Kyrgyz still waiting for police reform

President Zhaparov raises the issue again. As in Soviet times, the police remain a “punitive” force. The money of international organizations is only spent on riot control activities. The officers are at the service of the powerful on duty. The first objective: to increase patrols in the streets.

Moscow () – For more than 20 years, police reform has been a pending issue in Kyrgyzstan. The objective of the project is to train police forces that the population can trust. In recent days, it was President Zhaparov who took up the issue, within the framework of the fundamental objectives of the fight against corruption in the country.

As early as 2002, the government had declared that police reform was essential: on March 17 of that year, militiamen opened fire on a crowd of protesters in the town of Aksy; the victims defended a detained deputy. The authorities requested the collaboration of international organizations, from the OSCE to the UN, in order to have material and technical assistance that would allow the Kyrgyz police to effectively combat crime and guarantee security at all levels. However, humanitarian and civil activists denounce the lack of concrete results in this twenty-year period, and from the Ministry of the Interior they complain of the chronic lack of adequate financing.

The Aksy massacre ended with six deaths and many injuries, but it seems that the lesson was not enough. The then president Askar Akaev had invited many international experts to change the functioning of the militia, which was only used to forceful tactics and repression. According to activist Aziza Abdirasulova, habits have not changed, and the police remain a political weapon that stands between the people and the ruling caste: “There have been many other bloodsheds, and the factions in power have always followed one another with the use of force, even in October 2020, when it seemed that the police had become a little more civilized; civil society must pay close attention to this issue.”

According to the activists, the lack of means makes it impossible to sustain adequate training programs for new police officers. On the other hand, the habit of politicians using the police to defend their own partisan interests has become chronic. In many cases, the reforms have been limited to changes of name and facade, and at most a few training expeditions in Georgia or Turkey.

As Aziza says, “we have remained in a way of conceiving the police typical of the Soviet era, when it was only a punitive body. And this, despite the millions of dollars donated by international entities”; for example, ” The OSCE has allocated at least 20 million, with which they have bought flash grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets used in demonstrations.”

The chairman of the Social Committee of the Ministry of the Interior, Yalkun Daudov, repeats that much more funds are needed to achieve real results: “In Georgia, for example, billions of dollars have been invested in reforming the police; funds are needed very important, it is not an easy job, and it is no use continuing to kick the policemen accusing them of all social problems, while their possibilities are very limited”. As he explained, in Bishkek each neighborhood policeman answers 5-6 thousand people, and due to limited resources the shortage of personnel is chronic and profound. In fact, the international sponsors themselves have so far been unable to make a full assessment of the reform attempts.

The head of the Kyrgyz Interior Minister’s press office, Tilek Otorov, tries to be a little more optimistic: “Lately we have trained the tourist police forces and the digitization of the investigation offices continues, we have many more mobile patrols and little by little we are completing the necessary technical and material base; we have provided street agents with uniforms equipped with video cameras, and we have reformed the forces dedicated to the fight against organized crime”.