The Dangers Behind Oversimplification: Rape of a Four Year Old Russian Girl in a Kyrgyz Village Petrovka Provoked a Pogrom of Kurdish Family Houses

There was a girl raped in some village in Kyrgyzstan.
This is not big news. Violence towards women, especially young women in traditional patriarchal societies, takes place every day all around the world. These are stories with variations, which give me creeps. The rape of a Russian four year old girl in a Kyrgyz village of Petrovka, and the rape and murder of her grandmother which took place later as a result of her attempt to bring an action against a 21 year old Kurdish young man --- this story is not an exclusion. But it received an exclusive attention of the local and international news media.

On 26th of April, the ayil okmotu (village gathering) ended up in a verbal and physical abuse. The Kyrgyz and Russian villagers demanded that the criminals, who happened to be ethnic Kurds in this case, got punished. And that was not only it: the Kyrgyz and Russian villagers demanded that Kurds leave the village. The Kurdish villagers with guns organized themselves and confronted the anti-Kurdish crowd. According to AkiPress.org, the militia major Aliev could not stop shootings: three people were wounded. The Kyrgyz and Russian villagers looted the Kurdish property. The MIA Vice-minister Isaev reported 6 autos were severely damaged, one of which was set on fire; the windows of 15 houses were broken, etc. Around 800 villagers participated in pogroms. 100 villagers were arrested. The next day, the participants of the Sunday pogrom organized an action on the strategic route Bishkek-Osh demanding from the militia to release the arrestees.

The bloodiest "inter-ethnic conflict" in Kyrgyzstan took place in 1989 in Osh, Ferghana Valley. In 2005, there happened another inter-ethnic conflict between the Kyrgyz villagers and Dungan diaspora of the Iskra village. The controversial story that took place in April 2009 was served by the local news media as another manifestation of the latent inter-ethnic conflicts. Most of the local press explains the violence in Petrovka: the rape of a four year old Russian girl by a Kurdish twenty one year old Kurd and then the murder of her Russian grandmother could not be tolerated by the Kyrgyz villagers --- these accidents provoked pogroms of the Kurdish houses and forcible exclusion of the Kurdish diaspora from Petrovka.

This oversimplification of the conflicts between the Kurdish, Kyrgyz and Russian villagers is outrageous! By storing the problem into the box labeled "inter-ethnic conflicts", we avoid answering the long-standing acute questions raised by the demonstrated intolerance time and time again.

To be continued.

WEIRD VOTING ABROAD EXPERIENCE: A Short Story about How One Citizen Cast Her Vote for the Kyrgyz President in 2009 During Her Stay in Germany

23rd of July will stay in my memory as a stressy day when I, the citizen of Kyrgyzstan --- currently studying and teaching in Dortmund, Germany --- got on the train to Frankfurt-am-Main in order to practice my right to vote. In this blogpost, let me praise the Hauptkonsulat der Kirgisischen Republik in Frankfurt-am-Main for the Kyrgyz --- "vote easy" --- organization of the presidential elections 2009.


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