Last week, Inside the Cocoon wrote about an Atlantic Council-sponsored conference on Kyrgyzstan and the potential for a conflict of interest. So now that the conference is over, were those concerns borne out? The answer depends on who you talk to.
The controversy centered on Latvian financier Valeri Belokon, who provided funds to help make the conference, titled Kyrgyzstan since 2010: Progress, Problems and Opportunities, possible. Belokon is under investigation in Kyrgyzstan for money-laundering, thus his sponsorship was seen by some participants as potentially compromising the event’s underlying purpose of nudging Bishkek in a westward direction.
The chief organizer, Ambassador Ross Wilson of the Atlantic Council, called the meeting a success, describing the full day of discussions on May 15 as “honest and straight-forward.”
“The presence of Belokon did not in any way influence the conversation,” Wilson stated. His portrayal of the discussions was generally echoed by other participants at the event.
Even so, the conference may end up aggravating already contentious relations between Kyrgyzstan and Latvia. A Kyrgyz participant at the conference, Baktybek Abdirisaev, offered scathing criticism of Belokon and Latvia in a letter sent to Ambassador Wilson and other event attendees, and made available to EurasiaNet.org.
Abdrisaev called the conference “counterproductive” and assailed Belokon as “the banker who empowered [Kyrgyzstan’s] former dictator Kurmanbek Bakiyev and who helped Bakiyev and his henchmen move hundreds of millions of dollars in assets out of our country as the regime collapsed in April 2010.” Belokon vehemently denies any wrongdoing.
A former Kyrgyz envoy to the United States, Abdrisaev later took aim at the Latvian government for granting asylum to “fugitives from [Kyrgyz] justice deeply attached to the Bakiyev regime,” and for not cooperating with a Kyrgyz investigation into suspected money laundering. He closed his letter with an appeal to Latvian leaders to help Kyrgyz officials “in their pursuit of the money which was pilfered from them.”
While Abdrisaev described his letter as a “profoundly personal” initiative, the views he expressed are believed to be widely shared by members of the Kyrgyz government. “Kyrgyz officials allege that the Latvian government is hindering the [money-laundering] investigation,” said Tom Mayne, a researcher for the watchdog organization Global Witness, which has carried out its own investigation into Kyrgyz money-laundering during the Bakiyev era.
So the friends of Kyrgyzstan, it would seem, are facing a fresh challenge in the coming weeks; tamping down the rancor in Kyrgyz-Latvian relations.
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