Kanybek Bekmurzaev, 32, has a goal this winter. Home from Moscow to visit his elderly mother in southern Kyrgyzstan, he’s using the time to memorize irregular Russian verbs.
Few in Kyrgyzstan would be surprised to learn someone in the government is listening to their phone calls. Government prying is a widely acknowledged legacy of the Soviet era. Among rights activists, however, the concern is more technical: who, exactly, is listening?
One morning last year in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Dilnoza awoke to find her brand-new Toyota Corolla missing. She knew immediately whom to call, and it wasn’t her local police precinct.
Twenty-seven years of arduous and often risky work in state-run factories have bequeathed Olga Kovalenko, a 71-year-old former electrical engineer, a monthly pension of 5,020 soms, or just over $100. “It is enough to buy bread, and almost enough to butter it,” she jokes.
When nationalist MP Kamchybek Tashiev led his supporters over a fence surrounding parliament in early October, both foreign and local executives working in Kyrgyzstan’s mining industry braced for the worst. Throughout the year, the sector has been cloaked in uncertainty, with foreign investors confronting regulatory hassles and nationalization threats.
Democratization activists in Kyrgyzstan are worrying about a roll-back of basic freedoms after a Bishkek court prohibited a film festival from screening a Dutch documentary about homosexual Muslim men.
For a group of prospective North American parents whose attempts to adopt Kyrgyzstani children wound up on the wrong side of a 2009 moratorium on foreign adoptions, the last four years have been a harrowing education in the cut and thrust of Kyrgyz politics.
“I’ll be the first corpse,” says Sveta Filatova when asked about initiatives to terminate Kyrgyzstan’s methadone programs. A heroin addict for 10 years, Filatova has been taking the opioid substitute for three and says it’s changed her life, enabled her to reconnect with family, and hold a job.
A couple of high-profile corruption cases in Kyrgyzstan are sparking concerns that the Central Asian nation is about to hit another pocket of political turbulence.
In the newer suburbs that ring the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, a piece of paper can decide if life will be nasty and possibly short, or relatively comfortable and upwardly mobile.
