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

The Newsweek wrote on April 30 about the impact of internet both on building democracy around the world and making the dictators much stronger with easily available information online. Well, I do believe that social media and new internet tools make it easy for people to obtain and disseminate news. But I also do believe that with the help of experienced internet geeks, dictators can strengthen their control over people. And the Newsweek  is right calling it a cat-and-mouse game. I agree with it and I am not going to argue with it.

The debate I am going to have is about the subheading the Newsweek used for its article on internet helping to build democracy. To be more precise, it is about the statement of the Newsweek that it is internet that made the recent revolts happen in Kyrgyzstan.

Many, including the Newsweek, mistakenly think that if not internet, the recent events in Kyrgyzstan, which ousted the president and took away lives of 85 people, would not have happened at all. Why mistakenly? Well, unlike the same events of 2005, which also made the president flee (but was peaceful), the demonstrations were organized on grassroots level, with minimum influence of the opposition parties, and it all started in regions like Naryn and Talas, where penetration of internet is very low and majority of people do not know what Twitter, WordPress or Livejournal is.

The graph is a part of a research "Research of Internet Audience in Kyrgyzstan" done by the Civic Initiative for Internet Policy in 2009 (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan)

This graph shows that Naryn and Talas, where people organized big demonstrations against poverty, unemployment, skyrocketing utility prices and family based ruling of the president,  have 0% and 1% share of internet audience of Kyrgyzstan respectively! The great majority of internet users in Kyrgyzstan (77%) are based in the capital city Bishkek. And a death toll list shows that most of those, who were shot dead when storming the White House, were originally from regions, not Bishkek. Therefore, it is really hard to believe that it was internet that helped people gather and demonstrate against the government.

Telling that internet did not play any role in recent revolts is also not true. Social media, especially online forums and Twitter, a microblogging service, did a great job in disseminating information about what was going on in Kyrgyzstan before, during and after April 7. These online tools were helpful especially when several independent news websites were blocked by previous Kyrgyz authorities. Kyrgyz twitterers used hashtags #freekg and #kyrgyzstan when giving information or links about uprisings, thus creating hubs of information, where one could find interesting first hand information or get links to related articles and multimedia online content. It is true that the audience that was using these new online tools were disappointed by Bakiev’s government. However, they were not the backbone of the uprising on April 7.

Thus, the Newsweek is not right when saying that the bloody uprising in Bishkek, which took away many lives and ousted the president, would have never happened without web. Internet did a great job in terms accessing and disseminating information freely. But it never was an ultimate cause of the public uprising.

The situation in Kyrgyzstan is not getting any better after the April events, which took away lives of 85 people. Despite the visible stability and security in the country, it feels like a calm before the storm. People are very skeptical about the interim government headed by Roza Otunbaeva. Nonpublicity of actions and several staff-shuffling in the key positions of the government are making people think that the interim government is busy dividing the power among each other.

Moreover, ex-president (?) Bakiev, who found shelter in Belarus, keeps telling that he will not resign until the situation is stable in the country. In the South of the country, where Bakiev is from, there are rumors that inter-ethnic clash may occur soon. My friends there tell that the tension is rising, as the interim government is doing nothing there.

Southern Kyrgyzstan is like a powder bomb filled with tons of socio-economic problems that is fused by inter-ethnic tension (Uzbeks and Kyrgyz). It can blow up any time. It is a matter of small spark. A friend of mine, who is a journalist for a foreign newspaper, says that yesterday there was a clash between Uzbek and Kyrgyz youth in Furkat village, which is near the city of Osh. There is no information how it ended.

If the interim government will not take urgent measures on these issues in the South, the inter-ethnic conflict is unavoidable. And if it happens, it will not be like in 90s – few houses burnt down and several people died. Then, majority were poor and no one expected the conflict to happen. Today, when there are a lot of rich people and obtaining illegal weapons is not a problem, the conflict, in case it occurs, will be of big scale with great number of victims.

PS. Border with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are still closed due to unstable situation in Kyrgyzstan. It is creating huge problems for Kyrgyz business. Dordoi, the biggest market in Central Asia, is not working properly, as wholesale buyers from Russia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan cannot come to Kyrgyzstan due to closed borders.

The Communists spoke about the recent events in Kyrgyzstan and accused the interim government of not protecting workers’ rights. “More than 600 people working in Jogorku Kenesh (Kyrgyz Parliament) lost their jobs after the Parliament was dissolved,” – said Iskhak Masaliev, chairman of the Communist Party. He continued saying that the Communist Party was the only party that had been working hard on protecting workers’ rights in Kyrgyzstan. The rally lasted about an hour, and came to its end with the new party song (with old music), which made some emotional old people cry.

Maybe for these old people the Communist Party still means something, but for generation that grew up in new capitalist and democratic Kyrgyzstan it means just a mere history, the symbols of which have become “cool” recently. Maybe therefore I found the communist rally very entertaining, as you dont see that many soviet things in Bishkek in one day. It felt as if I was back in the Communist Museum in Prague, which I liked a lot during my last visit to Czech Republic.

PS. Personally, I do not agree with some Baltic and Central Asian states that treat their Soviet legacy hostile. It is a recent history, and you can neither change nor erase it. All you can do is learn from the mistakes of the past – it will make you not to repeat them. Therefore, we need to preserve the history, be it good or bad.

For many old people, the Communist Party still means a lot. Not because of the ideology, but because of the mere fact that they lived better under the communism...

Click “read more” to watch the slideshow of all photos from the rally.

I was to have an interview at the Embassy at 10 am. I had to leave home late, but due to the light traffic, I could make it on time knocking at the Embassy’s doors at 9:55. The interview was a part of a competetion for the program of the German Federal Foreign Office called “Blogger tour” – a 10-day trip for bloggers/citizen journalists to Berlin aimed at enabling them “to independently discover some aspects of German society while also providing an interesting programme and promoting the exchange of ideas through regular meetings.” Sounds interesting, huh?

I was met by Thomas Arndt, a young cheerful Culture and Communication attaché, who invited me to his big and bright office. We had a long talk about my blogging background, citizen media projects I worked for, the role of citizen media in Central Asia, and of course about Germany and what I like most about it. As Thomas said the German government is doing such programme for the first time, and therefore, it was also interesting for him to be part of it – select a blogger (or even two) from Kyrgyzstan to participate in the programme. The interview went interesting. I was told that they would inform me about the final decision withing couple of weeks (there is another blogger in the competition). So lets keep fingers both crossed and crescented for my success

Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised to know that the German government is trying to communicate with the blogging community of the world. It is a wise step of Germans, I believe, as citizen journalism is becoming amazingly popular lately; and many citizen bloggers have already become opinion leaders in Internet in different parts of the world. Well, it yet again proves the globally accepted fact that Germany is always several steps ahead comparing to other countries in creating and mastering new technologies.

It must be noted that in Central Asia, the problem of “religious extremism” (here it is Islamic extremism) was not that much popular during the Soviet Union. It gained popularity with the fall of the Soviet Union, in late 90′s of the past century, when Islam filled the ideological vacuum created after the fall of the Soviet doctrine, and poorly defined national identity, ideology and secular regime of “catapulted to independence” Central Asian countries could hardly compete with ideological power of radical Islam. Religous extremism got the height of its popularity after the 9/11 attacks and US intrusion to Afghanistan and Iraq, when Fergana valley countries started helping coalition forces in their tenth crusade.

Map of Fergana valley

Today, there is still a lot of buzz around Islamic extremism in Central Asia. The governments of all three Fergana valley countries have been putting great efforts in fighting Hizb ut Tahrir, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, wahabia, Akramia [.pdf] and other religious groups seen as extremists. However, the challenge is not decreasing, but vice versa – it is becoming bigger and bigger from day to day. The problem, as I see it, is in disproportional use of power by the Fergana valley states in dealing with so-called Islamic extremist groups in their terriories. The government’s too much, often unjustified, exercise of power on people always creates discontent among them, which results in rejecting the government and uniting around or strengthening the loyalty to the alternative sources of ideology, and in context of Central Asia, it is religous extremist groups.

In this context, I really like the ideas of Kadyr Malikov, political science doctor of Madrid University and director of an analytic research center Religion, Law and Politics (Bishkek), who thinks that the Kyrgyz government must come up with an effective ideological mechanism in fighting the religious extremism, rather than using force. According to him, Kyrgyzstan is in need of up to date theoretical knowledge about religious extremism, and establishment of ideological basis in fighting religious extremism is going to be an effective tool, in view of outdated approaches of the early 1990s. I share Malikov’s opinion, as I believe that the state officials in charge of dealing with emerging religious extremism threats are not well equipped with the knowledge about origins of such threats. I guess it is because most of state officials deny any religous ideas, as most of them are offsprings of the Soviet ideology, where main source of ideas were works of Karl Marx, especially his thought about historical materialism.

These straight away and unsystematized thoughts came to me after I watched the documentary made by Michael Andersen, a Dutch journalist working for Al Jazeera English. If you are interested in developments in Central Asia, especially around the issue of religous extremism, I recommend you to watch it.

However, Turkmen students themselves are not sure how real it is. But they hope the State Department of US, the main sponsor of Turkmen students at AUCA, will do its best to help them out in this situation.

Yesterday, July 29 2009, Almazbek Atambaev, who lost presidential elections and called elections illegal, and his supporters attempted to organize open-ended demonstrations and march towards the center of the city. However, they were stopped on their way by law enforcement bodies, who effectively dispersed the crowd and took into custody dozens of people. Leaders of the United Peoples Movement, where Atambaev is a member, later stated they would march to Balykchy city of Issik Kul oblast on July 30 2009, where many of their supporters are being held in custody.

When I arrived the Social Democratic Party’s headquarters at 9:45 am today, there were about 30-40 people standing  in front of the building waiting the march to begin. Almost half of the small crowd were journalists from local and international media. By 10:15 the crowd enlarged a bit. People waiting for opposition members to come out and tell about the furthers steps.

Suddenly, instead of opposition members, Sumar Nasiza, Deputy Prosecutor General, and a high ranking official from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) appeared in front of SDPK’s HQ. The state officials had a small meeting in public with Bakyt Beshimov, chairman the only opposition party represented in the parliament the Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan. During the meeting, the authorities officially warned opposition members that any marches held in Bishkek and outskirts of the city would be stopped by the law enforcement bodies “by legal measures.” They explained that it was due to the security measures on the eve of CSTO‘s summit in Cholpon Ata, Kyrgyzstan.

After meeting, all of them – Sumar Nasiza and official from MIA, Azim Beknazarov, and Bakyt Beshimov – went to the office of Almazbek Atambaev, where they had a meeting behind the closed doors. After 15-20 minutes, they came out of the office of Atambaev. The state officials said that they told Atambaev about the possible results if opposition organized marches. Almazbek Atambaev appeared after officials left, and gave a public speech, where he said that the United People’s Movement had decided to cancel the march as he “did not want to risk people’s freedom and security.” The crowd insisted on marching to Balykchy city and release the arrested supporters of opposition. Atambaev told that he would go to Balykchy himself soon. However, he did not tell the time saying he could also be stopped on the way. There were about 150 people in the crowd during the speech of Atambaev.

After Atambaev and other opposition leaders went in the offices, the crowd started dispersing. Journalists were leaving. But it was early to leave. Deputy Prosecutor General and his colleague from MIA appeared again. They went to Bakyt Beshimovs office, where they had a meeting behind the closed doors with the leaders of opposition. Bakyt Beshimov later told that they discussed the release of opposition supporters who are being held in Balykchy and other parts of the country.

I left the SDPK’s HQ after that feeling nothing news worthy was going to happen.

Law enforcement bodies talking to Bakyt Beshimov

Deputy Prosecutor General warning Bakyt Beshimov that march will be stopped

The state officials and opposition leaders are going to Atambaevs office

The state officials telling that they warned Atambaev about marchs

Almazbek Atambaev coming out from his office

Almazbek Atambaev saying the march is cancelled

Atambaev: I will go to Balykchy mylelf. I don't want to risk peoples freedom and security.

Crowd listeining to Almazbek Atambaev

State officials coming out from Bakyt Beshimovs office

Bakyt Beshimov telling what they discussed with state officials befind the closed doors

Today is 27th of July, Monday. Bishkek is calm. There is no feeling in the air of the capital city of upcoming demonstrations of opposition. Most of my friends, like many others fed up with the Bishkek’s heat, are gone to Issyk Kul to chill out on the lake shore. Farmers in the North are busy harvesting wheat, while their colleagues in the South are already planting the second crop on newly harvested wheat fields, and irrigating rice and cotton fields… Given people’s relaxed/busy summer schedule, it will be very hard to opposition to attract as many supporters as they want to have during open-ended demonstrations. Well, thinking logically, a farmer would not leave his crop and participate in a demonstration that does not have a certain end. Let’s see how opposition handles the situation. I will keep the blog updated.

Quick fact lines (for those who may be interested):

- the Central Election Committee stated that during 2009 presidential elections in Kyrgyzstan incumbent president Kurmanbek Bakiev got 76.4% of votes (1,779,417 votes), while Almazbek Atambaev gained 8.4% of total votes.

- Almazbek Atambaev calls the elections illegal and claims that 60% of electorate, who voted on 23rd of July, actually voted for him.

- the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE) officially stated that Kyrgyz elections “failed to meet key OSCE commitments, despite some positive elements.”

- Presidents of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan already congratulated Kurmanbek Bakiev with re-election for the second term.

- Almazbek Atambaev goes to Moscow on 26th of July to talk to Duma deputies on Kyrgyz elections.

Blive.kg, one of the video servers in Kyrgyz internet domain, has several videos showing the violations of election norms, including opening of polling stations before arrival of observers, ballot stuffingand carousel voting. As Blive is not accessible outside of Kyrgyzstan, I downloaded ‘norms violations videos’ from there and uploaded in YouTube. But the problem is that one cannot really prove that all these movies were taken during the 2009 presidential elections.

Ballot stuffing – is the illegal act of one person submitting multiple ballots during a vote in which only one ballot per person is permitted (c) Wikipedia. Author claims it is from the 2009 presidential elections.

An observer is criticizing badly organized polling station

The author claims it is a carousel voting, when a group of people go to multiple polling stations and vote several times using false IDs.

Opening of polling stations before arrival of observers. The cameraman is an observer of presidential candidate Almazbek Atambaev. He claims he came at 7:20 am, and there already were several ballots in ballot box. According to the law on elections, the polling stations must open at 8:00 am.