In October and November, avant-garde music duo Vtoroi Ka will be touring Europe, from Istanbul to Reykjavík. This is the first tour of its kind for a popular music band from Kyrgyzstan, and represents another significant milestone in its burgeoning career. 

Like the rest of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan is experiencing a pop music boom, partly thanks to its growing presence on international streaming platforms. However, local artists still lag behind those in neighbouring Kazakhstan, which has long established itself as a pop culture powerhouse, even winning a Grammy Award. Although Kyrgyzstani artists frequently perform concerts abroad, their audiences are usually limited to members of the Central Asian diaspora. 

The innovative Bishkek music duo Vtoroi Ka is now embarking on an ambitious tour to change that. From 17 October to 12 November, the band will perform in eleven different countries on sixteen dates, taking them from Istanbul to Reykjavík. This tour is unprecedented for a contemporary music band from Kyrgyzstan and represents a watershed moment for the local music scene. For Vtoroi Ka, however, it is the next logical step in their burgeoning career.

The organisers of the Iceland Airwaves festival in Reykjavík, at which Vtoroi Ka will perform on 7 November, share this opinion. In their presentation on the festival website, they express their strong conviction about their future career: ‘With the momentum building as it is, it won’t be long before Vtoroi Ka are the name at the tip of the tongue of your cooler best friend’s lips.’

Bakai Kolchaev, the band manager and director of Infinity Music, the leading music distributor in Bishkek, explains that the idea of a European tour had been in the air for some time, given the band’s growing international fan base. ‘We carefully examined the indicators in various countries in Europe and beyond – the figures showed that there is considerable interest,’ Bakai told Novastan. He added that the band is streamed particularly often in countries such as Germany, France, Poland and Spain.

Hip-hop in southern Bishkek 

Vtoroi Ka was founded in the mid-2010s by Sultan and Ilya in the Asanbay district in the south of Bishkek. The two school friends had met some ten years earlier – the band’s name refers to the designation of that class, ‘2K’. They started creating underground rap music with homemade beats in their home studio and releasing it on YouTube and local platforms, some of it accompanied by self-made music videos.

This led to the release of their debut EP, Iz Okna (‘From the Window’), in 2017. Eventually, they took it down from streaming services because they were no longer happy with the quality. However, the eponymous single, complete with music video, can still be found on YouTube, offering a glimpse into the group’s early work. 

The duo was already contemplating breaking up in early 2020 when they made their first local hit with the single Resnitsam stalo tyazhelo (‘My Eyelids Turned heavy’). Six months later, they released their first ‘official’ album, Den’ Zavisimosti (‘Dependence Day’). This musically rich hip-hop record introduces the band’s everyday life, their business, and their longings in their ‘hood’, the microdistrict of Asanbay.

As they gained immediate acclaim in the local hip-hop scene, Sultan and Ilya had already turned to writing completely different music. Their second album, Serial, released in 2022, still contains a few rap tracks, most notably the single 39 Shkola (‘39th School’), dedicated to a Bishkek school renowned for its performances in street battles at the time. However, with its portrayal of intense teenage life, the album already shows strong signs of musical eclecticism. Fans of 2000s pop rock will also find plenty to enjoy here.

Always on the move

In July 2022, the single Teni ot Palm (‘Palm Shadows’) marked the next breakthrough. With its memorable bass line, the track became a summer hit, gaining popularity far beyond Kyrgyzstan. To this day, it remains Vtoroi Ka’s most-listened-to song. The accompanying music video featured Sultan and Ilya in bizarrely old-fashioned gangster roles for the first time, a concept they continued to develop in subsequent years. For example, the track Vstrechayte Govnyukov (‘Welcome the shitheads’), released in early 2023, was accompanied by a retro-style music video, in which the two artists portray themselves as troublemakers who arrive in your city with a ‘whole squad’ and their ‘live live-band’.

Read more on Novastan: Sex, Drugs, and Postpunk – the new album of Bishkek’s Duo Vtoroi Ka

From then on, ‘always on the move’ became the motto for both Vtoroi Ka and for their artistic gangster characters. Sometimes they appear as elusive fugitives, as in the single Gde-to za granitsey (‘Somewhere Abroad’), sometimes as hustlers who are always on the lookout for the next big coup, as in Tonirovannyi Kaban (‘Tinted Benz’), in which the two set off with their business partner ‘Real Bayke’ (played by Bakai) to conquer Saint Petersburg. This also marked the beginning of the band’s travels, with parts of the videos being shot during their first concerts in Russia.

By that time, Vtoroi Ka had already been on the radar of Russia’s leading music critics for a while. In July 2022, the hip-hop magazine The Flow first reported on the two ‘newcomers’. Journalists such as Nikolaj Redkin and Danya ‘Pornorap’ publicly expressed their enthusiasm for the ‘incredibly stylish shitheads’ who produced the ‘best music videos of the past year [2023]’.

Post-punk and rave

Vtoroi Ka made their definitive breakthrough in the Russian-speaking world with the album Svinaya Poputka (literally a ‘Piggy Ride’), released in April 2024. With their post-punk-inspired yet consistently colourful and ironic tracks, the band clearly struck a chord. The album topped The Flow’s Top 50 ranking for that year and appeared in several other best-of lists.

However, that success did not stop the group from reinventing themselves time and again. They announced the end of their post-punk phase on social media when they released the album. Indeed, the GO PUBE EP, released in March 2025, shows them moving more towards electronic music. Their visual aesthetic has also evolved, away from the image of leather jacket-wearing gangsters. Instead, it revolves around a psychedelic, imaginative reinterpretation of everyday Kyrgyz motifs. 

Such elements can already be found in earlier music videos, such as Dura (‘Silly Girl’) and the video for Soundcheck, and their latest single, Minimum iz sta (‘Minimum out of a Hundred’). Reminiscent of the early noughties in both music and visuals, this latest piece also announces their upcoming album, Svobodnye Dvizheniya (‘Free Movements’).

Kyrgyz carnival 

These new directions are also accompanied by geographical expansion. Following a mini-tour of Russia in May 2025 and appearances at several festivals in China in August, Vtoroi Ka are now moving Westwards with their ‘whole squad’ and their ‘live live-band’.

With all these musical metamorphoses, even More Zvukov, the Berlin booking agency organising most of the tour, finds it difficult to assign the ‘innovative’ band to a genre. The promotional text states that they are ‘known for their unique blend of electronic, alternative, and indie sounds. Combining experimental beats with heartfelt lyrics, Vtoroi Ka creates music that transcends genres, resonating with listeners across diverse cultural landscapes.’

Nevertheless, there are some constants that have given the collective a clear identity over the years, whether their music features raw trap beats, melancholic basslines or powerful electro. Throughout their work, they present themselves and their surroundings in a lighthearted and self-ironic manner, without resorting to slapstick. Their combination of quirky motifs and artistic precision gives their work a very carnivalesque quality.

Nevertheless, their carnival is unmistakably Kyrgyz. These musical globetrotters have always maintained strong ties to their hometown of Bishkek. From the start, they have been ambitious to create a distinctive Bishkek sound. The Russian used in their lyrics is a Kyrgyzstani Russian, full of terms that prompted the journalist interviewing them for The Flow to ask several follow-up questions. The two are also eager representatives of Kyrgyzstan in their visual language, creating their own unique imagery full of playful details that stand out from tourist clichés. 

Art director Yuliya Petrova, who has been working with Vtoroi Ka since 2021, has certainly played a part in creating this visual world. She has also directed most of the band’s recent videos. The team around the musical all-rounders Sultan and Ilya, who write, record and mix their own music and lyrics, has also further grown.

Full venues and real energy

Their session musicians, who are featured in various live videos, such as this reinterpretation of their hit Teni ot Palm, include a drummer, a guitarist and a sound engineer. There is also a communications officer, and Bakai, the manager who takes care of all organisational matters ‘so that the musicians can concentrate fully on their art.’

‘Vtoroi Ka is a large team that takes music and image seriously,’ Bakai summarises. He believes that their growing success, manifested in tens or even hundreds of thousands of listeners in different corners of the world, is only ‘natural as they do everything honestly, deeply and to a high standard.’

During the tour, Bakai continues, he hopes for ‘full venues and real energy.’ In this respect, at least, some of the upcoming tour dates are looking promising: one of the two Berlin concerts and the Hamburg concert sold out weeks before the start of the tour. 

Click here for the list of Vtoroi Ka’s tour dates.

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Florian Coppenrath for Novastan

The post Welcome the Shitheads: Bishkek band Vtoroi Ka goes on a European tour appeared first on Novastan English.

Bishkek musical duo Vtoroi Ka has recently dropped its third album: carnivalesque postpunk in a world where nothing is as serious as it seems. Novastan’s review.

“These post-Soviet cities have already seen quite some nonsense/ But after seeing our Kyrgyz squad up close/ the lockdown has been abruptly enacted for some reason“, says the chorus of the single “Vstrechyaite Govnyukov” (“Welcome the shitheads”), released in February 2023. The retro-aesthetic video shows an exuberant wedding party stirring up the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek. The audience has been warned: the “shitheads” are coming to cause a lot of trouble.

“Shitheads” – Govnyuki in Russian – is what Sultan and Ilya of the duo Vtoroi Ka, currently one of the most exciting music groups in Central Asia, call themselves. They adopted the term from a video blogger who mocked them with it and turned it into something positive. As Sultan says in a long interview with the online magazine SRSLY: “[We are] two shitheads. We’re explorers. The kind that aren’t afraid to try things and are constantly on an artistic quest.”

At the beginning of May, Vtoroi Ka released their third album, Svinaya Poputka, a mysterious title that could literally be translated as “piggy ride” – a not entirely inaccurate description of the listening experience. It opens with the inviting bass line of “Teni ot pal’m” (“Palm Shadow“): “Come take me quickly to where the palm shadows are…”

A cheerful Joy Division

The song, which was released in June 2022 together with a music video filmed in Bishkek and on Lake Issyk-Kul, is the duo’s most successful hit to date. A total of six of the eleven tracks on the album had previously been released as singles, all with funny and colourful videos. Die-hard fans of the group will therefore recognize some of the songs, but in any case Svinaya Poputka offers a musically delightful half hour.

Since their debut album “Den’ Zavisimosti” (“Dependence Day”, 2020), which was still clearly a rap album, Vtoroi Ka seem to be moving further and further back into the musical past. The second album, “Serial” (2022), features excursions into the alternative teen rock of the 2000s, and the most recent tracks are full of allusions to the post-punk of the 1970s and 1980s.

However, the characteristic sound of bass, drum computer and synthesiser, which according to one critic is sometimes even reminiscent of the late Soviet cult band Kino around Viktor Tsoi, does not underpin a dark soundscape as is so often the case. “Vtoroi Ka play post-punk, but their music doesn’t have the depressive vibe so typical for the genre,” emphasises hip-hop magazine The Flow. On the contrary: Svinaya Poputka is full of colourful irony – a kind of cheerful Joy Division, as those who grew up with English-language music might say (especially as Sultan’s bass voice is not so dissimilar to that of Ian Curtis).

Read also at Novastan: Inside Bishkek’s Metal Boom: Portrait of a Music Pioneer in Kyrgyzstan

Musical references and quotations can be found in abundance, whether in the lyrics themselves (“An old cassette, vernissage in the loudspeakers“) or in the musical elements. The reels that Sultan and Ilya use to promote their music on social media are like building instructions. For example, for Dura (dummy), their latest single: “Oh, try singing like Zhanna Aguzarova“, an eccentric Russian-speaking singer who was particularly successful in the late 80s.

Sex, drugs and gangster romance

While Svinaya Poputka takes listeners back to the 80s musically, its content primarily relates to the first decade of independence after the end of the Soviet Union. In the words of another reviewer: “The main characters in these songs are bandits and shitheads from the times of the wild 90s, such country road romantics”.

This is symbolised by the “Tonirovannyi Kaban” (“Tinted Boar”), which is enthroned on the album cover with Bishkek’s skyscrapers and a “Kosh Kelingizder” sign (Kyrg. for “Welcome”) in the background. On closer inspection, you can also recognise a “pig duck” on the sign, the signature of graffiti artist Cherv1, which adorns many a wall in Bishkek. Kaban – Russian for wild boar – is the popular name for the Mercedes W-140, a status symbol particularly popular among the nouveau riche and mafia of the post-Soviet 1990s. However, the bonnet is emblazoned with a pig’s snout instead of the usual star.

The single of the same name, in which Sultan and Ilya stage themselves as music dealers, is also dedicated to the “Tonirovannyi Kaban“: Bakai Kolchaev, director of the Bishkek music label Infinity Music, which also distributes the music of Vtoroi Ka, plays the role of a mob leader in the music video.

But unlike the Russian cult series Brigada, which definitively associated the “Kaban” with the criminal 90s, Svinaya Poputka is not so serious. “We don’t want to be taken seriously – like Skryptonite. We want to be simpler, with irony. Sometimes serious, but with a bit of fun,” says Ilya, summarizing the group’s approach.

Through music, colourful imagery and witty language the actually serious references turn into carnivalesque. A typical example for this is the music video “Dura” (“Dummy”), whose bizarre characters seem to come from Alice’s Wonderland. At the same time, the piece is peppered with allusions to the world of erotic webcams, an equally lucrative and dodgy business in Kyrgyzstan, and a recurring motiv in Vtoroi Ka’s work.

Dura‘s text speaks of “her” admirers (“Ukhazhory“), who “give her money wholeheartedly and so earnestly“, while she repeatedly goes “on air”. The same applies to the extremely danceable “Ona sovsem odna” (“She is all alone”): “Her body is a glossy comic for adults“, and further: “All admirers are wild, with brisk movements, unarmed/ In the chat, uncles over 40 are frolicking“.

The underworld of Vtoroi Ka with its very likeable characters, always on the lookout for the next “Dvizh”, the next adventure, is romantic. In “Boomerang”, a couple hides from unclear dangers in cosy togetherness in anticipation of the next Dvizh: “Here we are an easy target/ Let’s leave these rooftops“, whether meant metaphorically or literally. “We don’t have to die yet”, it says, as in “Teni ot Pal’m”, which tells of a girl who has become a “great shooter“, probably not without allusion to Luc Besson’s Leon – The Professional.

Obviously, if you die, you can’t have fun anymore. Intoxication and artificial paradises run through the album like another leitmotiv. The place of longing, where the palm trees stand, is one “where a kilo of junk for the nose costs a thousand“. Or “Pomyat“(“Crumpled”), a wild piece about the state “when there is nothing to recharge yourself with“. “Bong” stands out in particular with its rock’n’roll rhythm – and is, unsurprisingly, dedicated to the water pipe, which, according to the lyrics, should definitely feature in Vtoroi Ka’s Stage Riders (or that of their fictional characters?).

Flawless craftsmanship

Svinaya Poputka impresses no less with its detailed and flawless production, all handcrafted by Sultan and Ilya, who, by their own admission, like to control “everything from start to finish” when it comes to their songs. Without overloading their songs, they manage to surprise you – even on the hundredth listen – with a noise in the background, an imaginative rhyme or a particularly successful transition. The tracks are entertaining, all around two and a half minutes long, with snappy intros – and therefore fit perfectly into the streaming age. However, if you listen to the whole album in one go, you might get the feeling that you’ve had enough of the interplay between bass and drum machine.

But Vtoroi Ka, who must have felt the same way when they were working, have an answer to this: “We would like to say that we are concluding our post-punk story with this album. From now on, there will be other songs, other videos, maybe a different us.” We can therefore remain curious – and quickly browse through their video library – so that we can still claim to have discovered this gem before it became mainstream.

Svinaya Poputka can be heard on all streaming services.

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The post Sex, Drugs, and Postpunk – the new album of Bishkek’s Duo Vtoroi Ka appeared first on Novastan English.

ANALYSIS. The political landscape of Kyrgyzstan was tumultuous in 2020. Novastan Deutsch’s founder and editorial manager Florian Coppenrath analyses Sadyr Japarov’s path to the top and ventures an outlook on its global implications.

The following article appeared in the December 2020 issue of Zentralasien-Analysen. We republish it with the kind permission of the editors. 

“Yesterday, police forces performed their duties perfectly … As President of State I repeat once again: calm in society should be the priority”, declared the then president of Kyrgyzstan Sooronbay Jeenbekov on 3 March 2020. The day before, between 1,500 and 3,000 people demonstrated for over eight hours in Bishkek for the release of Sadyr Japarov, a politician sentenced to over eleven years in prison for hostage-taking. The demonstration was broken up in the evening by the police as demonstrators were marching to the White House. 

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In retrospect, these events seem like a prelude to Japarov’s stellar rise from prison to the top of the executive system. The former advisor of the ex-president Kumanbek Bakiev (2005-2010) was released on 6 October and elected prime minister on 10 October. He also became interim president after the resignation of Jeenbekov and after the government’s spokesman, Kanatbek Isaev, stepped down. All these moves were also supported by a group of committed and sometimes aggressive demonstrators. 

There was hardly any counter-protest. As early as March, many opposition-minded residents of Bishkek showed their lack of understanding for Japarov’s supporters, who were perceived as rural and alien. In October also, many people in Bishkek and abroad were wondering what this “Japarov phenomenon” was all about. The fact that he has the support of a significant part of the population cannot be denied. Yet, he is also a reflection of the rising divergence between social strata. 

Revolution or coup?

Japarov, who resigned from his executive post on 14 November to run in the presidential election emerges as the clear winner of the political turmoil following the disputed and eventually annulled parliamentary election of 4 October. Like a Machiavellian prince, he and his supporters were able to seize the opportunity single-mindedly. Now, people close to Japarov occupy many key positions in the government, most notably his long-time comrades-in-arms Kamchybek Tashiev, now head of the GKNB security service. The outgoing parliament and the judiciary have also quickly sided with him.

Legally, many decisions made in Autumn are highly questionable, as the Venice Commission confirmed at the request of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court. According to the constitution, the term of the parliament ended five years after its first session i.e. at the end of October. Nevertheless, MPs passed new bills hastily and with numerous procedural violations. According to the electoral law and the electoral commission, the parliamentary election was supposed to be organised at the end of December, but has been postponed indefinitely. This is an illustration of the fact that even the highest of laws is only relevant if enough people and institutions commit to its validity.

Read more: Rise and fall… and rise: the career of Kyrgyzstan’s Sadyr Japarov

Japarov effectively pushed for a new constitution that would, in particular, increase the powers of the president, establish a vaguely defined, unelected kurultai (a traditional assembly) to control the executive and legislative branches, and invoke “traditional values” and “respect for elders”. A relevant draft was first presented on 17 November and promptly dubbed the “Khanstitutsiya”, the “Khan Constitution”, on social media. According to Japarov, now president, the new constitution will rid the state of corruption, but according to many observers, it will usher a new authoritarian chapter in Kyrgyzstan’s political history. 

Whether the incidents in Autumn 2020 will be remembered as the third Kyrgyz revolution or as a coup d’état remains to be seen. In any case, they reveal the limits of the thought patterns that all too often manifest themselves in Russian, Western European and US analyses of Kyrgyzstani politics. We can only speak of a competition between different clans to a very limited extent here, and even less of a division between the north and the south of the country. Neither was Jarapov’s rise promoted by geopolitical actors, rather the opposite: Kyrgyzstan’s international partners have uniformly reacted sceptically to the change of president and now tend to adopt a wait-and-see attitude. 

Such analytical motifs place the emphasis on local dynamics in Kyrgyzstan. They refer to partly existing distinctions of interests groups, but tend to be exotic in order to convey one thing to the readership abroad: ‘Something this crazy could not happen here’. Yet Kyrgyzstan has long been integrated into global processes and financial flows, and money stolen from the Kyrgyz state is often found on European bank accounts. Japarov’s success to date can also be described by globally quite common categories: as a right-wing populist episode in a neoliberal state. 

National populism in sheep’s clothing

In a feature of the Japanese weekly Nikkei Asia, Kyrgyz political expert Asim Asimov explained Japarov’s success through a ‘Trump-effect’: “There are very few points on his résumé that show that he is the most suitable candidate for the position of prime minister or president. But he has very strong public support, especially among traditional nationalists and very conservative rural people in Kyrgyzstan”. 

Japarov was imprisoned for taking the governor of the Issyk-Kul region hostage in 2013, in reaction to the nationalisation of the Kumtör, the country’s largest gold mine. He first spent several years in exile in Cyprus and was finally arrested on the Kyrgyz border in 2017 and sentenced to over eleven years in prison. He lost both his parents while in prison, and his son died in a motorbike accident. The tragedy in his biography feeds into a martyr narrative: he has already sacrificed a lot for his motherland; he started at the bottom and can thus understand the concerns of the ‘common people’ better than anyone else. 

He himself uses such an anti-elitist narrative in which he opposes the ordinary people with the corrupt political class. For example, in his interview with Al Jazeera on October 20, he replied to the journalist’s concerns: “I am a democrat. Those who say otherwise are my opponents who did not get the positions they wanted”. He does not stand for a concrete political programme, but only for the fight against corruption, which is being exaggerated as a battle between good and evil. 

Through his image and rhetoric, Japarov, the man of the people, fills a political vacuum. As researcher Asel Doolotkeldieva explained in the TV programme ‘Vecher Trudnogo Dnya‘ (A Hard Day’s Night) back in November 2020, a successful political communication campaign has already been created around his person over the past years via Youtube channels ‘in a very accessible language’. He stands for the non represented, the “working class without a job”: “this part of the population, these 35 percent of the poorest and maybe more from the middle class, who can not see any future prospects in this country. They think that Japarov really and sincerely represents their interests,” explained Doolotkeldieva.

Read more: Can Sadyr Japarov fulfil his promises?

This background also explains some of the opportunistic-looking political statements that cater to nationalist sentiments. One of Japarov’s first acts as prime minister was to reintroduce the indication of ethnicity (in Russian ‘natsionalnost’) in new identity cards and passports. The reference to the kurultai in the constitutional reform also refers to a supposed Kyrgyz tradition. Unlike Donald Trump, however,  Japarov has so far refrained from overly aggressive rhetoric. He is making an effort to win the sympathy of foreign investors and donors, as well as the urban middle class. For example, the fence of the White House in Bishkek has been dismantled and some of his opponents, such as MPs Tilek Toktogaziev and Elvira Zurabaldieva, were co-opted in the government (though they are not part of the government composed in February 2021). Toktogaziev and Zurabaldiyeva had previously been vocal members of the youth-led ‘lustration movement’ for a renewal of the political class. 

Japarov’s anti-elitism is populist, but so are his proposals of easy solutions to complicated problems and his selective understanding of the law. For example, the proposal of an economic amnesty for corrupt personalities: as reported in a journalistic investigation series, Raimbek Matraimov, a former customs official was accused of illegally taking at least 700 million US dollars out of the country, was briefly arrested at the end of October but released in exchange for a promise of repayment of almost 24 million US dollars. He was later detained again and finally released for the last time in April 2021. According to Japarov, this a “political decision”, because, imprisoned, such a person would not pay back a cent to the state. 

Read more: Matraimov’s millions: the story of a Kyrgyz corruption scandal

The current political crisis in Kyrgyzstan is also a socio-economic one. Many analysts did not without reason draw attention to the gap between urban and rural populations and the poverty and lack of prospects. This also motivated the original protest against the parliamentary election. “A country of volunteers and vigilantes. All by themselves,” complained the journalist Aidai Irgebaeva on Facebook in early October. Whether it is caring for people infected with Covid-19 or protecting the city from being sacked, it is always up to the citizens alone, she said. The state is conspicuous above all by its absence, which on the one hand leads to a certain political competition, but also to a shortage of public services. 

A shallow state

In their work Competitive Authoritarianism (2010), Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way introduced the concept of “rotten door transitions”: These “often happen quickly and look spectacular. Indeed, images of protesters taking the parliament while security forces look aside or join them have led to some of these transitions being called revolutions.” The political scientists refer mainly to the so-called colour revolutions of 2004-2005, and the events of the night of 5-6 October in Bishkek, when the White House was “occupied” by protesters within hours, also fit this pattern. According to the authors, such changes of political power rarely lead to a stable government and point above all to the weakness of the state, the party system and civil society. 

The often chaotic political events in Kyrgyzstan can be explained by the widespread absence of the state. This reached its peak in the days after 5 October, when, for a time, not even the security function of the state was guaranteed. The months before showed how quickly the public health system was overwhelmed by the Covid-19 crisis and many affected people could only count on their own resources or contacts. A similar picture emerges in the education sector, where the private sector continues to grow and public schools are increasingly run down, as Aigul Abdubaetova pointed out in the previous issue of Zentralasien-Analysen. 

Kyrgyzstan is an extreme example of a minimalist, neoliberal state. Appropriate reforms have been pursued with remarkable continuity since the early 1900s, albeit at a somewhat slower pace after 2010, commented the neo-left Kyrgyz portal Kyrgsoc.org on the legislative package “Towards New Economic Freedom and Development” adopted in April 2020. “Right now, in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, even the most market-oriented states are beginning to break neoliberal principles […] our government is blowing the whistle on its citizens and introducing harsh economic measures in order to obtain loans”, deplored Kyrgsoc’s editorial board. 

According to Kyrgsoc, such reforms sometimes led to the “destruction of industrial complexes and factories” and the “degradation of agriculture”, with wealth concentrated in urban centres via investors and the service sector, especially in the capital Bishkek. This situation is strongly reflected in people’s daily lives: according to the Statistics Committee, at the country level in 2018, an average of just under 38% of households had a permanent sewage system. In Bishkek, the figure is over 97%. These divergent realities also illustrate the gap between those who support Japarov and those who do not.

There is no coherent economic policy in Kyrgyzstan, and in the absence of attractive economic sectors, the state itself becomes a resource. In his thesis, researcher Johan Engvall showed that “the logic of an investment market lies at the core of the Kyrgyz state’s operations”. In other words, state functions are traded like financial assets that guarantee a stable income to the ‘buyers’ who occupy them. It is no secret in Kyrgyzstan that government posts and seats in parliament (or favourable list position) are for sale. Instead of creating public goods, respective officials are first busy making private capital out of their positions. 

Something similar seems to be happening after the recent incidents: “State posts are being grabbed by the same corrupt elites … According to insider information, the new team makes money by selling state posts as valuable resources,” described Doolotkeldieva on Twitter in November, for example. Thus, Japarov’s presidency is expected to bring continuity in the economic and social spheres. He will hardly be able to live up to the expectations many have of him today. He has already backtracked on his former hobby horse, the nationalisation of the Kumtör gold mine: there is not much gold left there anyway, he said. 

The question of who benefits from the situation remains. There are many indications that the events of October were probably an organised shift of power. Some of the demonstrators were driven around the city in buses and served food rations and even cultural programmes. It is not yet clear who is behind this. Some talk of organised crime, others of the circle of ex-president Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was overthrown during the April Revolution of 2010 after five years in office. In fact, Japarov and many of his circle held political positions under Bakiyev. 

A growing political culture

After Japarov’s success in the presidential elections in January, one would be tempted to say that the once highly praised Kyrgyzstan is going back many years in its democratisation process. This not only would correspond to the somewhat condescending reflex of describing countries in transition as good or bad pupils, but also overlook underlying social dynamics. 

Last but not least, the Covid-19 crisis rightly stirred up a lot of resentment towards the political class, but it also represents a collective experience of self-efficiency. It was volunteers who provided much of the social and medical care. Likewise, it was some 10,000 volunteer “Druzhinniki” who protected Bishkek from looting in the days following 5 October. For the researcher Erica Marat, such examples show “how a resilient society gains in complexity and organisation  in order to resist the insolence of those in power”. 

In an interview with the Akipress press agency, the former interim president Roza Otunbaeva also asserts that one cannot speak of an end of democracy in Kyrgyzstan. Rather, Kyrgyz society is experiencing “growing pains”: “There is a knowledgeable youth growing, the generation of the 21st century, they will not go backwards, but only forwards! We do not stand by idly, fight, take risks, make sacrifices, move and drive political processes forward.”

Paradoxically, even Japarov’s populism can be seen as a sign of such social processes. For all its instrumentalisation, populism is also a democratic phenomenon because it is an indirect recognition of the political role of the people. In an interview with The Economist, the then presidential candidate affirmed: “You [the people] can put up with things for one, two or three years and then drive out any president … You cannot establish a dictatorship in our country.” 

Kyrgyzstan: a prime example of global social developments 

The new constitution should act as a wake-up call for many in Bishkek. A first demonstration against the constitutional changes on 8 November gathered only about 20 people. The following demonstration on 22 November brought together about 500 people, according to media reports: a relatively large gathering by Bishkek standards, but much smaller than the protest against the results of the parliamentary election on 5 October. There was a certain political fatigue at the end of an already exhausting year. 

The underlying causes of political instability in Kyrgyzstan are more likely to worsen. A stronger vertical power and the weakening of democratic institutions of control will only make the state more attractive as a playground for private interests and will hardly ensure more social justice within society. On this basis, “the people”, to whose will Japarov constantly appeals, can also quickly turn against him once the “post-revolutionary” honeymoon feeling has dispelled.

Read more: Kyrgyzstan: voters approve new constitution in referendum

Unlike Lukashenko, Japarov will hardly be able to draw on a public security apparatus that has been consolidated for over two decades. So the door remains rotten, to return to Levitsky and Way’s metaphor. 

Processes determining social developments in Kyrgyzstan are no less shaped by global dynamics than they are in Europe. This is especially true for translocal interconnections of a media-communicative and financial-economic nature, of which Kyrgyz citizens are just as much a part as the inhabitants of other countries.

This also shows that it is much more fruitful and interesting not to constantly portray Kyrgyz politics as something that is “backward”, “chaotic” and “alien to us”. After all, phenomena like right-wing populism and neoliberalism are happening globally, even if they may take on particularly extreme features in Kyrgyzstan. But instead of being stuck in a “not yet sufficiently democratised” past, the country might as well find itself in a threateningly approaching future.

Florian Coppenrath
Founder of Novastan Deutsch

Translated from German by Manon Montant

Edited by Alexander Fuss

For more news and analysis from Central Asia, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Linkedin or Instagram.

The post Between nationalist populism and neoliberalism: Kyrgyzstan and global political trends appeared first on Novastan English.

A new Kyrgyz constitution, proposed by referendum, was approved by 79.3% of voters according to preliminary results. Turnout, however, was low: just over 35%.

Voters in Kyrgyzstan have approved a new constitution. According to preliminary results of the 11 April constitutional referendum, 79.3% voted for the change, the Kyrgyz Central Electoral Commission (CEC) announced. With this vote and the new constitution, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov sees his role gain sweeping new powers.

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The vote, which took place at the same time as local elections, had very low turnout. Also according to the CEC, 35.9% of citizens of voting age participated in the poll, slightly above the threshold of 30% legally required to validate the referendum. This proportion is similar to that of the presidential election on 10 January, which Sadyr Japarov won with nearly 80% of the vote but a 39% turnout.

A victory for the “Khanstitution”

Despite everything, the vote remains a new milestone for Kyrgyzstan’s new strongman. Sadyr Japarov proposed this constitutional change in mid-November 2020, shortly after a rise to power that saw him go from convict to prime minister and interim president. Critics in and out of the country say the new constitution will make Kyrgyzstan an authoritarian state.

Read more: Rise and fall… and rise: the career of Kyrgyzstan’s Sadyr Japarov

These critics have sometimes referred to this new constitution as a “Khanstitutsiya” (that is, a “Khan constitution”). Indeed, it greatly expands the president’s power without providing institutional counterbalance. As described by the Kyrgyz media outlet Kloop, the new constitution makes the president the sole head of the executive, reducing the prime minister to a subordinate role. The president can in addition now propose laws directly to parliament. According to the Venice Commission’s analysis at the end of March, this “creates a real risk of undermining the separation of powers and the rule of law in the Kyrgyz Republic”.

“Super-presidential” government

Correspondingly, the Kyrgyz press agency AKIPress describes the new constitution as a “legally enshrined super-presidential form of government “ and points out that Kyrgyzstan was de facto under such a system of government already under the presidents Askar Akaev (1990-2005), Kurmanbek Bakiev (2005-2010) and the final years of Almazbek Atambaev‘s presidency (2011-2017).

“To put it simply, the governments of Kyrgyzstan have already tried all possible variants of the political system,” AKIPress adds. “But the problem that we do not want to recognise does not lie in the constitution or in the lack of ideal laws…”

President Japarov describes the constitutional referendum as a solution to political instability in Kyrgyzstan. “Kyrgyzstan has been looking for its way for thirty years, a time during which there have been waves of unrest. All of this is a consequence of the incoherence of our intentions and aspirations,” he declared on the day of the referendum. “Our future path is closely linked to your decision today.”

Updated at 11.50am on 12 April 2021: added final section

Etienne Combier
Editor-in-chief of Novastan France

Florian Coppenrath

For more news and analysis from Central Asia, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Linkedin or Instagram.

The post Kyrgyzstan: voters approve new constitution in referendum appeared first on Novastan English.

Spotify is coming to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Local music distributors see the arrival of the Swedish streaming service not as a game changer but rather as another sign of the growth of music streaming in Central Asia.

This article was originally published on Novastan’s German website on 25 February 2021.

Spotify is expanding to Central Asia. On 22 February, the Swedish audio streaming service announced that it would launch in over 80 new markets, including Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Music fans from Kazakhstan have had access to Spotify since July 2020, when the company made the long-awaited jump to Russia and other Eastern European countries.

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It is the company’s “broadest market expansion to date” according to a press release. “These 80+ markets represent more than 1 billion people.”

The streaming service remains unavailable in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

Streaming in moderate progress

The move comes as a bit of a surprise. It could be building on the success of entering the Russian market: “The launch was really a triumph, the best launch in our company’s history,” the head of Spotify in Russia and CIS countries, Ilya Alekseev, told the online outlet Meduza in December 2020. “In the first three months after launch, we hit the subscriber target we’d set for the first year, and in doing so we managed to get into the top 25 Spotify markets worldwide.”

In Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, the use of streaming platforms is gradually growing. Services such as Apple Music, Deezer and Russian platforms such as Yandex Music and BOOM have become available in the past few years. There are also more Central Asian artists distributing their work via streaming.

Whether Spotify’s entry will make a big difference to Central Asian music markets is “difficult to say,” Najot Agzamov, the founder of the Tashkent-based digital music distribution company Maestro, told Novastan. In his view, the Russian market had long been ready for a service like Spotify when the streaming service launched: “The Russian market is on a completely different level from the Uzbek one.” In order to assert itself in Uzbekistan, he said, Spotify has to offer users good prices and conditions.    

Bakai Kolchaev, the founder of the Bishkek-based music distributor Infinity Music does not expect any significant change either: “When [Spotify] enters the market, nothing on the whole will change. Some will move there but life will go on as before,” he told Novastan. But he sees a sensible strategy in Spotify’s sudden expansion. “There are many platforms and some of them are already in the country. But it’s also a tough fight for listeners,” he said. “[Spotify] will reach a billion people, but only a fraction of them will become users.”

Promote legal music consumption

For a long time, music markets in Central Asia were shaped by piracy: first through the distribution of pirated music physically and later through music downloads. In this context, musicians only have concerts, private hire and, less often, advertising contracts as sources of income.

Against this background, streaming services also promise a certain regulation of music distribution by creating incentives for better protection of copyright. “For us this is another step in getting audiences to listen to music legally. We have been trying to convey this for a number of years, it is a very slow process,” Kolchayev explains. In 2020, Infinity Music released over 1,800 singles and 100 albums, the company wrote in a report published on Instagram.

Services such as Spotify and YouTube offer musicians the opportunity to receive money directly for the consumption of their music and video materials. That income, however, is limited: according to Agzamov, none of the musicians distributed via Maestro can live on streams alone. 

Local to global

While streaming use is growing only moderately in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, such services offer musicians a gateway to new ears. This is part of Spotify’s approach: “This expansion will help ensure that sounds and stories that once remained local can reach a global audience,” the company writes in its press release.

“It all depends on the promotion,” Agzamov said when asked how he assesses the potential for Uzbek artists abroad. “The possibility is there if Spotify supports our artists in different playlists, podcasts, posters. We have good musicians, they just sing in our mother tongue [Uzbek]”. 

“It’s cool when such a service supports releases ‘made in Kyrgyzstan’,” Kolchayev said. “But we’re mainly talking about Russian-language works.” Accordingly, the launch of Spotify Russia in 2020 had a bigger impact on musicians in Kyrgyzstan than is expected from the service launch in Kyrgyzstan itself.

Read more: Central Asian rap in 10 tracks

The musicians from Central Asia with the greatest reach have their core audience in the Russian-speaking world. For example, the two rappers and producers Yamadzhi & Feizhi, from the city of Osh in Kyrgyzstan, were on the cover image of the popular Russian Playlist “Novoye Slovo” (“New word”) in November 2020. They currently have over 50,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, the vast majority of them from Russia. The same goes for the Bishkek-based rapper Ulukmanapo‘s 60,000 monthly listeners. Uzbek-speaking musicians, like the singer Shahzoda, are more likely to have their largest streaming community in Turkey.

Whether Spotify can make a big difference in Central Asia remains to be seen. The outstanding success of an artist abroad can already stimulate a positive dynamic in his home country. A good example is the Kazakh rapper Skriptonit, whose conquest of the Russian-language music scene in 2014 was followed by a whole wave of Kazakh artists.   

Florian Coppenrath
Founder of Novastan Deutsch

For more news and analysis from Central Asia, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Linkedin or Instagram.

The post Spotify expands to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan appeared first on Novastan English.

Sadyr Japarov took office as president of Kyrgyzstan this Thursday. He is the country’s sixth president and the third to come to power following political uprisings. His political career began with the first Kyrgyz revolution and has always been accompanied by unrest.

This article was originally published on Novastan’s German website on 28 January 2021.

Sadyr Japarov officially became the sixth president of Kyrgyzstan on 28 January 2021. Elected on 10 January, the new leader of Central Asia’s most democratic state said he was opening “a new page of history”.

The new president’s political history started 16 years ago. In February 2005, in the run-up to the Kyrgyz parliamentary elections, angry demonstrators blocked key roads in the Issyk-Kul region to protest the withdrawal of several opposition politicians’ candidacies. In one case, they succeeded: “The electoral commission reinstated the previously withdrawn candidate for the Tüp constituency, Sadyr Japarov. His supporters went home and unblocked the road,” wrote the Vecherniy Bishkek daily newspaper. The article considers “a dangerous precedent had been set,” as it could encourage others to pursue a “policy of extortion through road blockades“.

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Japarov won the constituency and obtained his first mandate. For him, it was a victory of “the people”, as he explained in his autobiography, published in 2015: “Truth only triumphed thanks to the strength of the people. That justice was a particular happiness for me.” Shortly after the first session of the new parliament, President Askar Akaev was overthrown by the “Tulip Revolution“. In early April 2005, he signed his resignation in the Kyrgyz embassy in Moscow. Japarov was part of the parliamentary delegation that negotiated with him.

In retrospect, the beginning of Japarov’s political career seems like a rehearsal of the events that would take him to high office over 15 years later. Pressure from the street, constant references to the “Kyrgyz people” and violence are recurring themes. As is Japarov’s determination, reflected in the term “dakansa”, widespread on social media in recent months – a humorous simplification of the Russian “do kontsa”, “to the end”.

From business to politics

Sadyr Japarov was born in December 1968 in the Issyk-Kul region, near the Soviet-Chinese border. His parents had returned from China six years earlier, where they had gone to flee Stalinist repression in the 1930s, according to Radio Azattyk, RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz service. Japarov grew up with ten other siblings in a shepherd family.

In 1987 he began his studies Kyrgyz State Institute of Physical Culture in Bishkek, the capital (then known as Frunze), and at the same time worked at a collective farm in the Chüy region until 1995. He graduated as a trainer in 1991. That same year he married Aygül Asanbaeva, with whom he has four children. He had before that done his military service at the Telegraph Office in Novosibirsk, in Russia. In 2006, he completed a law degree at the Kyrgyz Russian Slavic University in Bishkek.

Before entering politics, Japarov was mainly active as a businessman in the fields of agriculture and oil. Between 2002 and 2005 he managed the Nurneftegas oil company in Balykchy, on Lake Issyk-Kul. Another oil company, Issyk-Nar-Neft, is still registered in his name. According to the online publication Kaktus.media, it has been inactive since 2003.

Japarov’s first mandate lasted until the end of 2007, when Kyrgyzstan’s parliament was dissolved after the then president Kurmanbek Bakiev initiated a constitutional amendment. Japarov’s long-term friendship with the current head of the security services, Kamchybek Tashiev, also dates from that time. In September 2006, Vecherniy Bishkek reported the story of how, one night, the two lawmakers had fought for over an hour with a group of young people who were trying to ambush them. It wasn’t to be their last fight. According to media reports, they also settled their differences with the then mayor of Osh Melis Myrzakmatov and, later, with the MP Altynbek Sulaymanov with their fists.

Head of the anti-corruption agency

In the 2007 parliamentary elections, Japarov stood for the Ak-Jol party, founded by the then president Bakiev, but turned down a role as presidential advisor. The following year, he became head, or “commissioner”, of the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption. In this role, he occasionally presented “The Commissioner Warns”, a show on public television reporting cases of corruption, sometimes with a hidden camera. After half a year, the program was cancelled by the broadcaster. Japarov also created a council of foreign businessmen to support the government’s anti-corruption work.

During Bakiev’s presidency, Kyrgyzstan was among the 20 most corrupt countries in the world according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (in 2019, it was 126th out of 180). “We have to face international propaganda and oppose it ideologically; it creates a negative image through ratings like these, which are often mentioned in local media,” Japarov said at the time.

In his autobiography, he explains the agency’s poor results by its lack of power: “The title ‘Commissioner” sounds powerful, but we had no right to search any place, to investigate criminals. Still, we got to the heart of the matter, we worked with other law enforcement agencies.”

The “famous gold conflict expert”

After a second revolution ousted Bakiev in April 2010, Japarov stayed in his position until July. In October that same year, he was alongside Tashiev among the founding members of the nationalist party Ata-Jurt (Fatherland). Ata-Jurt surprisingly came first in a parliamentary election not long after, with a little more than 15% of the vote. Japarov and Tashiev later switched to the Mekenchil (Patriot) party, which they are still part of to this day.

After lengthy negotiations, Ata-Jurt formed a coalition government with two other parties, and Japarov became head of the Committee on Judicial and Legal Affairs. In this role, he mainly advocated a reform in how judges are selected in order to put an end to corruption in the judiciary. However, his work was controversial as he and his political opponents accused each other of illegal acts. In an open letter, the then interim president Rosa Otunbaeva noted the “persistence and determination of the сhairman of the Committee on Judicial and Legal Affairs, Sadyr Japarov … in trying to get candidates presented and rejected by the president elected as judges. It’s obvious that such a decision violates the main principle of the law “On the council for the Selection of Judges” – its independence.”

In 2012, Japarov turned his attention to another hot topic: the nationalisation of Kumtör, the largest gold mine in Central Asia. The question of nationalisation has been a political issue since the mine’s development in the 1990s. According to a framework agreement from 1992, the Kyrgyz Republic initially owned two thirds of the shares in the joint holding Kumtor Gold Company. However, after a new agreement in 2009, the state’s share fell to a third.

It is precisely against this restructuring that the nationalist movements Sadyr Japarov was part of protested. The politician, then described by Vecherniy Bishkek as “the rather famous gold conflict expert”, was appointed head of a parliamentary commission on Kumtör. In early October 2012, Japarov and Tashiev called for a demonstration for the nationalisation of Kumtör. The initially peaceful protests turned into a perceived coup attempt when demonstrators attempted to storm the nearby White House, the presidential and parliament building, with success.

The researcher Asel Doolotkeldieva, who was at the time writing her thesis on social mobilisations in Kyrgyzstan, analysed the situation for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in 2012. “When … Japarov announced early on in the October 3 rally that this was not about scoring political points, but was instead about real social and economic issues, it might have seemed for a moment that [Ata-Jurt] had moved on from personality-based politics,” she wrote. “But the ensuing events put an end to any such ideas, as indeed it did for the image he has tried to project of a mature, considered politician.”

From prison to exile…

Japarov, Tashiev and their party colleague Talant Mamytov were arrested and sentenced less than a year later for attempting to overthrow the government. They remained remained in jail for less than a year but lost their seats in parliament. Their trials were accompanied by loud, sometimes violent demonstrations by their supporters, some of whom exerted direct pressure on the judges.

The year 2013 in Kyrgyzstan was riddled with protests in various regions, leading to the declaration of a state of emergency but also a governor in southern Jalal-Abat being replaced by a self-proclaimed “people’s governor”. When the governor of the Issyk-Kul region was held hostage by demonstrators in October of that year, Japarov was accused of complicity and of financing the operation. He fled the country but it’s unclear where he went: sources mention Belarus, Russia, Cyprus and/or Kazakhstan.

In 2015, he published his autobiography Ten Years in Politics. It is a summary of ten years of Kyrgyz politics from the author’s point of view. What emerges is a self-portrait of Japarov as a politician working for the well-being of the people, always with a clear conscience. The book cover shows him smiling amid a group of supporters. In places the text reads like an indictment of his opponents. “Even without this book, I have more enemies in politics than hair on my head. Because there were moments when I exposed the corruption of most of them, told them their inadequacies straight to their faces,” the introduction states. “Obviously, with the publication of this book, the number of my opponents will double.”

… to prison again

When Japarov returned to Kyrgyzstan in March 2017 to take part in the presidential election that autumn, he was arrested at the border. In August of the same year, he was sentenced to 11 years and six months’ imprisonment (later reduced to ten years) for the alleged participation in the kidnapping in 2013. The sentence led to frequent protests, most recently in March 2020.

As Japarov stated in an interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant shortly after his election, he used the time in prison to “work with the people via social media”: “I created groups on Odnoklassniki, Facebook and Instagram. I collected contacts on Whatsapp and created more than 50 groups there – one of them contains 256 contacts. Through these groups I disseminated information about Kumtör, about my work. That’s how I reached the whole people in half a year.”

His time in prison also helped create the image of a politician who sacrificed a lot for the people.  Shortly after his arrest in 2017, he attempted suicide. In addition, he lost one of his sons and his parents while in prison.

He also fills, with his references to “the common people”, an otherwise unoccupied political position, thus bolstering his popularity, especially among the country’s poorest.

From prison to the president’s office

The active, violent support base that has accompanied Japarov throughout his political career, combined with skillful political communication, also explain his meteoric rise in October 2020. After he was released from prison early on 6 October, he was able to rise to the top of the executive branch within two weeks.

Read more on Novastan: From prison to high office: Sadyr Japarov is Kyrgyzstan’s new prime minister

“Sadyr Japarov’s strategy to, first, remove the competitors from the October revolution, second, remove the incumbent president from power and, third, take control of the elite’s wider circles was really extraordinary,” Asel Doolotkeldieva told Novastan France. “He managed to very quickly monopolise the political space, in a matter of months”. In this way, a surprise candidate became a status quo candidate. He stayed away from television debates during the election campaign, dismissing them as places of defamation, and had by far the highest campaign budget.

At the polls in January, he received almost 80% of the votes cast, but with a turnout of 39,16%, the lowest for any presidential election in Kyrgyzstan since 1991.

Cui bono?

The rapid political rise of Japarov also raises the question of whether he and his team benefited from the support of third parties. Accusations usually either refer to the family of the former president Bakiyev or to organised crime. The former has been alleged several times by the presidential candidate Abdil Segizbaev. During the televised debate at the end of December, he brought up several events and scandals from Japarov’s political career, which, according to him, indicate loyalty to Bakiev.

Read more on Novastan: Kyrgyzstan elects Sadyr Japarov and opts for presidential government

Assumptions about Japarov’s connections to the underworld go back some years. At the end of 2011, the then interior minister Zarylbek Rysaliev accused Japarov of friendship with Kamchy Kolbaev, the head of a criminal network involved in drugs, arms and human trafficking according to the US government. In an interview in December 2020, Japarov said that he only knew Kolbaev from a criminal investigation in 2010. According to research carried out by a consortium of journalists for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, there is also a connection between Kolbaev and the former customs official Raimbek Matraimov. The same journalistic project published an investigation alleging Matraimov had taken part in a large-scale money-laundering scheme.

Both Kolbayev and Matraimov were arrested as part of a series of filmed arrests. Some, like the former secretary of the Security Council Keneshbek Düyshöbaev, considered it a “theater show”, as Kloop.kg notes. Matraimov was released after promising repayment of nearly $24 million (£17.5 million). According to Sadyr Japarov, this was a “political decision”: from prison, he explained, these arrestees would not have paid a cent back.

“Be patient”

Even since he took over the executive, Japarov has called the fight against corruption his number one priority. As during his time as head of the parliamentary legal committee, he sees changing the country’s legal framework as a necessary condition. A new constitution and a “renewal of the state” represent about half of his official program.

The rest of the program is primarily a description of the problem and of Japarov’s goals, with only vague information about how to achieve said objectives. For example, the budget of the public health system is to be doubled, financed by reducing public administration. Social policy is hardly mentioned, but there is talk of reducing “administrative barriers” for the private sector. According to this programme, Japarov’s policy should hardly differ in content from that of his predecessors.

Read more on Novastan: Can Sadyr Japarov fulfil his promises?

There is also remarkable continuity in the prosecution of political opponents. Two opposition candidates, Abdil Segizbaev and Kursan Asanov, were arrested days before the presidential inauguration. However, if Japarov turns too many public figures against him without improving his electorate’s living conditions, he could put his own position at risk.

In a message on his Telegram channel on 25 January, he urged his fellow citizens to be patient: “Reforms will begin on January 28, the day I take office. A new government will be formed. There will be a new structure of government. A new constitution will be adopted in April. Then the new laws will come into force”, he wrote, asking his audience to refrain from vigilantism. “Only then will we begin to uproot corruption legally,” he explains. “You have endured it for 30 years, you can endure another six months!”

Florian Coppenrath
Founder of Novastan Deutsch

For more news and analysis from Central Asia, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Linkedin or Instagram.

The post Rise and fall… and rise: the career of Kyrgyzstan’s Sadyr Japarov appeared first on Novastan English.

After a controversial comedy show on YouTube, Kyrgyzstan’s culture minister discussed stronger state control of musicians. Artists and parts of civil society reacted with indignation and criticised the lack of support for culture in the country.

This article was originally published on Novastan’s German website on 16 January 2021.

A group of comedians pokes fun at a guest. This format, known in stand-up circles as “roast”, has also become popular in Russian-speaking countries in recent years. A particularly successful example is the Internet show “Chto bylo dal’she” (“What happened next?”) whose videos have millions of viewers on YouTube. A recent attempt to introduce the format in Kyrgyzstan, however, ended in scandal.

After just two episodes, the show “V pi#du zvezdu” (which can be roughly translated as “F#ck the star”), hosted by the Kyrgyz pop singer Kural Chokoev, caused a stir on social media. The first guests were the former The Voice Russia finalist Kairat Primberdiev and the singer Kairat Kyrgyz. Some viewers saw in the show’s profanity and off-colour jokes a sign of “social degradation” and called for a boycott of its sponsors.

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In response to these critics, Chokoev decided to end the project and delete the recordings from his YouTube channel. “Your opinion is very important to me. If our videos and our content have hurt someone, of course we apologize,” he said in a video published on Instagram. Primberdiev also recorded an apology.

The government wants harsher laws

The scandal also reached the minister of culture, Nurjigit Kadyrbekov, who expressed his indignation at the show. “Unfortunately, the laws don’t provide any leverage against independent singers. But we will hopefully find a way to get them to act morally,” he announced on 9 January on the Ministry of Culture’s Facebook page. He also evoked measures against Chokoev and Primberdiev, including broadcast and concert bans for the two singers. As the online media Kloop.kg notes, these would be the first bans of this kind in the history of independent Kyrgyzstan.

Kadyrbekov also spoke out in favor of a fundamentally stronger state control of musicians: “It would not be bad to license singers for their work,” the minister said. “Otherwise, the ministry will keep being blamed for all the nonsense of whistlers and singers.”

Action followed. On 12 January, the Ministry of Culture said in a statement that it had revoked a cultural award granted to Chokoev in 2011 and suggested the presidential administration should take back the title of “honoured artist of the Kyrgyz Republic” given to Primberdiev in 2017. In addition, neither artist will be invited to any state-organized cultural events in the near future.  

Strong criticism from civil society

The minister’s words were met with strong criticism from civil society. In a public statement, the Committee for Civil Control, a non-governmental organisation, demanded Kadyrbekov’s resignation. “His words … are ominous, outrageous and unprecedented in terms of unlawfulness and unconstitutionality in the entire history of sovereign Kyrgyzstan,” the statement said, at the same time noting that Kyrgyzstan is bound by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. “This threat is not only directed against the singers, but against each and every one of us.”

“Censorship is like poison gas: a powerful weapon that can injure you as soon as the wind changes its direction,” said lawyer Saniya Toktogazieva on Facebook. Everyone, she explains, can express their dissatisfaction with certain forms of expression, but such criticism must always consist in “more words, not silencing others”.

Media personalities and cultural workes also expressed their views, as reported by the online media Kaktus: “The show, of course, sucks. But if the Ministry of Culture even tries to withdraw Kairat and Kural’s awards, I will voluntarily return all my awards to the minister,” said the television presenter Erkin Ryskulbekov.

Little support for the arts in Kyrgyzstan

In fact, there has so far been little state intervention in Kyrgyzstan’s independent cultural scene. Beyond the funding of public institutions such as the Philharmonic, the Ministry of Culture actually plays almost no role, neither through restrictive measures nor through financial or material support. The exception is an article in the penal code on “inciting interethnic, racist, religious or interregional hostility” the authorities often use to take action against cultural content. For example, the blogger Elmirbek Sydymanov was arrested in 2017 for inciting interregional hostility after he said in an Instagram video that Kyrgyzstan’s southern regions were “not developed”.

In this way, Kyrgyzstan differs greatly from its Central Asian neighbours, who interfere more actively in cultural life. For example, Kazakhstan launched the Ruhany Jańyrý (“Spiritual Renewal”) program in 2017 to promote contemporary Kazakh culture. In Uzbekistan there has been a licensing system for pop musicians since the early 2000s, coordinated by the state agency O’zbekkontsert (“O’zbeknavo” before 2017).

With the state’s inaction in terms of cultural funding in mind, the reaction of Kyrgyzstan’s minister of culture seems inappropriate to some, to put it mildly. “Who paid for Kairat Primberdiev’s international trips when he praised our country? The Ministry of Culture? Of course not. Who invests in the work of our artists? The Ministry of Culture? NO,” commented the journalist Meerim Osmonova on Instagram.

“I’ve already had enough of the populists who come to power and make decisions for their own sake,” she added, probably in reference to the fact Kadyrbekov did not become minister of culture until October, when Sadyr Japarov became prime minister (he has since then been elected president). “Is mat [obscene or vulgar language in Russian] the biggest problem in our country? Perhaps the Ministry of Culture should deal with Sadyr’s fans, who use mat every other word, rather than our artists? “

 A “cultural revolution” in the making

The current legal situation in Kyrgyzstan provides for freedom of expression as a fundamental right and prohibits censorship of any kind. But that could change with the upcoming constitutional reform. The first draft of the new constitution foresaw a ban on content that “harms the morality and culture of the people of Kyrgyzstan“. After a referendum where voters chose to switch to a presidential rather than parliamentary form of government, constitutional reform is now planned for spring.

Read more on Novastan: Kyrgyzstan elects Sadyr Japarov and opts for presidential government

At the same time, the past few months have brought increasing politicisation in the country’s pop music. The Kyrgyz superstar Mirbek Atabekov, for example, was a prominent participant in protests last October where he spoke out in favour of a change in the political class alongside young activists. In the summer, Primberdiev also declared that he would no longer take part in political election campaigns: “I am ashamed of the fact that I used to perform at campaign concerts. I apologize to the Kyrgyz people.”   

According to Chokoev’s recent declaration, he also viewed “W pi#du zvezdu” as a socio-political act. “The main aim of the project was a desperate attempt to draw the attention of state bodies to the development of culture in our country,” he writes, pointing out that even the national epic, the Epic of Manas, is promoted by civil society and individual artists. Instead of a constructive discussion about the problem, the Ministry of Culture acted “by default” through penalties.

“I have a lot to say, a lot of suggestions and dreams! It cannot go on like this. I declare a CULTURAL REVOLUTION!” said Chokoev. “How often have I taken part in international competitions on my own and waved the flag for my Kyrgyz people alone! This project was a step that I had to take.”  

Read more on Novastan: Central Asian rap in 10 tracks

On 18 January, the State Awards Commission refused the Ministry of Culture’s application to revoke Primberdiev’s title of honoured artist of the Kyrgyz Republic, as Kloop.kg reports. There is “no legal basis for depriving the singer Kairat Primberdiev of his title” because he has not broken any law.

On the same day, Kadyrbekov invited the two singers to a meeting, the Ministry of Culture announced. In addition to the show, they discussed projects to promote Kyrgyz culture abroad “in a friendly atmosphere”.

Florian Coppenrath
Founder of Novastan Deutsch

For more news and analysis from Central Asia, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Linkedin or Instagram.

The post Kyrgyzstan: threat of censorship looms after controversial comedy show appeared first on Novastan English.

Kyrgyzstan’s snap presidential election resulted in a landslide victory for Sadyr Japarov. The vote came at the same time as a referendum on the population’s preferred form of government, with over 80% choosing a presidential rather than parliamentary system. The referendum result paves the way for far-reaching constitutional changes.

According to preliminary results after polls closed on 10 January, Sadyr Japarov has been elected president of Kyrgyzstan with 79.9% of the vote, avoiding a runoff. 84.18% of voters also opted for a presidential, not parliamentary, form of government in a referendum held at the same time as the election.

Turnout was low, around 33%, just above the 30% threshold required for the referendum results to be valid. In contrast, 56.2% of the electorate had voted in the previous presidential election in 2017.

After Rashid Tagaev withdrew from the race in late December, voters had 17 candidates to choose from, 16 men and one woman.

Snap elections following a political crisis

The position of president has been vacant since the resignation of President Sooronbay Jeenbekov on 15 October. This followed a controversial, and eventually annulled, parliamentary election marred by fraud in October. While the parliament postponed a new parliamentary election indefinitely, it also approved the organisation of the referendum on the form of government.

Read more on Novastan: Kyrgyzstan: President Sooronbay Jeenbekov steps down

In response to a request by the Supreme court of Kyrgyzstan, the Venice commission criticised the move: “One may have an impression that suspension of election motivated by a need of a constitutional reform is a purely instrumental perception of the Constitution and cannot be considered to be in line with democratic standards.” 

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In an overview of the events leading up to the election, Kloop.kg calls the political crisis that started in October a (non)revolution: “The protest, started by young politicians and those unhappy with the results of the elections, did not turn into a third revolution and has not yet changed the political elite.” In fact, Japarov emerged as the main winner of the crisis: after having been freed from prison on 6 October, he became interim president after Jeenbekov’s resignation and only left the position on 14 November.

A campaign with a clear frontrunner

The election campaign, launched in early December, was also dominated by Sadyr Japarov. While holding the office of interim president, Japarov nominated close allies to key positions in the state and disposed of by far the biggest campaign budget : 67 million som (nearly £600,000), or more than the budget of all the other candidates combined. Additionally, as Kloop.kg discovered, Japarov benefited from the support of organised social media trolls who previously worked for Mekenim Kyrgyzstan, one of the winners of the cancelled parliamentary election.       

As a result, as Deutsche Welle sums up, Japarov was “omnipresent” on banners and in TV spots. From his position as frontrunner, he refused to take part in the electoral debates organised by the state-owned television channel KTRK: “It’s more useful for all of us to meet the people. It’s more useful to be closer to the people”, he commented, calling the debates places for “defamation”. 

Read more on Novastan: Can Sadyr Japarov fulfil his promises?

Japarov appeals to the most deprived parts of Kyrgyzstan’s population, a connection he widely instrumentalises with populist references to “the people” as a whole. For example, interviewed after casting his vote, he stated that the money he spent for the electoral campaign was “gathered from the people”. He also evoked the possibility of “counter-revolutionary disorder” after the election, adding: “But I believe the Kyrgyz people will not let that happen”.       

Alleged violations on election day

In the wake of the overturned parliamentary election, monitoring violations during the electoral process seemed particularly sensitive. As in October, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) only sent a limited observation mission with 13 experts and 22 long-term observers to the poll, by whom “systematic observation of voting, counting or tabulation of results on election day is not envisaged”. 

But, widening a programme started in October, the independent online media Kloop.kg sent about 1,500 observers to voting stations all over the country and covered the electoral process throughout the day. In its live coverage of the election day, Kloop.kg documented alleged manipulations of the electoral outcome. In contrast with the October vote, electors had to vote at their local polling place, which reduced the organised transportation of loyal voters to strategic polling stations. 

There was also less vote-buying than in October, which may also be an explanation for the low turnout, as political expert Azim Azimov stated on Twitter. The head of the Electoral Commission also shared this view, noting that “the main factor impacting turnout was vote-buying”. However, observers reported cases of money being handed to voters and of third parties or members of electoral commissions holding separate lists of “loyal” voters.   

Most other problems concerned the violation of the secrecy of ballots in numerous polling stations. This was due to a lack of distance between third parties and ballot boxes and to members of the electoral commissions standing too close to citizens as they cast their vote, taking pictures of the ballot and sometimes even casting the vote in their stead.

Additionally, Kloop reports hundreds of violations of electoral rules due to malfunctioning electronic ballot scanners. The electronic voting system and biometric voter identification were first used in Kyrgyzstan in 2015 and are meant to prevent the most blatant forms of electoral fraud. 

Finally, in several cases, the work of observers was hindered by members of the electoral commission or by the police and sometimes their phones were confiscated.     

What next for Kyrgyzstan?

In a press conference late on 10 January, Japarov said he believed the election was fair: “Until I came to power I didn’t believe in the honesty of elections. But after I examined the work of the CEC (Central Electoral Commission), I’m convinced that everything there is going on honestly.” He further promised to build a fair judicial system and to fight corruption, evoking the October protests’ demands for lustration: “All work will be carried out openly and transparently. We will not tolerate political persecution and will not protect lawbreakers. We must cleanse ourselves of old bureaucrats and corrupt officials. This is the demand of the people.”

While the present election came as a result of big-scale protests in October, several members of the interim government claimed they would prevent a repetition of that scenario. As the interim prime minister, Artem Novikov, said after issuing his vote: “The government is prepared for possible provocations. I take this opportunity to call on all candidates in the election race to accept the results, whatever they may be, to show political will and responsibility to the country and to the citizens”.

The elections mark a new stage in the political transition started in October. Upon taking the position of the head of state, Japarov is planning to engage in a wide-ranging constitutional reform that will likely widen his powers at the expense of the parliament. A corresponding constitutional project had already been proposed in November and dubbed “khanstitution” by the opposition.  

Nonetheless, in the absence of proper socio-economic reforms, such a concentration of power could lead to yet “another cycle” of revolutions and foster “a normalization of revolts and forceful takeovers of power”, as sociologist Asel Doolotkeldieva wrote on Twitter in the morning. “I am saddened to see that people place high hopes in Japarov and strong president. Not understanding that unlimited unchecked presidency has been and will be a source of instability and economic degradation…”

Florian Coppenrath
Founder of Novastan Deutsch

Valentine Baldassari
Editor of Novastan English

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The post Kyrgyzstan elects Sadyr Japarov and opts for presidential government appeared first on Novastan English.

Kyrgyzstan is holding a snap presidential election on 10 January. Candidates include well-known politicians, businessmen and even a self-proclaimed god. The country will also be voting on a constitutional reform the same day.

This article was originally published on Novastan’s German website.

There are 18 people running for president in Kyrgyzstan’s snap presidential election on 10 January, the Electoral Commission announced on 12 December: 17 men and one woman.

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At the end of November, there were still 47 candidates. Some withdrew but others failed to submit the documents proving their eligibility. According to the country’s electoral law, candidates for the presidency must prove their knowledge of Kyrgyz, raise one million som (approximately £8,750) and gather at least 30,000 signatures.

President Sooronbay Jeenbekov resigned on 15 October following a controversial parliamentary election and resulting political crisis. The results of the election were annulled, and a new vote scheduled for 20 December, though the outgoing parliament later postponed it to spring 2021.

At the beginning of December, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court declared this amendment to the electoral law legal, despite the doubts expressed by numerous lawyers and by the Venice Commission, a European body advising states on issues of constitutional law.

Instead of a new parliamentary election, there will be a referendum in which voters will be asked to choose between a parliamentary and a presidential system of government. This vote will take place on the same day as the presidential election, 10 January. However, as the online media Kloop reports, the law approving the referendum was passed through a series of violations of parliamentary rules and existing legislation.

The new head of state will therefore have a lot to do:  in addition to the renewed parliamentary election, Kyrgyzstan can expect a constitutional amendment, on top of the socio-economic crisis exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The front-runner and his competition

According to observers, the clear favourite is Sadyr Japarov. This would be the culmination of his meteoric political rise from prison to the leadership of the executive branch. He was one of the last to submit his candidacy on the cut-off date, having previously resigned the offices of interim prime minister and interim president.

In addition to having the support of a significant part of the population, this right-wing populist politician can count on Internet troll factories, as well as on what is by far the largest campaign budget with almost 50 million som (approximately £438,000) as of the 18th December.

He also seems able to mobilise administrative resources – a term widely used to describe the use of public resources for an individual’s own interests. For example, the Electoral Commission pointed out that during one of Japarov’s speeches, supposedly neutral security officers were photographed wearing his campaign’s colours.

Read more on Novastan : From prison to high office: Sadyr Japarov is Kyrgyzstan’s new prime minister

The Electoral Commission refused the objection by several opposing candidates that Japarov’s running in the election was unconstitutional. According to the constitution, the interim president cannot run in a snap presidential election.

Should Japarov stay in the race and win the election, he would campaign for a new constitution that would significantly expand the powers of the president. A draft of the constitution is already in circulation.

Japarov’s main political opponent is Adakhan Madumarov, the leader of the Bütün Kyrgyzstan (United Kyrgyzstan) party, who had already participated in the 2011 and 2017 presidential elections. As the lawyer and former presidential candidate Taalatbek Masadykov explained to Deutsche Welle, Madumarov is also very popular. Had the results of last year’s parliamentary election been upheld, Bütün Kyrgyzstan would have entered parliament as the fourth party with over seven percent of the vote. With its nationalistic positions, it is targeting the same core electorate as Japarov.

Long-time MP Kanatbek Isayev is also a veteran of Kyrgyz party politics. In the October election, he headed the list of the Kyrgyzstan party, which received almost nine percent of the vote. After the election was cancelled, Isayev was for a time the chairman of the Kyrgyz parliament. His resignation paved the way for Japarov’s interim presidency. At a press conference on 19 November, however, he spoke out against the constitutional change: “We have already seen a presidential system of government. Twice – in 2005 and 2010 – this system led to tragic events,” he said, as quoted by Kloop.

Opposition candidates

On 24 November, seven other candidates spoke out against illegal acts by Sadyr Japarov in a press conference. Three of them are still in the running.

Foremost is the former constitutional judge Klara Sooronkulova. She filed the complaints against the delay of the parliamentary election and against Sadyr Japarov’s candidacy. As interim president, Sadyr Japarov was able to “travel to all regions and use his position to benefit his election campaign”, she declared in November. “The fairness and honesty of the election is under question.”

Sooronkulova is also the party leader of the young liberal opposition party Reforma, which obtained approximately 1.7 percent of the vote in October and is committed to a renewal of the political class.

Read more on Novastan: Kyrgyzstan: governing party wins “dirty” parliamentary elections

Kanybek Imanaliev, a long-time politician and outgoing member of parliament, was on the list of the Mekenim Kyrgyzstan party in October. In the run-up to the election, he spoke out against the planned constitutional reform several times and declared at a media forum in November that journalism is “the only legitimate power” in Kyrgyzstan.

At the press conference in November, he said Kyrgyzstan would become “a second Afghanistan” should Japarov win the election, and that the country would have “the most uneducated ruler in its history“.

Ravshan Jeenbekov – no relation to the former president Sooronbay Jeenbekov – is also a well-known face in the opposition. Like Japarov and several other political figures, he was released from prison on the morning of 6 October. He had been there for almost a year in relation to the violent arrest of ex-president Almazbek Atambayev in 2019. The investigation is ongoing and Ravshan Jeenbekov is thus banned from leaving Bishkek and Kyrgyzstan. A court upheld this ban on 16 December, a decision Ravshan Jeenbekov called “a political judgment”.

Ravshan Jeenbekov described his political position in a video interview: “I have always fought for democracy, human rights and freedom … Overall, I see myself as a democrat, not just a liberal democrat.”

Former senior officials

Two former members of the security services are also running for the presidency election. Kursan Asanov had had a career in the police for about 20 years when he became deputy interior minister in 2011.

In August 2019, he was dismissed for alleged misconduct during Atambayev’s arrest: he had contacted Atambayev directly to persuade him to surrender. During the unrest in early October, he briefly occupied the post of interior minister and was arrested on 9 October after clashes in Bishkek. According to Kloop, he was initially forbidden from leaving Bishkek, a restriction lifted on 16 December so that he could campaign.

The former coordinator of the Soros Foundation Kyrgzystan (1995-2000) Abdil Segizbaev has built his political career at the side of ex-President Atambayev. He started as an assistant and consultant before joining the GKNB, the national intelligence agency. He was head of the GKNB in 2015-2018.

On 15 December, he started his election campaign at the Ata-Beyit memorial near Bishkek, which is dedicated not only to the victims of the Red Terror but also to those of the 2010 revolution. “Our fellow citizens who became the victims of these people are buried here. I will never betray the memory of our heroes,” he said in a speech. As the press agency Akipress noted, this was an allusion to an alleged connection between Japarov and the regime of Kurmanbek Bakiyev, overthrown in 2010.

Ulukbek Kochkorov was minister of labour and social development between October 2018 and October 2020. He claims that he learnt of his resignation from the Internet. “This is not a tragedy. I am more concerned about the current situation in Kyrgyzstan. The political and economic situation, the standard of living of the population; unfortunately, everything is in danger, we are in a crisis,” he responded in a video message. Kochkorov is the party leader of Jangy Door (New Age), but in October he stood for the “presidential party” Birimdik.

Businessmen

There are figures from the business world among the candidates. Some also have experience in the public service. For example, the former deputy economy minister (2016-2019) Eldar Abakirov, who ran for the Ata-Meken party in the last parliamentary election. Over the past decade, Abakirov has co-founded business projects in various industries such as textiles and fast food.

Another example is Jengishbek Bayguttiev. He was minister for economic regulation for six months between 2009 and 2010, after being a long-time advisor to the finance minister and from 2006 to 2009 advisor to President Bakiyev. Today he owns three pawn shops and other companies in consulting, finance and education.

The up till now rather discreet Aymen Kassenov has had a successful career in the oil business, in particular with the Russian corporation Gazprom, where he worked as country director for Kazakhstan in 2007-2015. Between 2016 and 2019, he was a board member of the Russian-Kyrgyz Development Fund, a fund created when Kyrgyzstan joined the Eurasian Economic Union.

Babyrjan Tolbayev began his career in international organisations in the 1990s before moving into the private sector. Today he is mostly known for funding MolBulak, a microcredit firm popular with migrant workers in Russia.

The owner and director of the building company KG-Group, Imanidin Tashov, said at a press conference on 24 November that he could pay off the national debt to China within three years and put Kyrgyzstan back on its feet after 30 years of suffering. The electoral commission interpreted this as a premature election campaign and fined him.

Hard to be a god

Arstanbek Abdyldayev (or Arstan Alai) is known to many in Kyrgyzstan for his bizarre statements, especially his assertion that “there will be no winter” at a press conference in 2011. At the end of 2019, he declared himself a god, and in March 2020 announced he had sent the coronavirus to Earth. He owns several companies in trade and finance and is running for president for the third time.

The journalist and businessman Arstanbek Myktybek is mainly active in the religious sphere. He has been a lecturer in theology at Arabaev University in Bishkek since 2011 and head of the Center for the Development of the Halal Industry since 2012. His YouTube channel, which he launched in 2012, is also primarily dedicated to religious topics.

Rashid Tagayev, 62, is the oldest of the candidates. Between 1985 and 2005 he worked in the police force before moving into parliament for five years. Most recently, he was head of the Gazprom Kyrgyzstan branch in Osh between 2016 and 2020.

At the other end of the age spectrum is Baktybek Kalmamatov, the youngest presidential candidate at 36. He was a member of parliament for the Ata-Meken party between 2010 and 2015, after coordinating the party’s activities in the Osh region, in the south of the country.

Florian Coppenrath
Founder of Novastan Deutsch

Translated by Etienne Combier and Valentine Baldassari

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The post Kyrgyzstan: voters face choice of 18 candidates in January election appeared first on Novastan English.

Hip hop, which appeared in America in the 1970s, has long since become a worldwide phenomenon adapting and evolving in each new environment. Central Asia is no exception, as a quick overview of rap music from the region reveals.

This article was originally published on Novastan’s German website in 2018.

According to Spotify, hip hop is the most popular music genre in the world. Although most of Central Asia is not yet covered by the Swedish streaming service, it does have very active and increasingly professional rap scenes. Some of these even enjoy great commercial success.

This is especially true for Kazakhstan, home to the largest music industry in the region. Kyrgyz rap has equally found its way to the forefront of local pop culture. In Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, state control over the cultural sector is stronger, pushing local rap scenes either into conformity or to the margins.

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Central Asia’s widespread multilingualism is reflected in its rap. Russian-speaking artists still have the largest audience, yet most Central Asian rappers favour their national languages. But Central Asia’s rap scenes also differ in terms of their themes and social setting.

As an entry point, here are ten remarkable songs from all five Central Asian countries.

1.     Skriptonit – Style (Kazakhstan/Russia, 2015)

“One brother to my left, one to my right, I don’t call this “koresh” [Russian slang for a close friend] – because I’m from Pavlodar, if you remember”

With his atmospheric flow and lyrics from the world of a small town in northern Kazakhstan, Skriptonit – a stage name for the 27-year-old Ádil Jálelov – has long been one of the most popular rappers in Russia. But he likes to call his music “Kazakhstan rap”: “I am lucky that I come from Kazakhstan. I had little to do with Russian rappers and I don’t echo them,” he said in an interview with Russian journalist Ksenia Sobchak.

Skriptonit’s texts revolve around his experiences as a child and teenager in Kazakhstan’s Northern Pavlodar region. In Styl’, from his first album Dom s normalnimi yavleniyamy (“House of Normal Appearances”, an allusion to the Russian title of the US film A haunted House), he offers a portrait of his neighbourhood, “stinking of grass mixed with Hugo [Hugo Boss perfume]”.

Skriptonit achieved his breakthrough in 2013 with VBVVCTND (short for “Choice without options, all you gave us”). The words “look into the television, there you are like Alice in Wonderland” could be the song’s slogan. By signing a contract with the Russian label Gazgolder and moving to Moscow, he managed to jump down the rabbit hole.

2.     Baller – Armandar oryndalady (Kazakhstan, 2017)

“Dreams come true, if the goal is clear, if you have patience and faith”

If Skriptonit represents North Kazakh rap, Baller stands for the Southern side, or Shymside, as he would say himself. The 24-year-old artist comes from Shymkent, dubbed the “Texas of Kazakhstan” by Texas Monthly. His career began in 2008 when he became a member of the Shymkent label 11-Block. Unsurprisingly, one of his early pieces is dedicated to his hometown.

Baller raps mostly in Kazakh but also plays with Russian and English vocabulary in his lyrics, using the code-switching that is already common in rap. Today, he is one of the most popular rappers in Kazakhstan and even won the prize for best hip hop project at the Eurasian Music Awards 2017. Dreams come true, as he titled this song.

3.     Zamanbap – Ene Til (Kyrgyzstan, 2015)

“This piece belongs to me, to my mother, to all who understand it, to you…”

Two years ago, the Bishkek group Zamanbap (“Modern” in Kyrgyz) landed a minor hit with Ene til (“Mother tongue”), an ode to the Kyrgyz language. The three rappers Begish, Bayastan and Casper merge traditional Kyrgyz motifs with hip hop and a text calling for the appreciation of the Kyrgyz language.

Zamanbap’s musicians have all been in business for a good ten years and are now at the forefront of the rising Kyrgyz-language rap scene. Together with their Russian-speaking colleagues from Troeraznikh (“three different ones”), they recorded the theme song of the popular comedy series Jarayt City.

Zamanbap’s music is not just about using the Kyrgyz language, as the group emphasises in interviews: “Our mentality is not based on smoking weed and drinking alcohol etc., we write our tracks very differently than in America and other countries. This is our Kyrgyz rap”, Bayastan said in an interview with the channel Mosgi na Vynos. It’s family-friendly, completely in the sense of finding a Kyrgyz identity.

4.     7gen – 1916 (Kyrgyzstan, 2015)

“Under one sky, one unity, one way, in front of one tunduk, North and South be one!”

Kyrgyz-speaking rapper 7gen (Jetigen) raps predominantly about Kyrgyzstan, too. The song 1916 revolves around the uprisings of the inhabitants of Russian Central Asia against their entry into the First World War. This event, known as “urkun” (exodus) in Kyrgyz, was violently suppressed and led thousands of Kyrgyz into exile in China or Afghanistan, among other places. 2016 marked the 100th anniversary of the event – an opportunity to call on the Kyrgyz to unite beyond regional divisions.

The young rapper and graduate of the Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University is the seventh child in his family and was also born in the seventh month of the year, the source of his stage name. He works with the production company 45 TV, one of the two strongholds of hip hop in Kyrgyzstan with TopTash.

7gen’s lyrics offer a wealth of references to Kyrgyzstan’s self-image: “My fatherland, my country is Kyrgyzstan/ If I look up to the sky, the stars give me hope,” says the song Dayar Bol (“Be Ready”), which opens the album Kyrgyz bol (“Be Kyrgyz”) and addresses the social injustices and divisions of society.

5.     Shoxrux – Hayolimdasan (Uzbekistan, 2005)

“Every day, my love / Every night, my love, / You are always in my dreams, my love”

Shoxrux almost belongs to the senior generation of Central Asian rappers. He first gained notoriety in Uzbekistan in 2004 with a video clip that was distributed on television. The two albums Balandda (“In the heights”) and Bolaligim (“My Youth”) followed, before he took a break in 2007. The love song Hayolimdasan (“You are in my dreams”) is the 7th track on Balandda.

For the past few years, the now 31-year-old artist has been active again. Breaches of social taboos, often associated with rap, are hardly ever found in his songs. On his Instagram profile, Shoxrux first introduces himself as a member of the ruling “Liberal Democratic” party of Uzbekistan.

6.     Konsta – Blabla (Uzbekistan, 2017)

“I woke up early in a bar, and I understood there is no paradise here”

Konsta is stylistically more akin to contemporary US rap than to traditional Uzbek music. The young artist from Guliston began his musical career in 2009 as a student. He wrote his first track T.B.U.K.K. in Russian. Since then, he has refined his art between his stays in Moscow and Uzbekistan and writes most of his songs in Uzbek.

Konsta’s video BlaBla was released shortly before the end of 2017. Against the backdrop of the Azerbaijani capital Baku, it talks about his artistic career and the difficulties he has in making his way abroad. “If you want to make it here, you need good contacts. Whoever looks for work here does it again and again,” he says a little further in the lyrics. Possibly an allusion to the almost two million Uzbeks who earn their money in Russia.

7.     Master Ismail/ M.One – Assalom Alaykum (Tajikistan, 2017)

“I make Tajik rap like Tupac”

Master Ismail has been rapping since 1999 and is one of Tajikistan’s most famous rappers. He built his career between Tajikistan and Russia, where he spent two to six months every year. His songs are written partly in Russian and partly in Tajik.

At the beginning of the 2010s, Asia Plus counted Master Ismail among the regime-critical rappers in Tajikistan. In the Russian-language piece Goodbye Rahmon, for example, he focused on corruption and the poor economic situation that drives many young Tajiks abroad. Like many of his colleagues, however, pressure from the authorities led him to a U-turn. As a result, in his more recent works, he has polished the production but the lyrics have lost their political sharpness.

In Assalom Alaykum, with a greeting “to all at home and abroad,” Master Ismail introduces another patriotic song about his homeland, “watan” in Tajik, a word he repeats like a leitmotif. No matter how much he has travelled around, the rapper is always drawn back to Tajikistan, and more precisely to Dushanbe, the “best city in the world”, as he points out in Ponedelnik (“Monday” in Russian, an allusion to the meaning of ‘Dushanbe’ in Tajik).

8.     Bacha84 – Tok’i Todshiki (Tajikistan, 2012)

“Tok’i is the secret”

Bachtior Kosimov’s stage name Bacha84 is derived from his place of residence, the microdistrict no 84 in Dushanbe. The 29-year-old artist began his music career in 2002 with a piece he sang for KVN, a comedy competition dating back to Soviet times. As he told VIPZoneOnline in an interview, his mother, who worked for an international organisation, sparked his interest in rap.

Bacha is best known for his love songs. Pieces like In oschiki Todschiki (“This is Being in Love”) or Dili Dewona (“Crazy Heart”) were played in all of the country’s taxis in their day. In Tok’i Todshiki (“Tajik Tok’i”, referring to the tok’i, a traditional Tajik skullcap) he tells the listener how much he is attached to his tok’i, which he would not take off even if Jennifer Lopez asked him to. In addition to the obligatory patriotic pieces, Bacha84 touches on social themes, and a social café recently opened in Dushanbe bears the name of his piece Dar jak samin (on one world).

9.     Godek, Vagrant, Zumer & BlackShadow – Demir Tiken (Turkmenistan, 2012)

“I grew up very fast, time has taught me, I learnt courage and zeal”

Turkmenistan’s rap scene is without doubt the least known in Central Asia. Hip hop culture fits badly into the stereotypical image of an all-powerful totalitarian state. A “Khan” wrote on the now inactive citizen media NewEurasia a few years ago: “The outside world thinks we Turkmen live in constant fear of our government. Not quite, many of us don’t even realize that something is wrong. No, mostly we are just bored … The young generation really has nothing to do. That’s why they love hip hop.”

According to Khan, Turkmen hip hop can be traced back to 2000. But it wasn’t until Zumer that the scene really took off. The rapper, who studied at a Turkish university and spends a lot of time in Turkey, is considered the father of Turkmen rap. With his group Darkroom Posse, he represents the Turkmen West Side, or Balkan Side.

Zumer’s hometown Turkmenbashi is the subject of the song Demir Tiken (“Barbed Wire”), a thoughtful piece about youth on the streets of the “dark paradise”, as he calls the city. “My legs are caught in this barbed wire” – a metaphor for the lessons of the street.

10.     Ulykazy – Ekskurs (Turkmenistan, 2015)

“I don’t remember how many women I had, sometimes I meet one of them on the street, and life reminds me of the past”

Turkmen rap is developing not only in Turkmenbashi and Ashgabat but also abroad. This is especially true in Turkey, which is linguistically close and which Turkmen citizens can enter without a visa. There are also local rap communities and concerts in Turkmen in Russia.

In Eskurs, the rapper Ulykazy, who like Zumer is from Turkmenbashi and born in 1988, gives listeners an excursion through his love life. He recorded his clip abroad, too, in the Belarusian capital Minsk.

Bonus Track: Jokeasses – ZYN ZYN (Kazakhstan, 2017)

“White T-shirt, cool glasses…”

Zyn Zyn by Youtuber collective Jokeasses from Almaty (Kazakhstan) breaks records. The song attracted over 14 million views on YouTube in three months. Written in a mixture of Kazakh and Russian, interspersed with anglicisms and name-dropping from pop culture, (“Here and There, Tom & Jerry, Katy Perry, Jim Carrey”) it’s a colourful rap parody, and a real catchy tune…

Florian Coppenrath

Translated by Magnus Obermann

The post Central Asian rap in 10 tracks appeared first on Novastan English.

Kyrgyzstan’s lawmakers gathered on 10 October to elect a new prime minister. They chose Sadyr Japarov, known for advocating the nationalisation of the country’s main gold mine, and until recently serving a prison sentence for attempted kidnapping. But critics say his election was illegal.  

This article was originally published on Novastan’s French website.

Kyrgyzstan’s parliament gathered on 10 October at the State Residence Ala-Archa, south of the capital Bishkek, to elect Sadyr Japarov interim prime minister, at the head of a nearly unchanged government.

One person died and hundreds were injured on the night of 5 October after protesters took to the streets to oppose the results of the parliamentary elections the previous day.

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Since 10 October Bishkek has been under a state of emergency declared by President Sooronbay Jeenbekov, who also called in the army to stabilise the situation.

A dubious vote

Several attempts to convene parliament and organise a vote had taken place over the previous days but had failed to reach the 50% quorum. Finally, on 10 October, out of the 120 members of the Jogorku Kenesh, the Kyrgyz parliament, 51 were present at the State Residence and 10 voted by proxy, totaling 61 votes, or just over half.

Critics such as the politician Felix Kulov question the legality of this procedure. He argues that half of the members of parliament must actually be present for the vote to be valid. In addition, the deputy Aida Kasymalieva stated on her Facebook page she had left before the vote but had still been counted as a participant. She concludes the vote and Sadyr Japarov’s nomination were not legal. She also reports receiving threats from her colleagues to pressure her into voting.

The legal clinic Adilet, a group of Kyrgyz legal experts, also asserts the parliamentary session on 10 October was illegal, due to “serious violations of the Constitution and legislation“, notably the lack of quorum.

After a speech by Sadyr Japarov and questions from the assembly, the members unanimously voted him interim prime minister through a show of hands. They also accepted his cabinet, nearly identical to that of the previous government. The political factions who took part correspond to the previous presidential majority. As the Kyrgyz media Kaktus noted, no deputy openly opposed to Sadyr Japarov took part in the vote.

Sadyr Japarov’s role is not yet fully official. The President still needs to sign the decree of appointment, usually a formality.

15 years in politics

Born in 1968 in the Yssyk-Köl region, Sadyr Japrov graduated from the National Academy of Physical Culture and Spor in Bishkek in 1991. According to Kloop, he spent most of the next 15 years heading collective farms and directing a small oil company. He started his political career during the 2005 revolution alongside Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who became president.

Sadyr Japarov was elected to the Jogorku Kenesh before becoming adviser to the president and head of the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption. Having made himself scarce during the 2010 revolution, which ousted Kurmanbek Bakiyev, he came back to politics as a member of the Ata-Jurt party alongside the southern politician Kamchibek Tachiyev. He once again became a member of parliament in the first post-revolutionary elections in October 2010.

In 2012, Sadyr Japarov championed the nationalisation of the country’s main gold mine, Kumtor, located in his home region of Yssyk-Köl. He took part in protests that attempted to storm parliament in Bishkek. In Karakol, the regional capital of Yssyk-Köl, in 2013, his supporters took a regional governor hostage.

Sadyr Japarov fled Kyrgyzstan and lived in exile, before returning in 2017. He was arrested on the Kazakh-Kyrgyz border and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Freed by protesters

Sadyr Japarov was in prison until the night of 5 October, which saw protesters storm parliament to contest the results of a parliamentary election seen as fraudulent. Some of the protesters rallied to Sadyr Japarov’s cause and went to the headquarters of the State Committee for National Security (GKNB) to demand his release. His supporters called for him to become president or prime minister.

Read more: Kyrgyzstan: governing party wins “dirty” parliamentary elections

As Kloop reports, Sadyr Japarov received the support of deputies from the parliamentary majority, who tried to appoint him interim prime minister without proving they’d reached the quorum of 61 deputies.

As early as 8 October, Kaktus showed that social media accounts supporting the president and the Mekenim Kyrgyzstan party before the election were now posting in support of Sadyr Japarov’s nomination as prime minister. Kloop also details the links between Sadyr Japarov and the Matraimov family, the main supporter of Mekenin Kyrgyzstan and at the heart of a vast corruption scandal. Sadyr Japarov has denied any connection with Soroonbai Jeenbekov and the Matraimov family.

Local media reports that Sadyr Japarov’s supporters violently clashed with other protesters on Bishkek’s main square on 9 October. Later, several opponents, including former president Almazbek Atambayev, and Ravshan Jeenbekov were arrested.

On the evening of 10 October, Sadyr Japarov’s supporter celebrated the appointment, ignoring curfew.

What is Sadyr Japarov’s political programme?

Speaking to Parliament before his confirmation as Prime Minister, Sadyr Japarov declared the events of the past few days “are not a coup, but a peaceful renewal“, as neither the government nor the president have fled. In a press conference following the vote, he blamed the October parliament elections results on the party system, calling it a “business system”, pointed to corruption as the cause and promised to “eradicate corruption and restore the confidence of the people“.

He went on to say that he had met with the president, who had promised to resign within two or three days. The president’s spokesman, contacted by Kaktus, was less forthright and announced that the president would resign once the country was “back on the legal track”.

The programme the interim Prime Minister presented to parliament puts stability and the defense of investors and small and medium-sized businesses first. Also among its priorities is the “review of agreements on the development of the mines of Jeruy, Kumtor and others”, in line with Sadyr Japarov’s previous commitments. However, he told MPs he no longer thought it necessary to nationalise Kumtor because there was little gold left.

Sadyr Japarov also came out in favour of a first-past-the-post rather than proportional system for parliamentary elections, which would require changing the constitution. He did not give a date for the next parliamentary elections but stated he would not take part.

 Asked whether he would run for president, Sadyr Japarov replied : “If many Kyrgyzstani support me and ask me to become president, then I will stand.” In the event of Sooronbay Jeenbekov’s resignation and in the absence of a parliament spokesperson – the office holder resigned – Sadyr Japarov, as prime minister, could become interim president, as the Kyrgyz branch of Russian media Sputnik points out.

Novastan.org

Additional reporting by Pia de Gouvello and Florian Coppenrath

The post From prison to high office: Sadyr Japarov is Kyrgyzstan’s new prime minister appeared first on Novastan English.

A new parliament was elected in Kyrgyzstan on 4 October. Almost all election winners are parties loyal to the government. As of the following day, several parties do not recognize the results, and thousands protest against fraudulent elections.

This article was originally published on Novastan’s German version.

“The Kazakh are probably once more shocked looking at Kyrgyz Twitter,” writes political commentator Azim Azimov on the microblogging service. He is alluding to how openly citizens in Kyrgyzstan express their political opinions compared to their northern neighbours. In fact, on the day after the parliamentary elections in Kyrgyzstan, anger and sadness reign in the local segment of social media, where the majority of users are critical of the government.  

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From the perspective of the opposition, the situation has materialized as was feared. According to the preliminary election results, the Birimdik party emerged as the winner with just under 25 % of the vote. Birimdik is considered the successor to the fragmented governing party SDPK.

Shortly behind them comes the party Mekenim Kyrgyzstan (“My Homeland Kyrgyzstan”), which is usually associated with the former customs officer Rayimbek Matraimov. According to international journalistic research, Rayimbek Matraimov’s involvement in smuggling and corruption networks makes him one of the most influential people in the country.

Kyrgyzstan and Bütün Kyrgyzstan (“United Kyrgyzstan”) also make it into parliament, respectively with just under 9% and a solid 7%. The Kyrgyzstan party is thus the only party from the previous legislative period to make it back into parliament. It is usually associated with the large business holding company Ayu and is considered loyal to the government.

After several attempts, the Bütün Kyrgyzstan party made it into parliament for the first time, identifying itself as an opposition party in the run-up to the elections. 

To enter parliament, parties must obtain at least 7% of the vote and 0.7% in each of Kyrgyzstan’s seven regions.

A barely representative parliament

As the Kyrgyz online media Kloop.kg reports, Birimdik, Mekenim Kyrgyzstan and Kyrgyzstan have spent more money in the election campaign than all other parties combined. Bütün Kyrgyzstan, on the other hand, made a disproportionately large profit from relatively low investments, drawing on a well-organized voter base and led by the political veteran Adakhan Madumarov.

The remaining 12 parties failed to enter parliament because of the 7% blocking clause. It was particularly close for Mekenchil which is only 0.04% away from entering parliament. Respublika, whose presidential candidate Ömürbek Babanov had received more than 30 percent of the votes in the elections in 2017, is at just under 6%. Ata Meken (“Fatherland”), a long-standing opposition party, managed just over four percent. 1.82% of voters voted “against all”, with an average turnout of 56.2%.

This means that a slightly smaller proportion of eligible voters took part in the election than five years ago. According to Deputy Prime Minister Akram Madumarov, almost half a million citizens were unable to vote because they did not register their biometric data. Since 2015, a biometric recognition system has been used in elections in Kyrgyzstan. Moreover, because of the coronavirus pandemic, people with high temperatures were not allowed to enter polling stations until after 6 pm.

In addition to a relatively low voter turnout, this time the 7% blocking clause excludes a particularly high percentage of votes. The four elected parties together hold only just over 65 % of the vote. Five years ago the figure was just under 90%. “Those in power have created a ticking time bomb, so many votes have remained on the streets,” political activist Nursultan Akylbek commented on Twitter.

Protests against election fraud

On the evening of elections, several opposition parties declared they did not recognise the results. The parties Reforma, Chong Kazat, Ordo, Yyman Nuru and Meken Yntymagy joined forces in calling for a demonstration. According to Kloop.kg, over 2000 people gathered in Ala-Too Square in the capital Bishkek on Monday afternoon. Representatives of other parties such as Respublika, Ata Meken, Bütün Kyrgyzstan and Mekenchil also joined the protest. Further demonstrations are taking place in the cities of Talas and Naryn.

“As you know, there can be no elections in Kyrgyzstan without breaking the rules. This election will probably not be an exception either”, wrote Kloop.kg at the beginning of election day. The independent media company was involved in documenting violations of the electoral law with 120 election observers. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was represented at the election with only a small observer mission as the 350 short-term observers originally planned could not enter the country because of the coronavirus pandemic.

While biometric voter recognition makes traditional forms of organised electoral fraud such as carousel voting and ballot stuffing much more difficult, this year numerous indications of vote buying by individual parties were observed. Outside some polling stations, for example, there were people keeping lists of voters supposed to vote for a given party. Some of these people also had face masks with certain characteristics. In other cases, voters were filmed receiving money after the vote.

Several violations of the secrecy of the ballot were observed as well: polling station staff stood too close to the ballot box or even looked over the shoulders of voters in the voting booth. In other cases, voters illegally photographed their ballot papers.

Finally, even before the election, the use of the so-called “Forma-2” form, through which voters can request to vote at a polling station other than their registered address, was criticized. According to critics, parties could use such applications to have their voters vote in other regions and thus make it through the regional blocking clause of 0.7%. Cases of collective voter transport suggest such a practice.

A “very dirty” election

“Especially in the city of Osh the election was very dirty. I say it quite openly. What kind of election rigging has not been shown in social media since this morning,” even Iskender Matraimov of Mekenim Kyrgyzstan explained the evening of the election. He added that his party should have received significantly more votes. Party leader Mirlan Bakirov nevertheless accepted the results.

Nearly 100 different complaints were received by the election commission, but according to its representative Tynchtyk Shaynazarov, they have no influence on the election results. “However, as far as individual parties or individual candidates are concerned, their illegal activities may have consequences. They can also be excluded from the election,” he added.

The anger of the protesters is now directed on the one hand against the government and parties, on the other against those who sold their vote. “These elections are legitimate. Absolutely from the people. Nobody has forced a million people to accept money. This is a stupid and irresponsible behavior of adult citizens. Not Raim [Rayimbek Matraimov, editor’s note] and not Birimdik are guilty, but the citizens themselves,” declared political expert Azim Azimov on Twitter in the evening.

Other observers, however, also point out that economic conditions and political disinterest can explain the sale of votes: “I don’t know how to blame the poor old people who receive 2000 som (about 21 euros) pension. They have very little left to live, they don’t believe the authorities and sell their vote for a monthly pension,” writes Twitter user Aizada Marat, for example.

Bektur Iskender, co-founder of Kloop.kg, also identifies economic causes for the election rigging. “In fact, our main problem remains poverty. If the people in Kyrgyzstan weren’t so poor, they wouldn’t sell so many votes for so little money,” he explained on election night. 

The glass of democracy half full or half empty?

“Although candidates could generally campaign freely, there were a number of concerns, including reports of candidate intimidation and disruption of campaign events,” writes the OSCE in a press statement. Thus, structural political and economic problems remain, but on the other hand, an increased focus on party programs as well as the ongoing protest movement point to a growing political awareness. In this way, a new activist party like Reforma was able to gather more than 30,000 votes in its election debut. “We have a protest electorate, it is just spread incredibly wide between numerous parties,” Bektur Iskender said.

The final election results will be announced within 20 days, once ballots have been counted manually and the complaints have been taken into account. Much may still happen between now and then, especially in the light of the protests that are beginning, sometimes with calls for new elections. Even Mekenchil could still make it to parliament as the fifth party.

If the current election result is retained, the political status quo will prevail for the time being, although a maximum of 47 members of the outgoing parliament may be given a new mandate. But it is also still open how the relationship between the four parties in parliament will develop. Birimdik and Mekenim Kyrgyzstan in particular, as two different poles of power, could ultimately find themselves in a competitive relationship.

Florian Coppenrath
Co-founder

Translated by Magnus Obermann

The post Kyrgyzstan: governing party wins “dirty” parliamentary elections appeared first on Novastan English.