OMG: Facinating Central Asia, next to China

The world needs much better coverage of 'the rest' of the former Soviet Union, for two reasons: First, so much is happening there, and secondly, Vladimir Putin is messing about there as well.

Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev attends Russian-Kyrgyz talks at the Grand Kremlin Palace on June 20, 2017 in Moscow, Russia.

A week ago, a former journalism student of mine from Kyrgyzstan (she now works at one of the few surviving critical media there) sent me a clip of a big TIME magazine article from 2017 about Kyrgyzstan. “Michael, instead of teaching us here, maybe you should teach your American colleagues. Only white, entitled males can get away with this kind of ….”, she wrote. This is how the TIME piece starts: “You don’t read much about Kyrgyzstan in the international press, but it’s a fascinating part of a fascinating region. A predominantly Muslim former Soviet state of 6 million that borders China along its eastern border, it contends with competing currents created by Russia, China, the United States, and the Muslim world. And it’s a genuine democracy in a part of the world that doesn’t have many.”

(Let me stress that I am not particularly gunning for Ian Bremmer or for TIME. Bremmer is the founder and president of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm, and of GZERO Media. Bremmer and TIME are simply indicative of the kind of condescending (helicopter) coverage of the region we have seen for many years and which is increasingly annoying local analysts and journalists.)

OK, so first, I double-checked and triple-checked, and yes, TIME really did publish this in 2017.

True, you don’t read much about that “fascinating country in that fascinating region” in the world’s media. Sweet, but so far, so good. The location is also correct, next to China, makes it sound exotic. But “predominantly Muslim”? Well, according to the guidebooks or Wikipedia, maybe, but this is a lazy label and identifier to put on a place like Kyrgyzstan: reading it, most of TIME’s readers (in the US) would imagine the Middle East and the dominant role of Islam in many societies there. But Kyrgyzstan has little to do with the Middle East. For most people in Kyrgyzstan, religion does not play the dominant role in their daily lives, attendance in mosques is limited, maybe 10% of women dress ‘according to Islam’, and alcohol is easily available and enjoyed as in Copenhagen.

And then we get to “it’s a genuine democracy….” You what?! Did they not have internet access at TIME in 2017? Or maybe they did, and that was the problem? Because ‘Kyrgyzstan: Island of Democracy’ comes up really quickly when you google the country. But that was a moniker briefly attached to the former Soviet republic in the 1990s when Kyrgyzstan harboured hopes of becoming a ‘genuine democracy’. Or rather, the people of Kyrgyzstan harboured such illusions. The crooks who have been in charge of the country since, well forever, never harboured such intentions. In the 1990s, the country became known as ‘The Island of Democracy’ because it was led by a soft-spoken Soviet academic, Askar Akaev, and because - compared to the neighbouring dictatorships in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan - Kyrgyzstan looked at least potentially ‘democratic’. That hope had already died by 2005 when Akaev and his corrupt family - who had tried to steal the whole country, literally - eventually had to flee to Russia when the people revolted. There was also a brief glimmer of hope in 2010-12 after the second revolution, under interim president Roza Otunbayeva.

But since then, Kyrgyz politicians and mafiosi (increasingly difficult to separate) have done their worst. One of the sharpest analysts of the nexus between politicians and the mafia, Erica Marat, warned already in 2006: “Government officials, parliamentary candidates and even presidents resorted to the help of powerful criminal leaders to advance their own capabilities in the political domain. The study shows that while the political and criminal worlds cooperate and benefit from such interactions, society suffers the most. The state becomes detached from the needs of the impoverished population, corruption at all levels hinders small- and medium-sized economic activities and rates of violence significantly rise among the grassroots, who also feel unprotected. The spread of criminal actors promotes nepotism, leads to the suppression of freedom of speech, deters modernization processes, allows criminals to use state institutions against the state, and hinders economic growth.”

11 years later, when TIME described Kyrgyzstan as “a genuine democracy,” the country had, in fact, descended even further into darkness, and many were warning about it.

To be fair to President Almazbek Atambayev, whom TIME interviewed in 2017, he was better than the men who came after, although his critics say that he, in fact, was the one who started the democratic descent. It was during Atambayev’s rule (2011-17) that the law on 'foreign agents' was first proposed (copied from Putin, who introduced this in 2012 in Russia), and the crackdown on democracy and human rights NGOs and the persecution of critical journalists started. So, where TIME magazine got its ‘Kyrgyzstan - a genuine democracy’ from is anybody's guess. At that time, in 2017, The European Parliament instead talked about “worrying signs of backsliding into authoritarianism.” One month before TIME talked about ‘genuine democracy,’ Open Democracy published a piece by a friend and journalist colleague of mine who had been forced to flee the country because he had voiced criticism of the regime; the piece was called 'Farewell to Kyrgyzstan's "island of democracy"'.

In reality, by the time, Ian Bremmer penned this piece for TIME in 2017, Kyrgyz ‘democracy’ was already far down the road to what it is today: an autocracy with a strong tendency to dictatorship, a constant crackdown on the few free media, sham elections, extreme corruption, totally dominated by middle-aged+ males, and ‘Islam’ often being used for political reasons and manipulation.

True, Kyrgyzstan was - and today marginally still is - more ‘democratic’ than its neighbours. However, that is the same as arguing that Donald Trump is a young and vigorous presidential candidate, compared to his opponent. A local analyst who prefers to speak (freely) off the record explains to me that “on a scale out of 10, Kyrgyzstan is a 7, it could still crawl back to the 5 we were a generation ago but is more likely to slide down to 9 like its neighbours.” From 2020, the country dropped from ‘partly free’ to ‘not free’ in the annual Freedom House rankings. And, by 2024, the (western) doyen of Central Asia watchers, Bruce Pannier, wrote a long, sad, analysis named ‘Kyrgyzstan: Central Asia’s Island of Democracy Sinks Into Authoritarianism’. That is where we are today. However, the direction was already very clear in 2017.

Over the last few decades and a bit, and certainly before the TIME piece in 2017, young local scholars, analysts and journalists started to emerge. And TIME should have consulted them. Amongst them, I often hear irritation over the pontifications about their region, produced by we old, white males, and relying heavily on words such as ‘Muslim’, ‘fascinating’, and ‘next to China’. (My own' excuse’ is that I base much of my scribblings on Central Asia on the work of these cleverer and more tuned-in younger colleagues. Plus, I actually lived in the region for many years.)

Therefore, apart from our main focus on Ukraine, this blog will also try to draw attention to Central Asia. First and foremost, because the younger generations in the region are doing marvellous things - on cultural, gender and environmental issues, often using new information technologies to wrestle with the old corrupt, macho, ‘Soviet’ system, although they so far are having much less direct impact on the politics of the region (understandably), and secondly, because ‘Ukraine’ and Putinism are having a real and brutal impact on the region. We will, with the help of local analysts and activists, be taking a closer look at these issues.

For starters, I will always recommend Eurasianet, which has a great mix of local and international writers and a massive archive. Human Rights Watch also publishes important and well-researched reports on the region, often focusing on ‘ignored groups’. On Instagram - Dina Iglikova, on Twitter - Asel Doolotkeldieva, Temur Umarov, Aigerim Toleukhanova, Nargis Kassenova, Togzhan Kassenova, Erica Marat, Nikita Makarenko, Aqylbek Muratbai, Leila Nazgul Seiitbek. I am sure that I have forgotten many things, so I apologize. Tell me, and I will gladly update you.

Let me also mention a handful of my fellow middle-aged Westerners, who are absolutely worth reading (most of them have lived and worked in the region for many years)—Peter Leonard’s 'Havli', for example, here on Substack, on Twitter the aforementioned Bruce Pannier, Chris Rickleton, Joanna Lillis, Paolo Sorbello, John Heathershaw, Ed Lemon, Luca Anceschi, and Steve Swerdlow.

As TIME said, Central Asia is indeed ' a fascinating region’ [ironic facial expression icon].

(Andersen)