I set off from Khorog on 1st May for Kyrgyzstan’s southern city of Osh. This was the day my five-day Kyrgyzstan transit visa was dated to start, a deadline that added a certain frisson given the uncertain state in Spring of this, the only road I could take.
The journey took me through the Pamir mountains and a cut through the snow laden Akbaytal pass some 15,000 feet above sea level. The journey and the arrival in Osh on the 2nd of May warrant a blog post all to themselves. Just remind me to tell you the bit about the Kyrgyz border guard and the leg of mutton.
I had only one contact in Osh: a number I had received from Abdulfattoh, a cousin of the family who had looked after me so well in Dushanbe. Abdulfattoh’s text had simply read: “[telephone number] Tell him I’m friend of Mirasror”.
I still have no idea who Mirasror is. I repeated the message to the voice at the end of the phone line and in short order Hakimjon, a journalist with Radio Free Europe, arrived at my guest house. His lanky form unfolded itself from the back of his black car with precise moves, leaving the door wide open. He stepped aside and gestured to me to get in. As I did so I saw his illuminated and connected laptop on the back seat with Google Translate on screen, ready for my instructions from English into Kyrgyz. There was more than a touch of Mission Impossible in his style and in the manner of our interaction.
I explained that I was in Osh to get a comment from a political analyst about the causes of the seizure of power the previous month, a struggle that left 84 people dead and hundreds injured. President Kurmanbek Bakiyev had been ousted by the political opposition, and was now holed up in Belarus. The self-declared interim government that followed has since been recognized by both the Russian Federation and the USA, but the situation is far from resolved. And the USA depends upon its Kyrgyz base at Manas as a supply line for troops in Afghanistan. Political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan threatens the US’s national security interests.
Hakimjon took me to meet a translator, Elmurad Kasym, whose English was astonishingly good. He had spent a year in LA but that hardly explained his grasp of idiom. He would be perfect for the task. They put their heads together to think of a suitable interviewee. It took them just a few seconds.
Elmurod made the appointment and we drove to the home of Ganijon Khalamatov in a well-to-do street in the northern part of the centre. Though just 61 , my interviewee has a ravaged air about him that I was informed stems from long term illness. We sat cross-legged on cushions around the table in his drawing room and his wife set down the tea.
There is more than one way of telling the story of the country’s descent into political upheaval; Ganijon Khalamatov’s preference is for grand narratives. A theatre director for some forty years, his sweeping histories of ethnic rivalry make him a journalist’s talking head of choice on political developments in the country.
An Uzbek by ethnicity, Ganijon sees himself as an outsider to the national political scene dominated by the 60 per cent of the population that are Kyrgyz.
His explanation is insistently punctuated with one word: “Tribalism!” When you meet an Uzbek, he elaborates, he asks you which part of town you are from. When you meet a Kyrgyz he wants to know from which tribe you are from. The Kyrgyz feel greater allegiance to the tribe than to the nation. Hardly surprising, I reflect, given the arbitrary boundaries by which the modern state was created in the Fifties.
Mountains divide Kyrgyzstan into north and south. The people in the north, he said, include many people from Russia, and make up a goodly proportion of the country’s intelligentsia. The people in the south look to the north for spiritual leadership, tapping into the northerners’ deeper history. This leaves southerners, he said, with an identity crisis.
Northern clans had been ruling the country for a hundred years until the Tulip revolution in 2005 when a southern clan took the reins. Since then the new president and his son Maksim had become bywords for rampant corruption.
In this year’s uprising it was the northerners taking to the streets. Apart from the ousted president’s own tribe, the south has been “semi-neutral” to the seizure of power, he noted.
The political opposition used the economic condition of the population, he said, as a trigger to get them out onto the streets. There had also been recent substantial increases in electricity and heating costs, while the people had thought of Kyrgyzstan as a country of abundant natural energy.
I interrupted his flow to ask Ganijon whether he thought the economic crisis had anything to do with the political crisis. He was dismissive. There has always been an economic crisis, he said, but then he acknowledged that everyone in the country was dependent to some extent on remittances from family members working abroad and that remittances had fallen substantially following the global crisis. Then he insisted that the global crisis had been good for the country because it had actually reduced prices. But prices had fallen, surely, because falling remittances meant many people no longer had the money to buy goods.
His own son worked in Russia as a cook. He observed happily that cooks are always in work as people need to eat.
While acknowledging that there had to be an economic crisis to bring people to the streets, he insisted again that the economy was merely used by the opposition as an excuse, and that the real reason for the seizure of power was tribalism.
The people in the south, he went on, have been doing better economically over the last five years than people in the north. In the south the economic drivers are the trade in goods from China and the trade in drugs. In the north there is perhaps greater reliance on remittances because of the stronger connections (ethnic, linguistic and transport) to Russia.
Even so, he was sure that people in the north could have been brought out onto the streets even without the economic crisis. People have stronger allegiances to their tribe than to dealing with their own personal economic positions, he said sipping his tea. We were diverted a moment translating the English word “china” as used for fine crockery.
So why, I wondered aloud, had it happened now; not a year or two ago or a year or two hence but this year, in the aftermath of economic meltdown.
But for Ganijon the conversation was over. We stopped to eat Mustava – a soup containing meat and rice that gets its name (literally “drunk-heat”) because it used to be made early in the morning with lots of pepper, an antidote for a hangover.
For a less magisterial but insightful view of the roots and timing of the political crisis in Kyrgyzstan, take a look at this analysis by Madeleine Reeves. She argues that
it is poverty, in an absolute sense, as much as inequality that brought people out to demonstrate.
She goes on:
For many households the choice this winter has been a simple and stark one of cutting down on heating or cutting down on food. At the same time, the single primary source of income for many rural and peri-urban families – the remittances sent by family members working in the Russian construction sector – has declined dramatically this year. Many of those who travelled to Russia in search of work in 2008 or 2009 are “working on empty”. My research in the south of the country earlier this year suggests that many families who would ordinarily expect to receive money from family members in Russia once every one or two months have been waiting, without transfers, for a year or more as the financial crisis stopped Russia’s mid-2000s building boom in its tracks.
On the political dimension, she argues:
There has been a crisis of governance in Kyrgyzstan, certainly. But an analysis focused on state failure conceals the extent to which what has occurred is also the product of a glaring social and economic crisis – part of the “long-range” fall-out from the global financial crisis that has pushed many families to the brink.
Making that fall-out feel less long-range is what NOTHING PERSONAL is all about. So let me paraphrase Madeleine Reeves’ conclusion: the global financial crisis triggered Kyrgyzstan’s upheaval and with it the loss of those 84 lives.
If it still feels too distant to matter, let me put it another way. Patriotism features often in public discourse about the economy, often enough in protectionist form. So here’s a question: how patriotic is it for Wall Street to unleash an economic shock wave of planetary proportions, placing in jeopardy not just fragile economies, but fragile states – some like Kyrgyzstan that are crucial to the US’ national security interests?
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