-
1 of 18The photographs in this series were drawn from photographer William Daniels' Kyrgyzstan project, called Faded Tulips, which he has been working on since 2007. 2007. During Eid ul-Fitr, several thousand Muslims prayed in front of the Bishkek parliament building and a statue of Lenin.William Daniels -
2 of 182007. Members of the Social Democrat party campaign in Bishkek during parliamentary elections.William Daniels -
3 of 182007. A political rally in Naryn for the president's party, Ak Jol ("Bright Path"), during the parliamentary elections. The crowd was mostly made up of people working for the administration, who were "invited" to attend the rally.William Daniels -
4 of 182007. A parliamentary election official oversees voting in a village outside Bishkek. Some international election observers noted a number of voting irregularities.William Daniels -
5 of 182008. A video screen illuminates Bishkek's main square.William Daniels -
6 of 182008. Bus passengers in Osh.William Daniels -
7 of 182008. Lev Tolstoy street in Bishkek is nicknamed "the street of the unemployed" because poor day laborers from the provinces, such as Kurman (right), come here to find work, which if they are lucky enough to get it, pays only around 5 euros a day.William Daniels -
8 of 182008. Outside of Bishkek, men try to repair an old Soviet-era coal plant.William Daniels -
9 of 182008. A woman works at the Mailuu Suu factory in the Djalalabad region. During Soviet times, most of the electric lightbulbs in the USSR were made here. Today, only one third of the factory is still working and many workers haven't been paid for months.William Daniels -
10 of 182009. Men take part in a demonstration against President Bakiyev in Bishkek.William Daniels -
11 of 182009. Human rights activist Maxim Kuleshov is violently arrested at a protest calling for the resignation of President Bakiyev in Bishkek. Later Kuleshov was placed in the city's psychiatric facility, which once housed Soviet dissidents.William Daniels -
12 of 182009. Jenish downs a glass of vodka. He works on the market on Bishkek's Lev Tolstoy Steet, nicknamed "the street of the unemployed." In winter he lives underground, close to the hot water pipelines.William Daniels -
13 of 182009. Men unload UN World Food Program sacks of wheat flour in the south of the country.William Daniels -
14 of 182009. Coal miners in Tash Kumyr. The town used to be a major industrial center, but now struggles to survive.William Daniels -
15 of 182010. A woman holds a portrait of her husband, a victim of the April 2010 uprising. He was shot and killed by snipers on the roof of the White House, the presidential building in Bishkek, as he attempted to film the uprising.William Daniels -
16 of 182010. Men clean up the White House in Bishkek following the April uprising, during which President Bakiyev was overthrown and the presidential palace was looted and set on fire.William Daniels -
17 of 182010. The personal bodyguards of toppled President Bakiyev shoot into the air in an attempt to calm down anti-Bakiyev demonstrators in Osh, in April 2010. Bakiyev later escaped the city and flew to Kazakhstan.William Daniels -
18 of 182010. A woman stands inside a polling station in a school in Osh on the day of a constitutional referendum. Some of the buildings had been extensively damaged during fighting between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks.William Daniels
Among the ‘stans of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan is something of an outlier. Remote and mountainous, the tiny republic is home to the region’s only parliamentary democracy and a vibrant civil society. Not once, but twice, its people have taken to the streets to force out their rulers—a considerable exception in a part of the world dominated by iron-fisted, post-Soviet apparatchiks.
Yet Kyrgyzstan is also a microcosm of Central Asia as a whole. A significant proportion of its impoverished population ekes out a living as migrant labor abroad. The rusted traces of a Soviet past line its cities and towns, while Moscow’s long history of gerrymandering borders and resettling whole communities gives it a complex, volatile ethnic make-up. Tensions between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in the south of the country flared in 2010 and riots led to as many as 2,000 deaths. Its legacy still smolders.
Over the span of some four years, French photographer William Daniels chronicled Kyrgyzstan’s tumultuous progress. His work, entitled Faded Tulips, documents the false dawn of democracy: in 2005, the country’s quasi-authoritarian regime was toppled in an uprising hailed the “Tulip revolution.” But the man drafted in to oversee democracy’s blooming across the Central Asian steppe—President Kurmanbek Bakiyev—proved to be cut from the same cloth as petty despots elsewhere in the region.
Allegations of corruption mounted as well as reports of voter fraud and intimidation of dissidents and the media. In 2007, Daniels arrived in a Kyrgyzstan where the illusion of democratic change was beginning to slip. He was on hand in 2010 when protests broke out against the Bakiyev regime, eventually forcing the putative strongman to flee into exile in Russia. Months later, as an interim government tried to right Kyrgyzstan’s listing ship, ethnic riots between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in the country’s south led to hundreds of deaths and a geo-political crisis. Neighboring countries closed their borders, while up to 400,000 people—mostly Uzbeks—fled their homes. Daniels’ pictures of charred, gutted neighborhoods in the southern city of Osh—an ancient Silk Road town that’s long been a rich crossroads of peoples and faiths—bear stark testament to how lifelong neighbors can wake up one day as enemies. “I particularly tried to understand how this small country could descend so quickly into extreme violence,” Daniels says.
But while much has yet to be reconciled following that spasm of violence, there are real glimmers of hope in Kyrgyzstan. The country’s seemingly successful transition into a multi-party parliamentary system has weaned it off the grip of a domineering executive—the main impediment for real political change elsewhere in Central Asia. But the country’s economy is still in desperate shape, and new President Almazbek Atambayev, who has so far engendered cautious optimism among most analysts, has to steer Kyrgyzstan through a maze of competing American, Russian and Chinese interests. “We will see how and where Atambayev will lead the country,” says Daniels. His photos, though, show a Kyrgyzstan as haunted by the past as it is uncertain for its future.
William Daniels is a photographer based in Paris. See more of his work here. He is currently engaged in a crowdfunding effort to publish Faded Tulips as a book; the drive is still ongoing, but the funding goal was reached while Daniels was reporting for TIME in Syria. Read about his harrowing escape from that situation here on LightBox.
Sign up for Inside TIME. Be the first to see the new cover of TIME and get our most compelling stories delivered straight to your inbox.
