By the late 1980s, economic disparities between the Uzbek and Kyrgyz populations were becoming sharper. The Uzbeks, traditionally traders and arable farmers, benefited from the market conditions of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. The Kyrgyz, most of whom were animal herders, suffered as the collective farms were broken up and they lost their jobs and housing. Uzbeks feared for their future in an independent Kyrgyzstan where ethnic Kyrgyz would dominate politics; although Uzbeks accounted for over a quarter of the population of southern Kyrgyzstan in 1990 (and about half the population of Osh), they held only 4 percent of official posts. In the spring of 1990, an Uzbek nationalist group petitioned the oblast government for greater representation and freedom for Uzbek-language schools, publications, and culture. Meanwhile, a Kyrgyz nationalist group called for the redistribution of land from an Uzbek collective farm. The authorities decided to reallocate most of the land to Kyrgyz farmers with little compensation to the Uzbeks.
Clashes between gangs of Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, many of them young and some intoxicated, began on June 4, 1990, in the town of Uzgen, and soon spread to Osh, thirty-five miles away. The local militsiya (police) stepped in, sometimes with excessive force; some policemen supported their own ethnic group by taking part in the riots. In the countryside, Kyrgyz herders on horseback terrorized Uzbek farmers and attacked chaikhanas, the traditional Uzbek teahouses. Under orders from Gorbachev, army units moved in to Osh and Uzgen, and closed the border with the Uzbek SSR to stop Uzbeks joining the conflict. Official estimates from the three days of fighting put the death toll at more than 300, although unofficial estimates claim it was closer to 1,000. In 1991, the government of newly independent Kyrgyzstan held trials for 48 accused, most of them ethnic Kyrgyz, on charges of murder, rape, arson, destruction of property, and other crimes; 46 were convicted and sentenced.
Despite their symbolism, the trials did not mark a new phase in ethnic relations in the south. Under President Askar Akayev, ethnic Kyrgyz dominated both the national government in Bishkek and the regional and local administrations in the south, including the police and the tax authorities. Although Uzbeks remained dominant in business and trade, they suffered along with the Kyrgyz and other ethnic groups in the economic collapse of the 1990s. In such a volatile situation, government-owned and private media outlets had a crucial role to play. If they succumbed to nationalist or ethnic rhetoric, they could exacerbate tensions. If they served as a voice of reason, they could help build bridges between the ethnic groups. The 1990 riots had unnerved Western governments who feared that Central Asia could descend into the kind of ethnic and religious conflict that wracked the former Yugoslavia. Foreign aid came flowing in to Kyrgyzstan—to develop a market economy, to privatize state-owned property, to draft laws and train legislators and judges, to build civil society, and to support media and raise professional standards in journalism. The Osh Media Resource Center was one of these initiatives.
Let’s Make a Deal
Kuban and I spent two days visiting newspapers and TV stations. The media owners were concerned about staying in business: the economy was in a slump, businesses were not buying advertising, and local government officials and the mafia were squeezing them for payoffs. The journalists were concerned about poor pay and working conditions. Most earned less than $50 a month, and needed two or three jobs to put food on the table. Both groups welcomed opportunities for training, agreeing that standards in the profession needed to be raised. Everyone said it was important for Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Russian media to work harmoniously together. Memories of the June 1990 clashes were still vivid.
After Kuban left, I hired a student from Osh State University as my interpreter and began planning for the center. The library director, Ismailova Ibragimovna, was proving to be a tough negotiator. The library’s budget had been slashed, and she was struggling to pay the staff and maintain the building. There was no money for books and newspaper and magazine subscriptions. A new center with computers, radio equipment, satellite TV and—perhaps most exciting of all in 1995—an Internet connection, promised to bring in new patrons and raise the profile of the library with the oblast administration. UNESCO and USIS had agreed to fund the newspaper and magazine subscriptions. I expected Ibragimovna to enthusiastically support the project.
Instead, she held out for more. Perhaps she thought the donors had deep pockets; perhaps she thought she could play hardball with a green Westerner on his first job in Central Asia. The agreement with USIS and UNESCO was not in writing, and did not specify the size or location of the room for the center. Ibragimovna started by showing me a windowless second-floor room, not much larger than a broom closet. She claimed all other rooms in the library were occupied. Even a casual visitor would have concluded otherwise because several rooms were, if not exactly unoccupied, at least underused. When you opened the door, a couple of staff members invited you to join them for tea; there were no shelves, typewriters, and certainly no books in the room. I decided to call Ibragimovna’s bluff and said that the room she offered was unsatisfactory. The center had to be located in a larger room with windows on the first floor. The donors would pay for repairs and painting, new desks and furniture, and install a security system.
Ibragimova thought for a moment. “Maybe I can find such a room,” she said. “But it will not be easy. I know you need to hire a manager for the center. My daughter needs a job.”
I suppose I should not have been shocked, but this was the first time I had come face-to-face with an attempt to parlay influence into a job. And the request needs to be put into cultural context. In Kyrgyz society, kinship ties are the ones that really bind. Your family comes first, then your tribe or clan. In a traditional nomadic society, there’s a duty to help a family member who falls sick or loses livestock in a winter storm. However, when this value system moves from the yurts and mountain pastures to the city, to government agencies, universities, and private companies, it can breed corruption and nepotism—jobs, government contracts, and sweet business deals for relatives, bribes for university admission and diplomas, and payoffs to officials and the police. In the city, the extended family grows to include political supporters and business associates.
Politicians in Central Asia are regularly accused of corruption for using their positions to enrich themselves and their relatives. Often their response, at least in private, is that they are upholding traditional values. Because they had the ability or good fortune to attain power and wealth, it is now their responsibility to help less fortunate family members. How far this responsibility goes is another matter. Is it a moral duty to find a job for a family member who lacks the basic qualifications? To bribe a judge to get your brother off on a drug-trafficking charge? To award a government contract or a commercial network TV license to your daughter? Still, the conflict in value systems is real enough. Conduct that in the West would be considered corrupt or at least ethically questionable may be regarded as a moral duty in Central Asia. In other words, not doing whatever you can to help relatives may be unethical.
I agreed to meet Ibragimovna’s daughter. She was a second-year university student with no background in journalism and no interest in the field. I gave her as much advice as I could muster on a career in retail fashion. I promised to revise her résumé and have it translated into English. She told her mother how helpful I had been and said she wasn’t interested in the manager job after all. The next day, Ibragimovna was able to find a spacious first-floor room with windows for the center.
I then proposed that we draft a job description for the manager, translate it into Kyrgyz, Russian, and Uzbek, distribute it to media outlets, NGOs, and government offices, and run an advertisement in the local newspapers. Ibragimovna seemed surprised. “That’s not the way we do things here,” she said. “Why don’t you just go ahead and pick someone you like? That’s how I choose my staff.” I said that I was dealing with donor funds, and we had to follow the rules—an open search process, with written applications and interviews. With a mild
protest, but also with a sense of curiosity, Ibragimovna joined me and a UNESCO representative in interviewing eight of the twelve applicants. The unanimous choice was Renat Khusainov, a twenty-eight-year-old university teacher with a background in journalism and computers, who was fluent in Russian, Kyrgyz, and English. He was a Tatar, a member of an ethnic minority. At the end of the discussion, Ibragimovna looked me straight in the eye. “Is ethnic origin an issue in this appointment?” she asked. “Well, it’s not an issue for me if it’s not one for you,” I shot back. She smiled. “This is a very good day for the library,” she said.
On the Road to the Sacred Mountain
After three nights at the grim Hotel Intourist, I moved into an apartment a few blocks south on Kurmanjan Dakta. The apartment was sparsely furnished but within easy walking distance of the library. Most important, the heating was working. In almost every Soviet city, a central thermal plant supplied heated water to radiators in houses, apartments, businesses, and public buildings. Or at least it was supposed to. Lack of fuel, maintenance, or some combination of the two meant that the system was notoriously unreliable. In winter, parts of Osh were without heat for days because of frozen pipes and equipment breakdowns. Most government officials lived in the city center where the system was better maintained. I was lucky to be in the right neighborhood.
Unfortunately, the heat never came on in the restaurants, where the few diners huddled in overcoats and fur hats. Even though soup and a main course cost as little as $1.50, and it was difficult to pay more than $4, few could afford to eat out. Apart from the occasional wedding reception, the restaurants were almost deserted. At the Ak-Burra Restaurant, a lonely attendant sat by the huge empty cloakroom. The cavernous upstairs dining room probably hadn’t changed much since the Soviet era when the local party brass went out to celebrate—ornate pillars, heavy red drapes, chandeliers, long mirrors, and paintings in fake gold frames. At 8:30 p.m. on Friday, only one other table was occupied. A sad-faced waiter handed me a five-page menu, but when I tried to order he told me that the kitchen could serve only kotelet (ground meat) with noodles, flat lipioshki bread, and green tea. On other nights, there was beef stroganoff with mashed potatoes and garnish and, sometimes soup and funchosa, a cold, spicy noodle salad. Most restaurant patrons came to drink and dance. Almost every restaurant had a stage for a live band, which belted out pop tunes at a decibel level that made conversation almost impossible. Because there was no heat, patrons danced in overcoats, boots, and fur hats. The music was a cross-cultural mix—a soulful Turkish pop ballad segueing into an American oldie, rendered in a thick accent, and usually without the definite articles: “Heavy bo-dee in whole-sale block, wuz dancin’ to jailhuz rock.”
After a week or so, I had learned enough Russian to greet the neighbors, shop for food at the bazaar, and tell a cab driver my destination. In 1995, communication and travel in Osh were daily challenges. The telephone switching system was antiquated and overloaded. You could usually get a local call through on the second or third attempt, but to call another city meant dialing a complex series of digits; making an international call required a trip to the city telephone exchange where you waited in line to book the call. The major challenge was finding the number. The library staff, journalists, and media owners (and anyone else who had to make calls on a regular basis) kept numbers in well-worn pocket organizers. Osh, the second largest city in the country, did not have a telephone directory.
There was also no city map—or at least no one I asked could remember ever having seen one. Even if it had existed, it would have likely featured Soviet-era street names that were fast disappearing as the city authorities dug into history and changed them to the politically correct names of Kyrgyz leaders and literary figures. Ulitsa Pionerskaya (Pioneers’ Street) was renamed for the painter Gapar Aytiev, Ulitsa 25 Oktyabrya (October 25th Street), marking the date of the Bolshevik Revolution, for the writer Kasym Bayalinov. The main one-way south street, Ulitsa Lenina (Lenin Street) became Kurmanjan Dakta kuchasi, named for the Queen of the South, the tribal chief who ruled the region after her husband was murdered in a palace coup in Khokand in 1862.
Even for fervent Kyrgyz nationalists, the name changes were confusing, and many people continued to use the old Russian names long after they disappeared from the street signs. Lenin was a particular source of confusion. Even though he was usurped by the Queen of the South on the main one-way south street, he simply moved one block east to take over the main one-way north street, pushing aside his one-time Bolshevik comrade-in-arms Yakov Sverdlov, as Ulitsa Sverdlova officially disappeared into street-sign history.
The city buses and marshrutkas (private minibuses) plied both the old and new Lenin Streets, but I did not know the city well enough to know where they would take me, so I took cabs for most trips. In Central Asian cities, the taxi business is still the most visible part of the informal economy. Although there are commercial taxi services, many drivers in private cars pick up passengers on the street. There’s a brief negotiation over the fare, although experienced passengers know the going rate between most points.
Apart from the occasional Mercedes, Audi, or BMW driven by a government official or crime boss, there were few vehicles in Osh in December 1995 that should have been on the road at all. The problem wasn’t just the bare tires and noisy mufflers. It was the streets, which had received little maintenance from a cash-strapped city government since independence. Cold winters and sizzling hot summers had buckled the road surfaces and created huge potholes. To avoid them, vehicles weaved and swerved, statistically increasing the chance of accidents. The Soviet-era Moskvichs, Volgas, and Ladas with their dented doors and shattered windshields looked like casualties of a fender-bender war, and a few were flamboyantly out of alignment. There were few auto repair shops, and parts were in short supply. If you needed a radiator or a distributor, you headed for the bazaar to scour the used parts laid out on tarpaulins and old blankets. A shortage of auto parts can spur innovation, and drivers routinely made repairs with scraps of metal and wire or a part salvaged from a different type of car. In 1995, gasoline cost about the same as in the United States (making it expensive by local standards), but there was no quality control. Because there were few gas stations, most drivers filled up at the roadside from roving tanker trucks called benavoz that sometimes dispensed a mechanically injurious blend of diesel and gasoline.
On days when I had to visit several newspapers or TV stations, I hired a car and driver for about $30 a day. My regular driver Babur, a broad-shouldered grinning Uzbek with a perfect set of gold teeth, fearlessly gunned his Volga through the rutted side streets, dodging pedestrians and farm animals, shouting (in English) “No problem!” It turned out that he was a police driver who took time off work because I paid more than the police did. Whenever we got stuck behind other vehicles he put a flashing light on top of the car and bellowed orders through a small speaker mounted on the hood. The cars magically parted in front of us.
Babur’s favorite, but absolutely unverifiable, claim was that he was a lineal descendant of King Zahiruddin Babur (1483–1530). Official histories describe Babur as a great poet and prose-writer, but he didn’t get to be head of the most powerful Moghul state in the world by penning rhyming couplets; he did a lot of fighting along the way. Babur (the name means “lion”) had both the lineage and role models to become a warrior king; he was a direct descendant of Tamerlane (Timur) through his father and of Genghis Khan through his mother. In 1497, as the newly crowned king of Fergana, he built a shelter and private mosque on the eastern promontory of Suleiman’s Mountain, the rocky outcrop that rises above the city of Osh. In 1504, his small army entered what today is Afghanistan and captured Kabul, where he established himself as ruler. In 1525, he set out to conquer India, using heavy guns to defeat the numerically superior forces of Sultan Ibrahim Lodi and capture Delhi. He went on to defeat other armies and by his death in 1530 had established the Moghul dynasty in India.
It’s a steep
thirty-minute climb to Dom Babura, the rebuilt version of the small house on Suleiman’s Mountain where Babur came to pray. The formation, with its five peaks, is the result of glacial movement, but it is easy to see why travelers believed the mountain, rising majestically from the middle of the wide, flat valley, was the work of God. For centuries, it has been a place of pilgrimage for Muslims. It is said that the Prophet Muhammad once prayed there and that a shrine marks the grave of Suleiman (Solomon), a prophet in the Qur’an. Women who ascend to the shrine and crawl through an opening will, according to legend, give birth to healthy children. As in other parts of Central Asia, Islam is casually mixed with older belief systems, particularly animism—the belief that natural physical entities including animals and plants, and often inanimate objects such as rocks, possess a spiritual essence. The trees and bushes on the mountain are draped with prayer flags. UNESCO, which added Suleiman’s Mountain to its list of World Heritage Sites in 2009, has recorded more than 100 sites with petroglyphs representing humans and animals, and 17 sites of worship, linked by a network of ancient paths. Each is reputed to have a medical specialty—to cure barrenness, headaches, or back pain, and even to give the blessing of longevity. According to UNESCO, the mountain is “the most complete example of a sacred mountain anywhere in Central Asia, worshipped over several millennia.”5
Postcards from Stanland Page 4