Story

Kyrgyzstan: After the Coup

Philip Shishkin, for the Pulitzer Center
Jalalabad, Kyrgyzstan

The other day, Asylbek Tashtanbekov, a squat former running champion without a job, was proclaimed mayor of Jalalabad. This turn of events surprised many, not least Mr. Tashtanbekov himself.

Green and quiet, Jalalabad is a small town in the South of Kyrgyzstan, a country where political fortunes have risen and crashed with bewildering speed after last week's violent overthrow of the president.

The revolution was the second time in five years that this Central Asian nation disposed of its elected leader in a coup. The first effort was dreamily called the Tulip Revolution. To celebrate it, Jalalabad authorities erected a slender statue in the middle of a newly renamed Freedom Square. The second revolution lacks any of that romanticism, both because of the déjà vu quality of events and because of the bloodshed—more than 70 people were killed storming the presidential palace.

Kyrgyzstan is a bizarre case of direct democracy taken to its most absurd extreme in a society where institutions and laws are weak or non-existent, where poverty makes people edgy and ready to attempt risky things, and where proximity to power tends to ignite destructive self-enrichment instincts.

The ousted president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, fled to the outskirts of Jalalabad. Here in his ancestral village, surrounded by an entourage of brothers, relatives and hangers-on, he weighed his options and paced around a courtyard, phone to ear. During his tenure as president, corruption and nepotism increased, while government opponents were jailed, beaten and even killed, critics say. Once seen as a democratic hope of Kyrgyzstan, Mr. Bakiyev kept losing support, until his political base shrank to the size of his family estate here.

His presence in Kyrgyzstan posed problems for the self-proclaimed interim government—he called them bandits and refused to resign. Mr. Bakiyev's sojourn in Jalalabad also added a particularly jumpy quality to local politics.

After the coup, the town's mayor resigned, part of the domino effect of Mr. Bakiyev's fall. His replacement, "the people's mayor", was a couple of days into his job when a rally addressed the question of his suitability to the position. There were a lot of women in that rally, and some alleged that the people's mayor was slow in meeting the needs of the people. One case cited was that of a woman who needed money for medical treatment but apparently couldn't get it. "So we said, let's appoint our own mayor," said Zulfia Abdrazakova, an elderly woman in a floral-print headscarf. She kept her eyes closed when she spoke, and I found out later she was blind and ran a local charity for the blind and the deaf.

This is how Mr. Tashtanbekov entered the picture. A Jalalabad native, Mr. Tashtanbekov, 52, had worked in the town administration before, and was known to some of the protesters since he was a boy. When he was younger he scored big victories in the 800-meter, and 1,500-meter races, he told me proudly in the mayor's office. A huddle of white telephones sat silently on his desk, while his mobile phone kept erupting in a raucous folk-song ring tone. He'd worked as a coach, and as an official in the mayor's office, but for the last two years he'd been mostly without work, he said.

He was initially reluctant to become mayor and felt it was impolite to push out the guy who'd just been given that very job. But he overcame that reluctance partly because the old mayor seemed exhausted and not that excited about being mayor any more, he said. When I asked him whether he supported the interim government or Mr. Bakiyev, he seemed unwilling to pick sides, and said he stood for "peace and conciliation." Pressed on the issue, he said he backed the new leaders in Bishkek.

The presence of loudly disposed women at political rallies has been a fixture in Kyrgyzstan. Describing a recent rally where a heckling argument occurred between two rival camps, a local journalist mentioned something called OBON. The word sounded like the ubiquitous Russian acronym for the Police Department Special Forces, and I assumed he was talking about riot police. It turned out the acronym stood for, roughly, Heckling Women Department Special Forces.

With the mayor's office in limbo, a similar round of musical chairs occurred in the Jalalabad governor's office. After the music stopped, the man who ended up sitting down was Bektur Asanov, Mr. Bakiyev's ambassador to Pakistan. A one-time opposition activist and minister of sport, he told me he'd taken the diplomatic job as a safe parking spot for himself and his family, but was now ready to participate in events closer to home. He rushed to Kyrgyzstan from Pakistan and eclipsed other contenders for the governor's job.

A few miles away on Thursday morning, the deposed president set off in a motorcade for Osh, a big Southern city, where he intended to give a speech to a rally of supporters. Ever since the coup, Mr. Bakiyev promoted the notion that he was immensely popular in his native South, and even suggested he could run a Southern statelet from here, while the interim government plodded in the North. But when Mr. Bakiyev arrived in Osh, he was greeted with rocks, and when he tried to speak, the electricity was cut off and he couldn't use the microphone.

The motorcade returned to his ancestral village. A man from Mr. Bakiyev's camp ran around the courtyard showing a gash next to his eyebrow. Someone hit him with a stick in Osh, he said. The president, dressed in a pin-striped suit and blue shirt, made calls and appeared angry that his big Osh rally came to nothing. "All these new people in power are bandits," he said. About 200 women were ushered into the courtyard—I heard there were members of OBON among them—and Mr. Bakiyev excused himself to "speak to the people."

Milling about a few yards away was Janysh Bakiyev, one of the president's several brothers, and his feared head of security. He wore camouflage military fatigues with his name stitched on the flap of the breast pocket, and chain-smoked Marlboro cigarettes. Many in Kyrgyzstan blame Janysh for the deaths of more than 70 protesters who were all shot storming the presidential palace. Many want to see him on trial.

"Yes, I gave the order to shoot at people who were armed, at the cars that were being used to ram through (the perimeter fence around the presidential palace)," he told me. He disputed the notion that his soldiers killed unarmed protesters and said fire had been directed at the palace from the crowd. He also said that some protesters got shot from such an angle that it suggested they were shot by their own colleagues. "Bullets don't fly that way," he told me, making a circular motion with his finger in the air. He said the protesters were moving like "zombies" toward the palace.

The photos of many of those shot to death are taped to the fence near the presidential palace in Bishkek, in a makeshift memorial. One of them shows Nursultan Tabaldiyev, a first-year college student, born in 1992. A bullet-riddled truck still stands here, and people gather to light candles and pray. Flowers are everywhere. But life is slowly returning to normal, even in tone-deaf manifestations. Just down the street from the memorial, a big poster showing a camouflaged soldier with a weapon, invites passers-by take part in "paintball combat". A phone number is provided.

Back in his Jalalabad compound, Mr. Bakiyev was grabbing at straws. With the Russians and Americans turning away from him, he was desperate for any sign of support. At one point his aides printed out a news report saying that Belorussian President Alexander Lukashenko called the revolution an "unconstitutional coup" and offered asylum to Mr. Bakiyev. In return, Mr. Bakiyev praised him for his "courage."

Ahmat, another Bakiyev brother pacing around the courtyard, said "we'll defend ourselves" if attacked. Later that evening, Mr. Bakiyev was quietly whisked to the Jalalabad airport where he boarded a plane to neighboring Kazakhstan, which offered to help mediate between him and the interim government. His tense stay at the ancestral village was over.

In a flurry of interim-government appointments that day, a one-line item announced a new mayor of Jalalabad. His name wasn't Asylbek Tashtanbekov, the running champ.