More photos here and here.

Grave reports continue coming from friends in Osh and Jalalabad. Videos and photos of killed Uzbeks, burning houses, restaurants and shops that belonged to Uzbeks started appearing in internet. Thousands of Uzbeks are seeking shelter in Uzbekistan. Today, the Uzbek authorities finally agreed to accept Uzbek refugees. Uzbeks in the South have lost their trust to the interim government and are hoping for Russia’s help, but Russia is not being active.

The emergency situation introduced in several cities in the South including Osh and Jalalabad is not helping. Many police and army institutions were attacked, and great numbers of weapons are now on people’s hands. People say that attacking groups wear police and army uniforms. Therefore, many have lost their trust in law enforcement institutions.

The Interim government is blaming everything on the Bakievs that the latter are intending to disrupt the referendum scheduled for 27th of June, 2010.

People write "Kyrgyz" on their cars to avoid attacks of angry mobs

The death toll is much much higher than the official figures, as people are still finding dead corpses around Osh, and many were burnt down in their houses in mahallas (Uzbek neighborhoods). While I was writing this, I got several gruesome calls from friends in Jalalabad that some groups seized buildings belonging to army and police. Tonight, Jalalabad will suffer its worst night ever! My heart is with them!

I am calling all international organizations to help Kyrgyzstan in this crisis. Today, we are suffering the results of previous governments mistakes, who ignored the issue of inter-ethnic tension, and who let the whole generation to be brought up with ethnic hatred. Please, we need your help like never before!

Friends, readers, please, send out this message to the world! Help Kyrgyzstan’s nation to overcome this crisis!

Background info: Kyrgyzstan is located in the heart of Central Asia. It hosts military bases of two great powers – Russia and US, and therefore, plays a significant role in region’s stability. Kyrgyzstan used to be known as “island of democracy in Central Asia”, and witnessed two popular uprisings in five years that led to change of the government. The country is geographically divided into two – the North and the South. While the North is mostly populated by ethnic Kyrgyz, the South has a great minority of ethnic Uzbeks. Some figures say there are about 1000000 Uzbeks living in Kyrgyzstan. Inter-ethnic clashes between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz already happened in early 90s of the past century leaving more than hundreds of people dead.

More info about today’s crisis is here, here, here, and here.

Here are videos of gruesome events (some maybe shocking):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aDlnIdkjM4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-_kmwF1bK8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBHMjZrbwYM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy4oMD_Gl08
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvWbhhAhMeE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt2bWKiZU58
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiT3tMoP-gw

Maybe in Europe or in US it does not really matter where you live – in a capital city or a non-capital city, cuz almost everywhere there, you can enjoy at least basic services and products to survive.  But in Kyrgyzstan, it is definitely better to live in capital city Bishkek. Not because Bishkek has high new (post-Soviet) buildings, fancy restaurants with cuisines from around the world, newly asphalted roads, modern night clubs, or popular universities… no, not even because your close relative works in the government and can also help you in getting employed by the government…

It is for a simple fact that all Kyrgyz mobile operators’ emergency call service is connected to emergency rooms of hospitals in Bishkek!

A friend from Aravan, my hometown, recently told a story with a fatal end that happened in Aravan, when an old man, who was returning from animal market, had a heart attack on the street and died in a while, because of late emergency help. The reason for late emergency help was a mobile operator, whose emergency call service, which is ’103′ in Kyrgyzstan, was connected to emergency rooms in Bishkek hospitals.

The story tells that when people in Aravan called emergency via their mobile phones and told the address (most probably just a name of the street or intersection of streets), the emergency room accepted the call and told back that their ambulance car would arrive soon. After some time, seeing that emergency help is late, people called emergency room again and asked if their help was coming. Emergency room answered that they made a false alarm, that the ambulance car had been at the given address, and no one needed help there (many street names are the same in most cities of Kyrgyzstan). After arguing for a while, people, who called emergency help, came to realise that they were speaking with capital city Bishkek that is in 700 km away to the North, behind several mountain passes. A person, who had a heart attack, died on the street, as no one could help him on time. Be it in Bishkek or was the mobile operators emergency service connected to local emergency rooms, he might have been rescued…

Click to enlarge

So whenever you come to Kyrgyzstan and visit non-capital cities, make sure that you have landline phone numbers of local hospitals, just in case you need emergency help. Otherwise you have to call Bishkek and get mocked by the emergency room.

Several months ago “Soros-Kyrgyzstan” (OSI) opened a competition among youth of Kyrgyzstan for small grants projects aimed at educating and mobilizing their peers. As organizers say, there were more than hundred different projects applied, and more than 40 projects were approved. My project, “The Oshington Post”, is one of them

The purpose of the Youth Action Fund is to identify, inspire, and support small groups of dedicated young people who can mobilize and influence large numbers of their peers to promote open society ideals. OSI created this fund as a flexible way to provide small grants and other support to encourage progressive, youth-driven initiatives that are aligned with OSI’s mission.

My project is aimed at teaching a group of local young journalists in the city of Osh, southern Kyrgyzstan, to new media and online journalism skills. The target group – young journalists – already has its own publication – a students’ newspaper called “The Oshington Post”, where student journalists write on local issues usually neglected by the mainstream media. The particular thing about it is that they write in English, as the project was founded by a US Peace Corps volunteer at the American Center at the Osh State University. The paper is very good, but there is a problem.

The problem is that their publication is on paper, or is so-called a “dead-tree” media. Moreover, the circulation of the paper is very small – about 50 copies per issues – and is distributed among students. And as the paper is in English, the audience of the publication is English-speaking people interested in the issues taking place in southern Kyrgyzstan. Given the huge interest from Western countries in the developments happening in Kyrgyzstan, it is logical to suppose that the paper “The Oshington Post” is not achieving great deal of its target group. Therefore, my project is aimed at onlinizing, if there is a such word, the work of these young journalists via giving them a webpage and a domain name www.oshington.kg. Thus, articles written by them will be available not only to a small group of people in Osh, but bigger audience – everyone arond the world interested in local issues of southern Kyrgyzstan often not covered by mainstream media.

A student at The Oshington Post tried to onlinize the paper, but due to the lack of knowledge in new media and online journalism, his endeavor did not succeed. Therefore, my project aims at giving series of trainings on new media, online journalism and new internet tools to young journalists at the Oshington Post. The final product of the project is a web-site www.oshington.kg, which will be updated by the participants of the project in average 3-4 times a week.

I will post more about the project soon. Now gotta go back to trainings. Seems the weekends gonna be long and interesting

Many started saying that the main achievement is not a victory, but participation (Russian proverb). I personally do not think so, and believe it is a mere losers’ excuse. Well, I hope the other representative of Kyrgyzstan Dmitry Trelevski will do better.

Many years have passed since then. Today, majority of population of Kyrgyzstan has a good knowledge of neither Russian nor English. If you visit, say, Osh, you can see a lot of billboards and signs in horribly misspelled Russian. And the same you can say about English.

Have a look at an advertisement of Pharaoh Night Club, one of the popular night clubs of Bishkek. The ad is in the website of Odnoklassniki.ru, famous Russian social network, which is also very popular in Kyrgyzstan.

Either PR staff of Pharaoh suck or the a flash builder had “F” for English at school. Well, I think it is both.

…people who think that democracy is impossible. Realize your evolution, revolutionize your minds. You will see that democracy is POSSIBLE. Just think and start to act!

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It is time to REVOLUTIONize your minds!

Read this piece of news.

According to the association’s [American Dialect Society] latest round of popularity studies into the English language, Google (as in ‘Google it’) has emerged as the top word of the last decade, while ‘tweet’ has been crowned the top word of 2009.

Google, as a word, has firmly grasped its place not only in English language, but also in Russian – as a verb ‘прогуглить’ (read as progooglitj), which means ‘search in Google”. It is becoming more and more often when you hear people saying “прогугли его/ее”. For instance, I use it in average 15-20 times a day. However, you cannot say the same thing concerning the word ‘tweet’, either because Twitter is not that popular as Google in Russian speaking part of the world, or it is hard to make a derivative from word ‘twitter’ in Russian language. Though, there is a word ‘фолловить’ (read as followitj), derived from the word ‘follow’ (Twitter’s “follow me” phrase).

There are also such words as ‘юзать’ (read as yuzatj) derived from the word ‘use’, ‘зафрендить/отфрендить’ (read as zafrenditl/otdrenditj) derived from ‘friend’ (‘add as a friend/remove from friends’).

Unfortunately, I could not find similar analyses of Russian language experts about such ‘internet era’ words.

At the front doors of the OSCE Academy, 2008

What is going on??? I was shocked by the news that the OSCE Academy in Bishkek may lose its license for the masters degree program in political science! The news says that the State Licensing and Accreditation Inspection decided to terminate the education activities of OSCE Academy, because its MA program has not been held in accordance with the state standards, and that no state-recognized diplomas were given (!). The State Licensing and Accreditation Inspection told media that the OSCE Academy has been giving advanced trainings, but not MA program degree, and that there is not hidden political motive under their decision, but they want to “bring activities of universities in line with the legislation and regulations of the Kyrgyz Republic.”

The decision of the State Inspection to recall the license of the OSCE Academy for the Master’s degree program was assertion of the existing situation per se and was preliminary agreed on with the top management of this university. This decision was accompanied with the indispensable condition to issue the license to this university for supplementary education program (advanced training) in political science.

What the heck is going on? Is it yet another political game the Kyrgyz government is trying to play? There is no need to explain and prove that the OSCE Academy is one the best educational institutes not only in Kyrgyzstan, but in whole Central Asia, because it really is, and it is recognized in the world! Why? ‘Cuz the Academy selects only recognized and high level academics, specialists and representatives of international organizations, who are experts in their fields of studies, with excellent education and experience backgrounds. Every year, excellent feedback of previous students and high demand of the Academy for its staff and students result in high entrance competition. Therefore, in most cases only best applicants become students of MA program of the Academy. And students come not only from Central Asian countries, but also from other CIS states. And most graduates of the Academy are surely better equipped in terms of knowledge than, say, those who graduate from the Academy of Management under the president of Kyrgyz Republic, whose license will never be recalled! I am not hyperbolizing by saying this, cuz I have seen this myself, when I did MA studies in Political Science at the OSCE Academy during 2007/2008 academic year. And I am sure there are a lot of people, who agree with these statements of mine.

Maxim Ryabkov, director of the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, told [ru] to Bishkek Press Club that the information about recalling Academy’s license was a surprise for him.

The press press-release [about recalling Academy's license] was a real surprise for me. It states about the recalling of licenses of 14 universities, and Academy is one of them. No one informed us about termination of education activities of our university. On the contrary, yesterday the Ministry of Education [of Kyrgyz Republic] informed us that our license was valid through June 20, 2009, and it would be prolonged after.

I called the Academy today to get more info about this news. Unfortunately, I did not have a chance to talk Mr. Ryabkov. However, the staff of the Academy say the given issue is just the “misundestanding, and the negotiations are going on between the Academy tops and state officials”, and that “the situation will be solved for Academy’s advantage very soon.” Well, lets keep fingers crossed and wait to see what happens.

PS. The OSCE Academy’s lame uneffective userunfriendly web site does not have any info on the issue. And media resonance was practically zero (at least from the foreign media side).

But this is nothing compared to prices for heating and hot water. Now, customers are paying 507 som per one gigacalorie. Beginning January 1, 2010, we start paying 1050 som, and starting July 1, 2010, it will rised up to 2.5 thousand som per one gigacalorie! click here to read more