In Kyrgyzstan, stories about the former president’s naughty son Maxim Bakiyev receive about as many column inches as the royal family in Britain’s tabloids. So, nodding to the temptation, this one is purely for the juice.
Maxim, that infamous playboy, surrounded himself with groveling businessmen and politicians in his father’s kingdom, but that did not buy him their loyalty, suggests another wikileaked cable available on the Russky Reporter website.
The cable describes an ostentatious opening party for Maxim’s newest resort on Lake Issyk-Kul in June 2009:
The main focus of the event was not the hotel, which nearly all attendees commented was done shoddily and in poor taste, but Maxim and his entourage. Maxim arrived at a nearby airport in his private plane, traveled to the hotel in a large motorcade with police escort, and moved around the party itself with eight bodyguards. Maxim mingled among the guests with his official wife Aijana (he is well known to have another girlfriend) on one side and Prime Minister Igor Chudinov on the other. Neither Aijana nor Chudinov looked happy to be there.
The author, former US Charge d’Affaires Lee Litzenberger, suggested throughout the cable that Maxim was widely disliked by his anxious coterie of businessmen, with one “otherwise loyal” interlocutor suggesting “the President is letting his son get away with too much -- and that these excesses will hurt the family and country in the end.”
Many businessmen appeared eager to curry favor with Maxim, and waited in nervous anticipation for the person they called "the boss" to arrive. The businessmen stood at attention when Maxim came near, but many then made snide comments after he moved on. One businessman asked: "What kind of country are we living in when all of us, including poor Igor (Chudinov), have to kiss up to the son just to stay in business?"
Many here in Kyrgyzstan suspect Maxim, from his no-doubt comfortable perch in British exile, is still calling the shots, or at least wields enough power to stoke the ongoing instability. That looks unlikely, especially considering he was so unpopular that a businessman told Litzenberger “Maxim may well need his security detail after taking over the businesses of so many people in the country.”
As entertaining as it is, the cable raises one serious question: With warnings like these, why was Litzenberger’s embassy so caught off guard when the Bakiyev clan was ousted this April?
David Trilling is Eurasianet’s managing editor.
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