstan is a country with about 5 million inhabitants that is located between Kazakhstan and China. When arriving in the capital of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, we see a lot of poverty and protest. We want to find out what’s going on and interrogate the Bishkek residents...

After having a talk with these people we realized that living in Kyrgyzstan isn’t that easy. It all changed in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union. Kyrgyzstan is the second poorest country of Central Asia and it also was the second poorest country of the former Soviet Union. But recovery seems to be far away. Kyrgyzstan wasn’t rich at all in the Soviet-period and won’t be rich in the future. The reason therefore is that Kyrgyzstan lost 98 percent of its export to several other countries of the former Soviet Union after the fall.Organizations such as the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank invested and are still investing a lot of money in Kyrgyzstan to ameliorate the economic life over there. And it seems to help! The economic situation improved until 1998, then it became problematic again… The Kyrgyz government couldn’t guaranty social security and fiscal revenues were missing out. The Kyrgyz government isn’t stable at all,in fact we can compare it to the governments in the Middle East. On the one hand, we have some corrupt government leaders and on the other hand we have the opposition. These two parties are fighting each other constantly. We can take this very literally! Sometimes there are fights in the capital Bishkek with a lot of dead civilians as result…

Our conclusion is that the bad economic situation leads to discord in the country. Another striking element is that a lot of business people blame the government of interrupting the growth of the economy which leads to protests. (I’ve met a little excerpt of these political and economic problems underneath this blog to show you how it is going in real life). Nevertheless, Kyrgyzstan has a lot of valuable resources such as coal, gold, uranium and water resources. But the big problem is that they can’t afford them the equipment and machinery that’s needed to develop these sources.  Yeah, we can say that the economic situation in Kyrgyzstan is very poignant…

To be honest, we were very interested in the political and economic situation of Kyrgyzstan, but after realizing that living in this country can be very dangerous, we’d like to move on and go to Uzbekistan.

If you have any questions… You’re welcome!

Jorick Verschraegen                   
Kyrgyzstan week 2 (Politics)        
               
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75SUUV0aLJk