In a small room with two desks and three chairs it is surprisingly easy to lose Ismayil Kadyrov. But he’s there, behind a tall pile of papers, correcting another document translated from Russian to Kyrgyz. “At every step I come across incorrectly translated documents,” he says. “We don’t have enough time, we work days and nights!” Pointing at a paper covered in red ink marks, he sighs.
Amid a lingering climate of fear hanging over southern Kyrgyzstan, journalists there are embracing a Soviet-style survival tactic: rather than run the risk of reprisals for writing freely, they are self-censoring and reporting only on what are considered safe topics.
Issues of Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) rights have been much in the news in the former Soviet Union over the past year. In Russia and Ukraine, proposed legislation criminalizing "homosexual propaganda," or just about any discussion of homosexuality in front of minors, threatens to roll back the boundaries of tolerance for the LGBT community.
Lawmakers in Kyrgyzstan are again trying to force Toronto-based Centerra Gold, the country’s largest foreign investor, to renegotiate the terms of a mining deal that generates up to 12 percent of GDP. Any new operating contract would be the third for the country’s flagship Kumtor Gold Mine in less than a decade.
One of Central Asia’s most respected independent news outlets is taking a government agency in Kyrgyzstan to court for blocking its website. The trial is scheduled to begin in Bishkek later this week.
When Osh’s Uzbek Music and Drama Theater opened its 94th season last month, the actors looked nervously into the audience. They had not celebrated an opening night for three years, since before the theater was partially burned amid 2010’s ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan.
