Failure to Inform Voters to Take Active Part in Elections
I have received official notification about the Kyrgyz Presidential elections 2009 neither from Konsulat der Kirgisischen Republik (Frankfurt am Main) nor from Botschaft der Kirgisischen Republik in der BRD. I was not in the lists as a result of not being registered in Konsulat (How was I supposed t know about it?). I learned about the dates of elections from relatives, friends and Kyrgyz news media. Surprisingly, Botschaft der Kirgisischen Republik (Berlin) announced about elections only on the Russian website (!!) Compare the German version of the Embassy's website, which I always consulted, and Russian. If you are attentive enough, you will see pink (Russian language) and then blue (Kyrgyz language) sentences running above the picture of the Embassy, Font 14, perhaps, Times New Roman. Today I have discovered a banner inviting to taking part in the presidential elections on the German version of the website, located --- or rather, hidden --- down-down below... The scarlet banner is worthless. The dead link. Please, leave a comment if you manage to open the link!
The website itself looks too simple. To my astonishment, my first impression of the website was: how unprofessional! (For the sake of comparison, here is the official webpage of the Deutsche Botschaft in Bischkek.)
It does not function in an efficient and effective way. It is clumsy and unattractive, absolutely non-interactive, rarely updated, consequently, uninformative, and user-unfriendly. To sum up, the Kyrgyz Embassy and Kyrgyz Consulate in Germany failed to provide sufficient information about the presidential elections in Kyrgyzstan in 2009. Yet it is worth of noticing that I have received a reply concerning voting and requirements the very next day after sending a short message via e-mail. Yet the website and other tools the Kyrgyz Embassy and Consulate apply to outreach the eligible voters in Germany should be considerably improved.
How I Cast My Vote for the Kyrgyz Presidential Candidate in 2009
23rd of July will stay in my memory as a weird day when I stepped into the Hauptkonsulat der Kirgisischen Republik in Frankfurt-am-Main around 7:30 p.m. to discover that the voting cabins were not in use anymore and the commission started counting the votes!
The voting was supposed to stop at 8 p.m. I still had time. I was asked to proceed to the office of Mr.X. and sit at the table where Asian dry fruits, biscuits and soda drinks were generously served. "Ah, how Asian!" I thought, I was supposed to wait in that room, have a snack and drink if I please, and proceed to the cabin to cast my ballot.
Wrong. This was the place where I was supposed to vote!
Mr.X was sitting right opposite to me. We exchanged greetings.
"Are you Russian?"
"My parents are Russian."
"Don't be ashamed of being Russian. Russian language has a special status in Kyrgyzstan..."
"I am not ashamed of being Russian. I just prefer to identify myself not according to ethnicity..."
After a short clumsy conversation, I was supposed to tick the box openly and pass the ballot into his hands directly(!!!).
My natural curiousity (some would say, bitchiness) could not but break through. "Why no voting cabins?" The answer was: "None showed up during the previous hour, so we are about to start counting the votes. You came late."
I did not.
Jakshy Kalynyzdar! (Good Bye in Kyrgyz) I felt like suffocating. And here I was walking down the street in the direction of the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof to catch my --- German --- train. I felt relieved to walk through the German city and hear the German language, and meet immigrants... I felt it was all so wrong in that room I just left. Does my vote matter? Will it be counted?
I fulfilled my duty as a Kyrgyz citizen --- one of the other 108.000 --- living and studying abroad.
Results:
Kyrgyzstan’s incumbent president appeared Friday to have won a landslide victory, gaining more than 80 percent of the vote in a contest that local and Western monitors said was marred by major violations of election laws.
Ballot stuffing, intimidation and media bias were just some of the infractions noted in Thursday’s election by observers from the monitoring arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or O.S.C.E.
With about 86 percent of the ballots counted on Friday, the incumbent, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, had won about 85 percent of the vote, according to Kyrgyzstan’s election commission. The commission said official results would be announced Saturday.
But Radmila Sekerinska, the head of the observer mission for the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the O.S.C.E.’s monitoring arm, declared Friday, “Sadly, this election did not show the progress we were hoping for, and it again fell short of key standards Kyrgyzstan has committed to as a participating state of the O.S.C.E.”
In a statement, she said, “The conduct of Election Day was a disappointment.
Meanwhile, an observer mission from the Commonwealth of Independent States, a Moscow-dominated alliance of former Soviet republics known for its rose-colored reporting on the region’s elections, announced Friday that the elections were “open and free.”
Fair or not, the elections in Kyrgyzstan appeared largely to be a domestic sideshow, eclipsed by the competition between Russia and the United States for influence over the country.” Read more in English
Posts
Great that you traveled to Frankfurkt to vote! It's a pity that you did this afford and still do not know if you're vote is count! However, you did what you can...
ReplyDeleteThe day I received my letter with the documents for the upcoming elections this week, I found my neighbour's letter in the garbage.... I don't take democracy for granted, so that I find it sad that obviously the right to vote doesn't have any importance for some people.
P.S. I would be very interested in a course about presidential elections in Kyrgyzstan!