[BRIEF NOTE] Kyrgyzstan's Travails

[rfmcdonald]

One year after the revolution that drove out Kyrgyzstan's President Askar Akaev, news reports suggest that things are not going well for the landlocked Central Asian republic. Up to a tenth of Kyrgyzstan's population of five million are migrant workers, suplying funds for an impoverished Kyrgyzstan that amount to half the state budget, while a huge foreign debt that is now five times as large as that same state budget. Independence, whether as a democratic state or not, appears in Kyrgyzstan's to be unable to reverse this country's position of dependency.