Shoot to kill
Following the Maevka incident, the interim government vowed to restore order to the streets of Bishkek.
Back in 2005, the new government, that time headed by one Kurmanbek Bakiev, commissioned Feliks Kulov to restore order. He was helped in his task by volunteers from various sports associations, martial arts teams and so on, who formed patrols of “civil guards”. One night this week, apparently, there were some 10,000 volunteers ready to take to the streets to help preserve order. They were helped in turn by the weather that quickly turned inclement.
The government say that they have the resources to maintain law and order, to ensure safety and security. This is not exactly in line with what Danyar Usenov, the previous Prime Minister, said just before April 7th, but a bit more worrying is the fact that they have given the police the authority to fire in the case of mass disorders … to “shoot to kill”!
Although I understand the difficulty that they are facing, this seems extreme … and shows that we have reached a sad state of affairs.
I ask myself if this isn’t exactly the sort of thing that incensed the crowd on April 7th … and the argument that they themselves are using to prosecute a case against the former president and government? The fact that the Bakiev regime ordered the police and the army to fire on their own people, taking over eighty lives in the process.
It’s a case of mutual recrimination … if the interim government blames Bakiev and members of his entourage for the deaths, then he lays the responsibility for them fairly and squarely on their shoulders.
Fortunately, I don’t think it will come to shooting … Just as in Tajikistan, when the civil war eventually came to an end, everything seems to have been done to prevent conflict breaking out again. The ordinary people were “tired” of war. I think that will probably happen here in Kyrgyzstan as well. There is a sense of shock and outrage, anger even, that people would do this so soon after the violence of April 7th. There is a backlash amongst the general population, at least here in Bishkek, against the protestors.
One of the local news agencies sent a reporter out into the street to ask people if they thought that the government would use the force of weapons on the population. student is reported as saying: “I am against bloodshed but sometimes you have to handle arms. … nobody feels sorry for marauders”, and another said: “… it would be great if somebody will stop all of this – weapons, shooting, marauding…”.
In fact, the general opinion in that rather limited vox-pop survey was that, No, the government wouldn’t turn weapons onto their own people, … but that was tempered with comments like: “… well, who knows?”
Bishkek