Following the clashes of recent days, many students are leaving the Kyrgyz capital to return to their homes, with a series of charter flights organized directly from Islamabad. Harsh criticism from the rector of the Kurmanov Diplomatic Academy: “We run the risk of becoming a rogue country, where everything is distributed among local clans.”
Bishkek () – The recent night of collective madness in Bishkek, with Clashes in the streets between locals and foreign immigrants, has left a heavy atmosphere of inability to welcome and absence of a true “civil society” in Kyrgyzstan. Many students from Pakistan are leaving the Kyrgyz capital to return home, with a series of charter flights organized directly from Islamabad. The consequences of these dramatic events can be very difficult for Kyrgyz society and its relations with its neighbors, as the rector of the diplomatic academy of the Kyrgyz Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zajnidin Kurmanov, tells Azattyk.
In his opinion, “we run the risk of becoming a rogue country, incapable of welcoming foreigners and with a government without authority, made up of uncivilized people in whom it is not worth investing and to whom tourists do not come, people of lower rank on the international scene, and this has never happened to the Kyrgyz people. The explosion of intolerance threatens to completely undermine the image of Kyrgyzstan, “which demonstrates a general failure in education and civil training,” and reforms are urgently needed “not partial or half-hearted, but taken to the end.” The reforms must not only be political and economic, but deeply social, addressing culture and education, because “the State is a very complex institution, a mechanism with very different factors.”
The risk, according to the dean of diplomats, is “getting carried away by the desire for economic and market reforms, forgetting everything else.” The current conflict creates great tension with Pakistan, a regional superpower with nuclear potential, a country of 300 million inhabitants compared to just over 7 million in Kyrgyzstan. The Pakistanis who come to study in Bishkek come mostly from the less well-off sectors of the population, and in general behave in a very calm and reserved manner, traditionally being anything but turbulent people, while “we behave like racists” Kurmanov complains, noting that “even the police stood by while our people created problems not only for foreigners, but also for our own citizens.”
The foreigners involved in the riots have been repatriated, while the Kyrgyz who got carried away have gone unpunished. The foreign executive calls for awareness of the drift of social behavior in Kyrgyzstan, where, for example, there is a serious increase in domestic violence while “everyone is silent, including ministers of religion, deputies and the police, interventions sporadic actions by security chief Kamčybek Tashiev are not enough. Kurmanov recalls that “I am a history teacher and I often write about our great history, about how we are a people of ancient and noble traditions, but only while we lived in villages and tried to build our civilization.”
Today, however, “we are being administered by cold bureaucrats, the oligarchs have even distributed the seats in Parliament and are changing the laws to prevent anyone other than them from accessing positions of power, without there being protests even in the press”. According to Kurmanov, who speaks “as a political scientist”, the transformation “of democracy into oligarchy” is underway, and Kyrgyzstan risks being reduced to “a political prison.” It is dominated by what is called the kirghizčylyk, a partition of local clans that imposes the difference between superiors and inferiors in social life, where the institutions that regulate the lives of citizens, both political and police, do not function, “everything is in the hands of the corrupt and the bandits.
Kurmanov also recalls that this year marks the centenary of some of the Kyrgyz founding fathers, such as Abdykerim Sydykov, Imanaly Ajdarbekov and others, who gave their lives for the country at the time of revolutions, when the Bolsheviks had no intention of identify the Kyrgyz Republic within the Soviet Union, dividing it among the other territories of Central Asia. Today the Kyrgyz State exists, concludes the historian, “but we lack civilization, we are 7 million people, but we are not true citizens and we are becoming more and more degraded, we must recover the sense of responsibility towards our land.”
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