7 April 2010: people enter Bishkek's "White House". Photo CC BY-SA 3.0: Wikipedia / Broke04. Some rights reserved.The upheavals that shook Kyrgyzstan in 2005 and again in 2010 played out along a similar scenario. The country’s presidents, Askar Akayev in 2005, Kurmanbek Bakiyev in 2010, were ousted following massive street protests against the corruption and nepotism that marred their tenure.
The two revolutions, as they later became known, differed in that no blood was spilt in 2005, while hundreds died in 2010 in the violence that accompanied Bakiyev’s outster and the ensuing power vacuum. But the general instability in their aftermath had a tremendous effect on the lives of the country’s ethnic minorities, especially Uzbeks, who felt their place in Kyrgyzstan’s future to be no longer secure. To this day, this is such a sensitive topic that local media largely avoids it.
In particular, Akayev’s ouster in 2005 also put an end to his doctrine of encouraging harmony between the country’s many ethnic communities. Under the label “Kyrgyzstan is our common home”, Akayev tried to create a sense of inclusiveness by founding Osh’s Kyrgyz-Uzbek University and Uzbek-language schools in the south of the country, as well as encouraging Uzbek participation in politics. According to Nick Megoran, a lecturer at Newcastle University, the populist nationalists who swept to power after 2005 reversed this course, setting the scene for the violence of 2010.
