A malaise is settling over this country as the uprising a week ago begins to look less like a democratically inspired revolution and more like a garden-variety coup, with a handful of seasoned politicians vying for the spoils of the ousted government.
"Let's not pretend that what happened here was democratic," said Edil Baisalov, one of the country's best-known democracy advocates, speaking to clearly disheartened students beneath huge Soviet-era portraits of Lenin, Marx and Engels in the auditorium of what has been the American University since 1997.
Baisalov bemoaned what he said Kyrgyzstan lost out on when the presidential palace was stormed and President Askar Akayev fled: the kind of cathartic national experience that he witnessed in Ukraine as its Orange Revolution unfolded. That was a slow-building, well-organized event that took two months to reach a successful conclusion.
"What Ukraine went through was very important to their democratic development," he said. "We didn't have that great emotional experience of civic education."
But as it seems to be turning out, the Kyrgyz experience could have a chilling effect on political freedoms in the region at least equal to its inspiration of pro-democracy activists. The squabbling that came out of the country's "revolution" reveals a clearly visible fracture dividing northerners from southerners, and many less obvious fissures fragmenting those groups even more. People who have won a measure of influence, meanwhile, are appointing family and friends to jobs in keeping with Kyrgyzstan's age-old tribal customs.
Kyrgyzstan's political analysts say that some good is still likely to emerge.
They say the country's future leaders have been put on notice that popular political movements are possible and that the mechanisms to make them happen are in place.
But such an outcome is far from the hopes that drove the uprising. It started as separate revolts in the country's southern provinces, where clans of politicians disqualified from the recent parliamentary elections occupied government buildings. The discontent spread to other parts of the country as the flawed elections unfolded, and opposition politicians in the north channeled the upset into a national movement.
Mamatkazy Kaparov, 26, a law student at Kyrgyzstan's National University in Bishkek, helped found KelKel, a student movement modeled on the Serbian Otpor youth movement, which contributed to Slobodan Milosevic's fall. The Kyrgyz students picked yellow as their color and lemons as their symbol after a popular student magazine. For them, this was meant to have been their Lemon Revolution.
But their dream of a camera-ready peaceful revolution was overtaken by events. Thugs attacked the crowds, prompting rock-throwing demonstrators to turn on the unarmed security forces guarding the capital's presidential compound. The guards fled, the rock throwers broke inside, and the president fled, all in a matter of a few hours.
Not even the students' yellow had time to catch on: some protesters wore pink.
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