Postcard from Bishkek

Have you noticed how history seems to have a habit of repeating itself.

The actual circumstances vary in detail, of course, but the situations and the way that people react often bear remarkable similarities.  I have written before how struck I was by the similarities between how the situations evolved in Russia in 1917 and Kyrgyzstan in 2010 and also in Osh in both 1990and 2010.

Last week I referred to the Oxford don who started a lecture with the words “As I was saying  before I was so rudely interrupted four years ago …” and someone wrote to tell me that the story sounded familiar … with two links which cited others who had said the same thing (more or less): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fray_Luis_de_Le%C3%B3n and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Unamuno.  As I said to him in reply … I was amazed at the extent of his general knowledge.  As it happens, I heard my version of the story in the middle of a lecture on New Testament Theology when I was in Oxford.  The lecture was being given by G.B. Caird who wrote the Penguin Commentary of St. Luke’s Gospel.  He was a good lecturer … very interesting, perhaps because he peppered his talks with side stories like that one … the technique has its drawbacks, of course, I remember the stories more than the content of the lectures! However, it just goes to show how difficult it is to be original.

As another example, after this year’s General Election in Britain, there was a lot of attention paid in the media to the year 1972.  Back then Britain went through a crisis of government … Edward Heath’s conservative government went through a trial of strength with the Trade Unions and the country was thrown into  political and economic turmoil.  There were a series of rolling power cuts throughout the country and businesses were put onto a three day week.   Heath called an election in which he championed the theme “Who governs Britain.”  Although the result wasn’t crystal clear as no party achieved an overall majority in parliament – he got his answer …  he lost his *** seat majority and the conservatives were relegated into second place behind Harold Wilson’s Labour Party.  As the sitting Prime Minister, he had the opportunity to call

Sound familiar?  There are differences between what has happened in this year’s election, but there are striking similarities.

We still have to have our election here … but I was reminded of 1972 because we have been through our own three day week.

Tuesday was a public holiday – Independence Day – commemorating the occasion in August 1991 when Askar Akaev and the leadership of the Khirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic exercised their right under the Soviet Constitution to secede from the Union and declared the Republic an independent state.  Because it fell on a Tuesday, and there was no chance of anyone getting any work done on the Monday, the government decreed that last Saturday would be a normal working day and Monday will be a non-working day, making this week a three day week: Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

The day, itself, started fairly quietly.  Streets in the center of the city had been closed … and a short ceremony was held in the main square … including a wreath laying ceremony on the small  discrete monument by the side of the White House, to those who fell in the April 7th demonstrations.  By the late afternoon, however, the streets were crowded and there were massive traffic jams.  Kievskaya, outside our office was choc-a-block with vehicles … flags flying and horns blaring … all travelling in one direction, into the center of town, and blocking the traffic trying to travel in the opposite direction.  The evening quiet was further disturbed by a massive firework display.

Rosa Otunbaeva also travelled to commission the new Hydro-electric plant Karamba Ata II on the Naryn River.

Over 500 police were drafted onto the streets in Osh, with reinforcements sent from Bishkek and “citizens’ patrols” patrolling the streets to maintain order.  Fortunately, they don’t seem to have been needed as everything was quiet.

The following day was September 1st – Dehn Znaniye, or “Day of Knowledge” … the first day of the school year.   The morning was marked by lots of unusually clean cut and smartly dressed kids walking along the street clutching bunches of flowers for their teachers … the price of flowers rocketed over the last couple of days … the law of supply and demand in operation!  Then it went quiet until lunchtime.  Many of the schools here work on a shift basis – the morning shift left school to be replaced by the afternoon shift.  Unlike in the morning, however, they stayed on the streets chatting and calling to each other … obviously they hadn’t been given much homework on that first day.  Mind you, they wouldn’t have been that keen to settle down to doing it because it is still very warm … it got as high as 35Celcius one day.  Now, I’m obviously not yet Metric because 35 doesn’t seem that bad to me … I grew up using Fahrenheit and expect to see figures in the 70′s … however, I do have to admit that it has been hot.

September 1st is also Independence Day for Uzbekistan … so I went to lunch with one of our visitors from Uzbekistan … Of course we went to an Uzbek restaurant, but I have to admit that I ordered Thai Beef … light and spicy, I didn’t feel up to a heavy Central Asian dish.

Alrthough it was supposed to be a three day week … actually, it has been more like a one day week.  When we returned to work on Wednesday, there was no internet access.  It took us most of the morning to find out what the problem was, checking all the connections, the wireless hub, the ASDL modem and so on …  In the end it turned out that our internet provider had cut us off … they said for not paying the bill … that really upset me because we have been trying to pay them for several months and they kept refusing the payment saying that we had a credit.  There was no warning … “it’s all the contract and the computer deals with it automatically”, they said.  By the time we had sorted all that out it was already lunchtime and so we had to wait until the cashier’s department opened again in the afternoon before we could pay and get ourselves switched on.

We lost internet access again on Friday.  This time it was the result of “an accident” – a broken cable – which meant that the whole city was cut off and entailed a major repair that even made the midday news bulletins.  When communication was eventually restored, for some reason I was the person in the office to get connected – some technical problem with my computer the entailed me rebooting … but eventually I was able to log on and collect my emails … only 76 of them and only 28 of those were spam and another 20 newsletters … I was surprised.

Although I had other work to do, and had a lunch appointment on both days which fortunately stretched well into the afternoon … it was so frustrating and just goes to show how dependent we, (or at least I), have become on the internet …

This week also saw the next stage in the election process.  Although 57 parties had registered their interest in participating in the election, when it came to registering their list of candidates and paying the necessary deposits that number was reduced to 23 … wait, wait … no, 26 … no … 29.  The deadline of 6pm on 30th August – remember a non-working day! – was approaching rapidly and on the last afternoon there was a sudden flurry to submit documents.  The queue was so great that the Election Commission had to stay open to register them all.   Now the list of candidates has to be checked to ensure that they are all eligible and not a member of two or three different parties (!) and that each party has the required number of signatures of sponsors in all the districts.  So it may well be that there may be even fewer parties in the final contest.

There has been some discussion about parties “jumping the gun” and printing “election materials” in the media before the official start of the campaign.

I keep saying how wary I am of official statistics – well, of any statistics, and during the week there was good evidence to support my suspicions.  It appears that two of the state agencies, the Ministry of Economic Regulation and the State Agency for Anti-Monopoly Regulation, both have their own view on what is happening to food prices in the republic.  And they don’t tally!  Whereas one seems to think that the price of meat has increased by 10% over the previous week, the other thinks it has actually fallen.  According to one the price of flour rose by six and a half percent and the other thought the rise was about three times greater at19%.  Now I can see how and why there might be some differences, but these do seem to be a bit dramatic … and with the notable exception of meat that I mentioned above, there does seem to have been a sharp increase in some food prices and there is a concerted effort to regulate the situation and  the authorities have promised to take “the most severe measures for groundless increase of prices for food products.”

But that’s not all … according to the Ministry of the Interior the first eight months of the year apparently saw a decrease in the number of murders in the republic … apparently they don’t classify the deaths in Ala Too Square in April, in Maevka, Djalal Abad and Osh as murder … or … well, perhaps it’s better not to think that …

You will have gathered from this that, thanks to a long weekend and absence of internet access, it has been a relatively quiet week … As I said, however, I have had plenty of things to occupy my time.  Thank goodness they have all been routine … long may that continue … there are some bits of history that we don’t need repeating.

Tags: Expat, Interesting_Times, Kyrgyzstan, Life_in_Kyrgyzstan, Reminiscences, Weekly_Postcards