On March 24, 2005, after nearly a decade and a half of independence, people power finally made a breakthrough in Central Asia, a region many observers had believed to be a bastion of stable authoritarian regimes. Over 10,000 demonstrators turned out in the capital city of Kyrgyzstan to protest falsified elections. Within hours they had overrun the government house, shouting “Down with the Akaev clans,” and forced the Kyrgyz president to flee. The regime had tampered with elections several times before, but this time the democratic opposition and dozens of others, inspired by the successful examples of peaceful democratic revolutions in Georgia in November 2003, and in the Ukraine in December 2004, led protests around the country, and thousands followed. Because I submitted the final draft of this book in the fall of 2004, this epilogue will briefly address these recent dramaticevents.

Several lessons can be learned from the recent events. First, clan-based systems corrupt regime institutions and become highly unstable when resources are declining and one clan strives for hegemony. The February 2005 elections were merely the catalyst. The fundamental cause of the political crisis was the Akaev regime's excessive, clan-based corruption. As argued in previous chapters, for the past decade Akaev has stripped state coffers and “privatized” state enterprises in order to feed his clan of relatives and friends, his wife's clan, and their closest cronies.