A Little Bit of History Repeating?

Yesterday the E-mail List of the Youth Association Kel-Kel sent out a short press release issued by the Kyrgyz Human Rights watchdog ‘Kylym Shamy’. In it the organization informs about an incident that occurred at Moscow airport. Human Rights activist Aziza Abdirasulova, head of ‘Kylym Shamy’ was arrested at the airport after border guards found a bullet in her hand luggage. The circumstances of this alleged discovery are more than suspicious as becomes clear from the press release. Abdirasulova, who recently became more public by openly criticizing the government and president Bakiev for false elections in July, was not allowed to witness the search of her luggage, ordered to step away, while the Russian officials several times went through her things. Only in the end, after scanning the bag again and again, they somehow ‘found’ the mysterious bullet.

‘Kylym Shamy’ calls this incident a provocation and rightly asks, how Abdirasulova could leave Warsaw airport, if the bullet was already in her bag? The statement ends with the conclusion that this case poses more questions than is providing answers.

Commenting in this event I would like to point out to the fact that Aziza Abdirasulova for long has been one of the very few Activists in Kyrgyzstan who kept the balance between Human Rights issues and politics, always openly criticizing the government for failures in the sphere of rule of law and freedom rights without chaining herself up with political structures. She thus managed to preserve an independence which many other HR activists lost in the last years, when stepping into close relation with oppositional groups like ‘Za Reformy’, ‘The United Front’, or ‘The Civic Parliament’. Lately, however, it seems that the old guard of HR Ladies (Abdirazulova, Ismailova, Sasykbaeva) in Kyrgyzstan has become the last opponent of an authoritarian political regime. They now have to fear further and harsher reprisals as Bakiev seems to go on persecuting even the slightest sign of criticism.

The concept of discrediting opponents by having them arrested for alleged smuggle of illegal items is not new to the Kyrgyz public. In September 2006 then oppositional leader Omurbek Tekebaev was arrested at the airport in Warsaw [!] where he planned to participate at a conference (Abdirasulova was coming returning home after attending a conference in Warsaw). Tekebaev was arrested in put into jail for some days because customs officials had found a Matreshka (a set of Russian nesting dolls), filled with Heroin. The incident turned into a scandal at home in Bishkek, where president Bakiev had to subject to public pressure and fire the deputy chief of the Secret Service, his brother Zhanysh Bakiev, whom everybody suspected of being the mastermind behind this attack on Tekebaev’s reputation.

It is unlikely that the current event will cause anything similar to the public uproar the ‘Matreshkagate’, as it was later called, effected. Besides the fact that the idea of Abdirasulova being involved into smuggling sounds too abstruse to be true (even not worth a scandal), an attentive public is missing in Kyrgyzstan, and thus the chances to have a public outrage are low. Everything we can expect is a headache for the members of ‘Kylym Shamy’ and the rising fear that the political regime can do anything, can widely experiment with new forms of manipulation without having to fear any consequences.