Postcard from Bishkek

If I take this opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas, please bear with me. I am being neither tardy nor anticipating something that is due to take place in 353 days time. Today, January 7th, is Christmas Day here.

The Russian Orthodox Church continues to follow the Julian calendar, despite the fact that back in 1917 the Soviets decided to join most of the rest of the world and use the Gregorian calendar. Tsarist Russia had never made the switch and by that time there was a discrepancy of some thirteen days between the two calendars. As a result, Orthodox Christmas falls on January 7th and the early days of Independence, the Kyrgyz decided to make it a Public Holiday.

Later today I will brave the cold and go down to the local Orthodox Church here in Bishkek, (The Cathedral of the Resurrection), and join in the festivities.  I do draw the line at going to midnight mass … although I do know some people who do go every year and regularly invite me to join them.  I don’t even stay up to see in the New Year!  This year, however, I had a restless night because the fireworks kept going until five o’clock in the morning.  I had the family over for dinner on New Years’ Eve, (a typical Englishman, I cooked Roast Beef with all the trimmings – well, most of them), and because two of the kids are quite young we set off our fireworks at a nice civilized hour; seven o’clock.  Even though that was quite early, ours weren’t the first fireworks of the evening …

Fireworks are, of course, dangerous things.  I remember, for example, how a friend of mine nearly lost his leg when some fireworks, (“bangers”), he had in his trouser pocket exploded and when I was about seven or eight, a “Roman Candle” firework erupted in my face.  I was very lucky in that it hit me in the forehead, (where there is still a faint scar), and if it had struck a couple of inches lower then I would have been blinded.  Two boys, (aged 14 and 19), were not so lucky and were taken to hospital with eye injuries caused by sparks from fireworks.  They were amongst the 170 people hospitalized over the holiday period.  Indeed, the ambulance service reported that they had received an increase in the number of calls and the crews were so busy that they even worked through their mealbreaks.

Anyway, apart from the fireworks, the first week of the New Year has been fairly quiet, mainly because the government decided to declare the whole week as “non working days”.  Monday was declared a holiday because the official New Year holiday fell on a Sunday, (a non working day).  The Christmas holiday falls on today, a Saturday, so they decided to move the intervening “working days” onto the next few Saturdays so that everyone could take the whole week off.

Of course, it doesn’t work that way for us.  A hotel has to be open 7/24/365, and visitors still drop into the office wanting us to arrange trips up to the local ski resorts.  However, the diary has been relatively empty – just three meetings this week.

There have been no newspapers all week but journalists for the TV, radio and internet news agencies have kept themselves busy, so I do have some news to tell you this week.  Mind you, a lot of them seem to be catching up with old news that they missed over the holiday period.

It seems that the members of the new government have also been working at their desks rather than swanning off somewhere.  Two days before the end of the year the new Prime Minister issued a number of instructions at a cabinet meeting and they need to be worked on.  It’s not just the new Ministers and heads of State Agencies, etc., who were at work; most of their underlings were behind their desks as well.  I got a phone call from someone I know in the Ministry of the Economy asking if I had any suggestions that the government might adopt in order to help attract new foreign investment.  I didn’t think I could add anything new as the government already has a fairly progressive policy in this respect, but he seemed to be quite interested in a couple of the comments that I offered.

One of those instructions was to the Finance Ministry, who were told to cut the deficit to just 5% of GDP in an effort to balance the budget – at the moment it is projected to be just over 8%, so that seems like a pretty tall order..  The new Prime Minister wants to achieve growth of 7-8% and keep inflation to a maximum of 10%.  That last one looks worrying.  A review of inflation figures amongst the countries of the former USSR put Kyrgyzstan in 6th place, with inflation at about 4.5% over the eleven months up to November.   It also looks as if there is bound to be a balance of payments problem because the forecast is that we are likely to import goods worth USD3.8 billion whilst exporting just USD 2.3 billion.

Babanov also wants to recover the ground lost in Kyrgyzstan’s standing in the World Bank “Doing Business” survey and to improve our standing in the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.  He wants us to improve our position from 166th place (out of 175) by 80 places.  That sounds good, but I wonder if it is also a bit of a tall order as it requires a whole change of mentality, psychological and social.  Mind you, he’s also talking about reviewing the work of the Financial Police, which is a continuation of the emphasis of both Otunbaeva and Atambaev who spoke last year about reforming the service, either reducing it in size or abolishing it altogether.

Another issue which has been commanding their attention was the situation in the village of Andarak, where some civil disorder took place there after some (Tajik) motorcyclists attacked and beat up some (Kyrgyz) youths, just before the holidays.  The investigation has been going on and we are being assured that there was no “political or ethnic background” to the disturbances.  It just so happened that the two groups involved people of different nationalities.  Several groups are working with the young people of the village, running meetings for parents and students.  At the moment, however, things seem to quiet as life gets back to normal.  Shops are working normally, transportation is running, the social and political life of the village is “under control”.

Over the New Year, apparently there was apparently yet another fracas between groups of different ethnic backgrounds; this time up here in the north of the country.  Once again, however, the authorities assure us that there was no inter-ethnic cause behind the brawl and they describe the behavior of the youths involved as “hooliganism”.  People may well take these protestations as wishful thinking or “hiding their heads in the sand”, after all there is a natural tendency to assume the worst and draw conclusions … but they could of course be right.

There seems to have been some difficulty in enforcing the ban on casinos and gambling activity introduced last year.  Although, technically speaking, the licenses have been revoked as of January 1st, it seems that many are still operating.  One problem appears to be that the list of establishments operating “slot machines” whose licenses were to be revoked was incomplete – probably because the majority of them were operating without a license.   The statistics are crazy … the list of licensed casinos to have their licenses withdrawn apparently contained 25 establishments, but other reports suggest that there were only 23 licensed casinos in the country.  Although there are supposed to be some 300 gambling halls throughout the country, it seems that only 17 had obtained official licenses … others being registered as “entertainment clubs”.

Anyway, on Wednesday, about 50 people gathered in front of the Government House to protest that the law wasn’t being enforced and promised to continue their protests until it was.  Meanwhile the casino’s have promised legal action, calling the law unconstitutional, complaining that something like 15,000 people are being put out of work, (which seems a lot – anything between about 50 each on average), and being forced out of business without any right to compensation.

(I can’t help drawing an analogy with the situation in the Maldives, where I see that the government has lifted the ban on spas and massage parlours, revoking a circular sent by the Tourism Ministry last week which ordered spas to cease operations.  The President is reported to have said that the government had requested the Supreme Court to advise whether spas were legal under the constitution of the Maldives.)

Energy continues to be a controversial issue.  After last years’ comments about the need to raise the cost of electricity in order to pay for the renovation of the distribution network and the possibility of introducing a form of “rationing”, (and, indeed, electricity consumption has exceeded expected norms and resulted in a number of “short” power cuts due to system overload), we have been told that gas prices are to be held, at least for the time being, probably until May.   Uzbekistan has turned off the gas supply to Tajikistan without warning but we were told that this should not affect us in Kyrgyzstan.  As it happens the Uzbeks turned the tap back on the very next day.  However, the North of Kyrgyzstan appears to have “lost” 15% of the targeted gas deliveries, but I am not sure what is meant by “lost”.  The news reports seem to refer to the fact that Kyrgyzgas is receiving less gas than expected from its suppliers.

Meanwhile, one politician has bemoaned the fact that local people cannot afford to buy coal.  Kyrgyz coal is about 45% more expensive from the mine than that in Kazakhstan – and the price to the consumer is even higher and many people are complaining that it is too expensive for them to buy.  This is mainly because of the high cost of transportation, which nearly triples the price, but that knowledge is of little comfort to the consumer.  Babanov ordered a commission to look into the situation in the southern oblasts of Osh and Batken which resulted in prices being reduced by reduced by about a som per kilo, or 1000 som per ton.

 

There are a number of on-going stories that continue to simmer away.

The first concerned Wikileaks which has struck again with a report that the American government decided that the Bakiev could be “bought” by providing extra funds to pay for the rent of the Manas base in order to keep it open after he had announced it would be closed after Russia had promised a loan of over two billion dollars.  It seems that the US money was “ready money” which he could use in the furtherance of the Presidential elections whereas the Russian money would be tied to particular projects.

Another Wikileaks revelation told how an attempt to persuade Kyrgyz officials in being more publicly supportive of the airbase backfired as all it did was to convince them that other airbases they visited that they visited in the States were more integrated into the local community, and they felt that the same should apply to Manas.

The second concerns the accession of Kyrgyzstan into the Customs Union, with the “libertarian” Central Asian Free Market Institute, (CAFMI), issuing their analysis of the likely consequences of such a course of action.  It appears to be quite a damning analysis with the overall conclusion that “there is no confirmation for the possible benefits of joining the CU for Kyrgyzstan.”  As with many reports, there are many questions surrounding, and arising, from it, but I suspect that there are some people, (pretty important people, at that), who will not be too happy to see it land on their desk.

Another analysis to surface during the week was one into the woes of the tourist industry.  I happen to know and respect the author so I was somewhat surprised to see the headline which seemed to suggest that we experienced a 260% increase in the number of tourists visiting the country last year.  My attention was caught, I saw that he was quoting official statistics and I was taken by the telling phrase, “If you believe the National Statistics Committee …”, but instead of questioning the basis of the figures, as I thought he was going to, he seemed to take them at face value … and expand on what they implied.  As I said, I know and respect the guy so I read on.  There were parts of his analysis which I thought were excellent and “spot on”, but unfortunately there were others where I reeled in a state of stunned shock.

 

Although the “no-day working week” is over, and next week everything should be back to normal, the festivities are not quite complete.  Next week, for example, I’ll be wishing you all a “Happy New Year”.  January 13th is known here as Stariy Noviy God, (Old New Year), because in the Julian calendar, that’s the day on which New Year would fall.

 

 

Postcard from Bishkek: the weekly postcard that I send out as an email also gets posted on the website ianbek.kg each week – and there are other postcards which don’t get sent out.  This week, for example, there were the following posts: on New Year’s resolutions; Manzhily Ata, a shamanistic “holy site” on the southern shore of Lake Issyk Kul; some photographs taken by Maxim on last month’s trip to Naryn; the re-launch of our KyrgyzDiary site;  Ala Kiyiz, a traditional Kyrgyz felt carpet, not a famous as the Shyrdak but, in many ways, far more distinctive, (including a gallery of photographs showing how they are made) and the dangers of air travel.

I also added a gallery of photographs showing a variety of colourful shyrdaks.

 

It is now possible to follow me on Facebook, (where I have specific pages for Celestial Mountains and ianbek … and also links.kg and Kyrgyz Diary), and on twitter, (@Bishkekpostcard).

 

 

If you decide that you don’t want to receive these weekly postcards in your email anymore, please drop me a line to  and I will take you off the distribution list.  Alternatively, if you know someone who might be interested in being added to the mailing list, then get them to drop me a line and I’ll be happy to do so.