Word: kyrgyzstan
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...Kyrgyzstan is as strange as the sound of its name. For one thing, it's the only nation in the world to host military bases for both the U.S. and Russia. And while it sought - and eventually won - a nearly fourfold rent increase from the Pentagon last year for continued American use of the Manas air base, outside the capital, Bishkek, there was another condition: that the U.S. military stop calling it a base. The U.S. agreed, and so since last summer the busy hub has been officially known as the Transit Center at Manas - a Greyhound bus terminal...
...traditions of an earlier era. Though now illegal, the distasteful custom of wife-kidnapping - where a woman is unsuspectingly and often forcibly seized and taken to her husband-to-be's home - perseveres in parts of the country. (See a TIME piece on whether Moscow subverted the upheaval in Kyrgyzstan...
...better control populations of ethnic minorities has left the independent states of Central Asia a mess of territorial disputes. The populous and staunchly Muslim Ferghana Valley, where Osh lies, had been fragmented over the decades by Moscow and, after 1991, fell within the borders of independent Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. This has led to all sorts of confusion and conflict. Bloody riots in Osh in 1990 between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz marred the run-up to independence; political spats over everything from border troop movements to the sensitive issue of water access blow hot and cold between the region...
Initially, Kyrgyzstan stood out among the newly independent Central Asian republics for its sound, multi-party democratic system. While its neighbors returned to authoritarian rule, built on networks of patronage run by Soviet apparatchiks of old, Kyrgyzstan became relatively open, buoyed in particular by an outspoken civil society. However, by the mid-1990s, Askar Akayev, president since the republic's inception, took an autocratic turn. He shielded business monopolies owned by friends and family and cracked down on journalists who pried into allegations of corruption - all the while, Kyrgyzstan's economy floundered, its Soviet-era industry and agriculture withering away...
...those promises. His regime continued an earlier practice of playing foreign powers against each other - accepting lavish handouts from both Washington and Moscow to accommodate their military installations on its soil, while also tying up lucrative infrastructure projects with Chinese state companies. Yet, by some estimates, half of Kyrgyzstan's economy is tied to the black market; there are signs also of deepening links with organized crime and drug running from Afghanistan and Tajikistan. International monitors questioned the fairness of elections held last July, while dissidents and journalists were often arrested or disappeared. Discontent over recent allegations of corruption came...