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Kyrgyzstan & Kazakhstan

Country profile Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyzstan is a small mountainous country in Central Asia, bordering Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan and China. It declared its indepence from the USSR in 1991 and became a member of the UN in 1992.

Although Kyrgyzstan is officially a democratic republic, most people are still unable to exercise their political rights and participate in the building of society. In 2005, three members of parliament were assassinated, and the government has had no luck solving the significant problems with corruption.

The same year a series of protests culminated with the so-called "Tulip Revolution" and the ousting of President Akaev. However, the new government controlled by president Kurmanbek Bakiev is still to fulfil it's promises about political and economic reforms.

The economic free fall after independence beset a region that was already on its knees. Central Asia was at the bottom-end of USSR league tables and relied heavily on budgetary transfers from Moscow. The transition to market economy has not been easy on the Kyrgyz people - the drop in the country's GDP level during the 1990s exceeds even the one experienced by the USA during the great depression.

With the social security from the Soviet era gone, many people in Kyrgyzstan are left in extreme poverty. Thus, a lot of children are forced to work to support their families instead of going to school, which threathens to create the first generation of illiterates since the 1920s.

More about Kyrgyzstan

Country profile Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan, formerly part of the Soviet Union, has an emerging economy with massive oil revenues but also shocking poverty.

In spite of the billions brought in by oil, and a special fund set up with oil revenues, one-third of the population live below the UN's US$1 per day absolute poverty line.

And even if Kazakhstan is a poor country it still has far more resources than Kyrgyzstan, and this creates a wider gap between rich and poor than the scarcity of Kyrgyz resources readily allows for.

Kazakhstan is a unitary state with a presidential form of government. The first and current President of the Republic of Kazakhstan – Nursultan Nazarbayev – won the first ever, democratic Presidential Elections in the history of Kazakhstan on December 1, 1991.

But the country's record on democratic reforms is not impressing. Independent observers regularly acuse the Kazakh government of violating human rights and rigged elections. Still, Kazakhstan has been awarded the 2010 chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE).