Story

Kyrgyzstan: The Woman in Charge

Philip Shishkin, for the Pulitzer Center
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

P1020277

"These days, I sleep while walking, so if I lose my train of thought, perhaps you could nudge me," Roza Otunbayeva, the interim leader of Kyrgyzstan, said on Saturday. She was drinking strong tea to keep herself from nodding off at her desk.

Her exhaustion is understandable: it's been only ten days since protesters in this poor Central Asian nation forced a deeply unpopular president out of power, for the second time in five years. Ms. Otunbayeva, a key player in both revolutions, took the helm of a caretaker government as Kyrgyzstan stared into the darkness. Some 80 protesters were shot to death storming the presidential palace. Looters ransacked shops. Though a regime reviled as corrupt and rotten was swept away, there's uncertainty over what comes next.

Five years ago, an equally unpopular regime collapsed only to pave the way for a worse one. What's even more surprising, it was Ms. Otunbayeva and her fellow opposition figures who helped launch Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the man now seen as the most disastrous leader so far in Kyrgyzstan's history. His rule, which began with such promise, descended into rampant nepotism, asset-stripping, corruption and violence against political opponents.

"He tricked us," Ms. Otunbayeva told me, in her temporary office at the Defense Ministry, a red-and-gold Kyrgyzstan flag behind her. "He gave all the right speeches back then." Later in the conversation, she returned to the subject: "Last time, we got tricked like little kids." She hopes this time will be different because the first revolution turned out so poorly and taught people lessons.

For someone who helped bring about the downfalls of two seemingly powerful regimes, Ms. Otunbayeva, 59, doesn't look menacing. She looks like your favorite aunt—when I first met her in 2005, she served me home-made pumpkin dumplings and insisted I eat. She has pitch-black hair that sits helmet-like over a round face that often breaks into a smile.

To unwind, she does yoga, though lately she hasn't had much time. She speaks in long ruminative sentences, as if one thought triggers another that requires explanation, which in turns sets off another thought or anecdote. In college, she specialized in German philosophy. After Kyrgyzstan acquired independence from the Soviet Union, Ms. Otunbayeva served as her country's first ambassador to the U.S. , and later as foreign minister.

In 2005, after a stint for the United Nations in Georgia, Ms. Otunbayeva decided to run for parliament, but the authorities said she didn't meet the residency requirements and knocked her off the ballot. This was a mistake. Ms. Otunbayeva pushed back and helped topple the government. Under Mr. Bakiyev, a one-time ally, she was quickly sidelined, much like many of the other revolutionaries of the Class of '05. This was also a mistake. On the eve of the 2010 revolt, as the government kept snatching opposition leaders from their homes and offices, Ms. Otunbayeva was hiding in another apartment and using her cell-phone to coordinate the disjointed protests that were erupting all over the country.

Ms. Otunbayeva stands out in a political culture dominated by men, although historically women have played frontline roles in Kyrgyzstan's nomadic society. "A woman jumps on a horse and can fly ahead of any man. A woman as a fighter, a woman as a messenger, a woman as a polemicist, all of these things are real," Ms. Otunbayeva says.

The most famous woman in the country's history is Kurmajan Datka, who died in 1907. She bucked tradition by refusing an arranged marriage, and wed an ambitious local chieftain instead. The man ruled over the Kyrgyz tribes within the Khokand Khanate, a Central Asian state that would be conquered by the Russian Empire toward the end of the 19th century. After Kurmajan's husband got killed in a palace coup, she assumed his mantle as the ruler of the Kyrgyz, and was awarded a high military rank of Datka (which translates roughly as "general").

She fought the Russian encroachment, but eventually pledged allegiance to Saint Petersburg. Then, two of her sons and two grandsons were accused of running a smuggling operation and killing customs officers. Despite her entreaties, the Russians publicly hanged one son and sentenced the rest of the accused to hard labor in Siberia. Crushed, Kurmajan gave away her cattle and settled into a solitary life in her home village. There are statues to Kurmajan Datka in Kyrgyzstan, and her face decorates the 50-som banknote.

Like many small countries, Kyrgyzstan is often defined in relation to bigger countries, as if its existence only matters because it's of some use to others. The Americans have a military base here, and so do the Russians, and the Canadians mine gold. Neighboring China looms large over everything. Though Kyrgyzstan draws benefit from some of these relationships, they also spawn fears of being a mere pawn in a bigger game.

"We are not a puppet, we want to succeed as a country," says Ms. Otunbayeva. "We don't want to be manipulated: one person opens a base, another says I also want a base; one says I'll give you money, the other says I'll give you more money." She's referring to the previous regime's awkward attempts to play the Americans and the Russians off of each other and extract more money from both.

"Yes, a destitute person may follow such logic. But we should be smart, we shouldn't sell ourselves." The interim leader says Kyrgyzstan doesn't have to choose between the U.S. and Russia. "The American base is here, that's what happened, there's Afghanistan, there was Sept. 11, we are strategically well positioned, there's a treaty with us. That means we shouldn't be jumpy."

The revolution inspires many conflicting emotions in Ms. Otunbayeva. There's shame over looting and destruction; there's sorrow for those who got killed; there's a certain pride that her people can rise up and shake off a rotten regime, unlike their neighbors who are too cowed to protest dictatorships; there's fear that things might fall apart; and there's hope that a better government might emerge out of this mess. "Just recently when the situation was escalating here, things were also happening in Thailand. And I was reading that there had been 18 coups d'etait in Thailand's history, and I got so scared."

In 2005, I ran into Ms. Otunbayeva inside the presidential palace, just as protesters were looting it, breaking stuff left and right, and throwing things out of windows. (It's an ugly Soviet-built structure in central Bishkek). It was dark, and Ms. Otunbayeva was a strange sight—a small woman in a headscarf walking shell-shocked through throngs of excited young men. She said that people needed to stop and think about what they were doing, about how they were hurting the revolution. And then she wandered off.

This was not a time for diplomats and professors, or for thinking. Five years later, Ms. Otunbayeva seems both intimidated and impressed by mobs---intimidated because of their destructive unruly power; impressed because they represent the people's right to rise up against injustice when all else fails.

On the eve of the revolution, the minister of interior in the Bakiyev government traveled to Talas, a Kyrgyz town where the protest movement was rapidly swelling. The minister was beaten by a mob. "They turned him into a bloody mess, they attacked him every which way. A thousand people beat him, beat him so badly, can you imagine, the minister of interior... They beat him, beat him, beat him, and then everyone spat at him. So morally he doesn't exist anymore, they morally completely destroyed him, humiliated him." There's a definite note of compassion in her voice, yet there's also anger at a government that puts people in a state in which they are capable of such cruelty.

The other day in Bishkek, I met Baktybek Saipbayev. He's a big, jovial man who owns a small ice-cream business with his wife. They make Snow Leopard-brand ice cream in a concrete bunker-like building on the outskirts of the capital. They sell it mostly through modern supermarket chains that began appearing in Bishkek a few years ago. In 2005, during the first revolution, Mr. Saipbayev lost a few thousand dollars in ice-cream and equipment during the looting of Beta Stores, a Turkish-built shop downtown. There were crushed cookies and detergent on the floor that night, as looters were stealing everything from television sets to underwear.

This year, the damage to the ice cream business was bigger. The Narodnii chain of some 40 stores got so thoroughly looted that Mr. Saipbayev estimates he lost about $20,000. He hopes to get some of it back through insurance. On a rainy Sunday, he unloaded sacks of powdered milk from the back of his minivan. A friend helped him find the milk because supplies from a factory in Talas, where he usually gets it, were disrupted by the revolt.

Even with all the hassles for his business, Mr. Saipbayev seemed sympathetic to the revolution. A doctor by training, he likened a corrupt regime to an infected wound. "If there's puss in the wound, you have to let it out, otherwise it will lead to sepsis, you have to clean the wound out," he said. "People here started to understand that you can get rid of these assholes in power. And the politicians are beginning to be scared." This was something Ms. Otunbayeva told me too: "Do you really think that in the end we want to be dealt with the same way that Bakiyev was dealt with?"

After unloading the powdered milk, the ice-cream entrepreneur climbed back into the car and said a new joke is making the round in Bishkek: "Don't wake my inner Kyrgyz."