Bishkek Letter: Bishkek marches, like freedom of speech, are still a novelty. The march from Victory Square in the Kyrgyzstan capital to the presidential residence in ways resembled a carnival, writes Mark Godfrey
Protesters and police had compromised peacefully in blocking off roads with ribbons coloured the same tulip red as the bracelets and headbands worn by many marchers. As if to show this was a protest of democrats - under the tulip red of Kyrgyzstan's flag rather than the red of the old Soviet regime - others carried bunches of balloons that were all the colours of the rainbow.
After the national anthem and a few speeches, the bulk of the 70,000-strong crowd melted into the afternoon heat.
They had made their point and promised to return to remind President Kurmanbek Bakiev that he is repeating the mistakes of Askar Akeyev, the man he helped to unseat during last year's Tulip Revolution, a week of chaos which shocked as much as liberated this mountainous nation.
An avuncular-looking economist with carefully styled steel-grey hair, Bakiev is accused of breaking the promises he made before winning last year's presidential election in a landslide. Wages and prices have gone in the wrong directions under Bakiev's rule, claim farmers who were among the protesters. Corruption and crime have worsened, they say - and there has been no constitutional reform.
Bakiev had promised to turn some of the powers of the president over to the prime minister and parliament. Kyrgyzstan, say protesters, should move away from the Russian model of a powerful president who ditches blame for poor governance on to expendable ministers.
Reform has lagged, but the Tulip Revolution bequeathed Kyrgyzstan an imperfect democracy that grants freedoms denied by generations of authoritarian leaders hand-picked by Moscow. The vast majority who stayed home from the recent protests agree on that, but they are not entirely confident in the power of protest or the future of free speech.
"I don't think [ the protests] will have any effect," says Aigerima Sakebaev, a trainee university lecturer, before admitting she didn't join the protesters because management at her university had warned staff and students that there would be consequences for anyone seen on the TV news protesting.
A year earlier, Aigerima (22) and her colleagues were not restrained from taking a free tour of a deserted presidential palace. "It was empty, they [ protesters] had taken everything. There were no police around, you could go anywhere and do anything in Bishkek then," says Aigerima, who saves a portion of her monthly salary of $50 (€39) to finance a dream to travel beyond Kyrgyzstan.
Today, as courts haggle over sentences for the worst of the looters, Bakiev is ensconced in the well-fortified White House - renewed with Italian furnishings, say locals - and the police are in control again.
That's part of Bakiev's problem. Walking down a mid-morning street in downtown Bishkek, it seemed a commonplace occurrence to watch a confrontation between an officer and a motorist, who was gesticulating wildly that he'd done nothing wrong. After a few minutes of this, the driver, with a knowing gasp of exasperation, slipped the policeman 100 som (about €2) for the return of his driver's licence.
Police are to be avoided in Bishkek. It's harder to spot the criminals, but there are plenty of beefy men driving over-sized Mercedes. Crime and politics are intimately connected, and the two worlds depend on each other.
A recently murdered member of parliament was the leader of a criminal gang which allegedly provided muscle to powerful politicians.
While it seeks to solve internal problems, Kyrgyzstan is riven by new commitments to the West and historical ties to Russia. Graduates say they want a job, a better job, or a chance to see the US or Europe. Few, apart from a large ethnic Russian population, want to go to Russia.
However the government has little confidence or connections in Washington. Most leaders were groomed by the old Soviet system, and feel most comfortable going to Moscow for advice or help.
Washington, which helped organise international loans and debt relief for Bakiev's government, has been rewarded with a demand for 100 per cent more in rent for an airbase outside Bishkek used by the Pentagon to service its military campaign in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Kyrgyzstan's relationship with a third country may explain a puzzling absence of proof of the shocking poverty indices assigned to its population by development agencies.
Stationery and clothes from China are starting to crowd out Russian alternatives in the bazaars which have sprung up in parks and underground passageways, many of them staffed by a growing percentage of Bishkek's large university population.
A day's drive south of Bishkek, China is the source of goods smuggled into the country and re-exported to neighbouring states thanks to Kyrgyzstan's notoriously corruptible customs service and a low tariff regime designed to encourage the local manufacturing sector.
Figures from the UN and Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe which put more than half the population below the poverty line don't take into account a thriving black economy, says Aslan Alykulov, editor of the Bishkek-based Times Of Central Asia newspaper.
"More developed countries wouldn't have survived the Tulip Revolution, but Kyrgyzstan did because so much of the economy is underground," he says.
Kyrgyzstan is poor and corrupt compared to the ambitions of its youth, but it is one of the few democracies in a region more used to oppressive and corrupt rulers. The giddy politeness with which its people are testing their new freedoms may be an example for neighbouring countries to follow.
But that may be expecting too much. Prickly relations with neighbouring Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan can partly be explained by the insecurity of regimes which have ruled their populations with an unrelenting mix of authoritarianism and corruption since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Demonstrations of people power, even those as polite as those in Bishkek recently, seem brave by comparison.