Protests in Bishkek as Talks Start in South

IWPR Central Asia

Institute for War & Peace Reporting

Sunday, 20 November, 2005

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By Ainagul Abdrakhmanova in Bishkek (RCA No. 360, 23-Mar-05)

As a team of government negotiators began talks with protest leaders in the southern city of Osh, the capital Bishkek was the scene of two separate opposition rallies, both of which were quickly broken up by police.

Opposition leaders indicated that the protests in Bishkek would be incremental rather than the “big bang” event some had been predicting.

A helicopter carrying the government delegation landed in Osh on the afternoon of March 23, and officials spent about an hour talking to opposition figures. There was no information about the content of the talks, or who the Bishkek representatives were. There were reports that Prime Minister Nikolai Tanaev would visit the city the following day.

The officials had to resort to a helicopter as opposition supporters have blocked the airport to stop the authorities flying in security forces. The action follows the March 20 police assault to seize the regional government office in Osh which was being held by the opposition. The building was recaptured by crowds of protesters the following day.

In Bishkek, President Askar Akaev shook up his law-enforcement services, sacking both Interior Minister Bakirdin Subanbekov and Prosecutor-General Myktybek Abdylbaev. The new acting interior minister, Keneshbek Duyshebaev, is promoted from being head of Bishkek city police, and also receives the title of acting deputy prime minister. The new prosecutor, Murat Sutalinov, was formerly head of the defence department within the presidential administration.

In the afternoon, up to 1,500 people attended a rally in central Bishkek’s Salieva Square to express solidarity with protesters in other parts of the country. The event was organised by the opposition youth movements Kelkel and Birge and by Bolot Maripov, a parliamentary candidate who lost in his Bishkek constituency to President Akaev’s daughter Bermet on March 13.

Within ten minutes, IWPR contributors saw police in riot gear wading in, beating and detaining participants and taking them away to police stations in waiting buses. The detainees included Maripov himself, Kelkel leader Alisher Mamasaliev and Birge head Timur Shaihutdinov, Edil Baisalov, the head of the NGO Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society, and prominent film director Bolot Shamshiev.

As well as uniformed police, a group of men in plain clothes who had been standing on the fringes of the demonstration, also attacked and beat protesters. Police took no action to restrain them. The men were fairly identifiable as they all had identical white baseball caps.

At roughly the same time, a smaller demonstration involving about 100 people took place in Gorky Square, several blocks away. The public meeting was organised by some of the 400 or 500 people who arrived from the Naryn region on March 22, in support of Akylbek Japarov, a candidate prevented from running in the Kochkor constituency.

This rally too was quickly dispersed by police, who detained about a dozen protesters while the rest escaped.

More information emerged about opposition plans to shift the centre of gravity of protests from the south of Kyrgyzstan to the capital. Instead of the single northward march culminating in a mass opposition entry into Bishkek, which some observers had been predicting, the Coordinating Council of People’s Unity, a group coordinating the protests, said actions in Bishkek would take place in stages and would not be a one-day event.

Opposition sources said people from Osh and Jalalabad, as well as the northern regions of Talas and Naryn, had been arriving in small groups for several days. There were reports that a convoy of several minibuses was stopped at Belovodskoye on the road from Osh, about an hour’s drive from Bishkek.

Ainagul Abdrakhmanova is IWPR programme coordinator in Kyrgyzstan.