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Kyrgyzstan
Foreign Relations
Kyrgyzstan's foreign policy has been controlled by two considerations--first,
that the country is too small and too poor to be economically
viable without considerable outside assistance, and second, that
it lies in a volatile corner of the globe, vulnerable to a number
of unpleasant possibilities. These two considerations have influenced
substantially the international position taken by Kyrgyzstan,
especially toward the developed nations and its immediate neighbors.
Akayev and his ministers have traveled the globe tirelessly since
independence, seeking relations and partners. In the first four
years of independence, Akayev visited the United States, Turkey,
Switzerland, Japan, Singapore, and Israel. His emissaries have
also been to Iran, Lebanon, and South Africa, and his prime minister
made a trip through most of Europe. One consequence of these travels
is that Kyrgyzstan is recognized by 120 nations and has diplomatic
relations with sixty-one of them. The United States embassy opened
in Bishkek in February 1992, and a Kyrgyzstani embassy was established
in Washington later that year. Kyrgyzstan is a member of most
major international bodies, including the UN, the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE--see Glossary), the
World Bank, the IMF, and the EBRD. It has also joined the Asian
Development Bank, the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO--see
Glossary), and the Islamic Bank.
Akayev has stressed repeatedly that the principle behind his
search for contacts is strict neutrality; Kyrgyzstan is a small,
relatively resource-poor, remote nation more likely to seek help
from the world community than to contribute to it. Especially
in the first months of independence, Akayev stressed Kyrgyzstan's
intellectual and political potential, hoping to attract the world
community to take risks in an isolated experiment in democracy.
Akayev referred to making his nation an Asian Switzerland, transformed
by a combination of international finance and the light, clean
industry, mostly electronic, that he expected to spring up from
conversion of the Soviet-era defense industries. Largely because
of Akayev's reputation and personality, Kyrgyzstan has become
the largest per capita recipient of foreign aid in the CIS (see
Foreign Investment, this ch.).
However, the decay of the domestic economy and increasing dissatisfaction
among constituents have made the Akayev government distinctly
less optimistic about the degree to which it can rely upon the
distant world community. At the same time, political and social
developments in the republic's immediate area have directed the
republic's attention increasingly to foreign policy concerns much
closer to home.
Data as of March 1996
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