CXW over at neweurasia reports on signs of the potential crisis evolving out of Kyrgyzstan’s urban-rural, rich-poor and North-South divides, which have been politicized around the April standoff by both opposition and government media. Particularly with recent village clashes reported in the North and South pitting Kyrgyz against each other, analysts fear a further escalation as journalists, local and foreign, echo the idea. CXW comments:
Certainly, the cut-and-dry nature of a soley regional explanation is very appealing – just as ethnicity has often been used as an explanation for conflicts without looking at the underlying dynamics. Regional or ethnic differences may well play a role in facilitating conflict, particularly once it has begun, but often the ground for conflict has been prepared by local socio-economic factors such as high levels of unemployment and poverty and a shortage of resources.
Sheer regionalism obviously wasn’t enough to rally either side much in April. So it’s still slightly puzzling why the Bakiyev government cracked down so hard on the United Front protests if they were so obviously fizzling out on their own. Either it was because the government just knew they could get away with it (in the short term at least) or the snowballing reports of the imminent “next Tajik-styled civil war” had the opposition’s immediate potential far bigger than immediately visible.
French anthropologist Boris Petric explains why the North-South divide is particularly current now, in a valuable interview featured on the newsroom-blog of Camille Magnard and Mathilde Goanec. While the South had historically been tied to the Kokand khanate, the North allied itself in the late 19th century evade Chinese influence. When the borders were drawn up, the two parts were ‘artificially fused’ together, albeit with the North often getting more Soviet support. In the past few years, given the shift of power to Parliament deputies,
Being a governor or a ‘hakim’ doesn’t bring you as much power and resources as it once did… Why do they all want to be elected as deputies? To benefit from the parliamentary immunity, which is the ideal protection for their private economic activities. All these speeches about identity and tribalism are first meant to hide other realities such as the growing social inequalities in Kyrgyz society.
And he argues that it’s these inequalities, rather than political issues, that brought people out to overthrow Akayev and in the future, could be exploited by a number of other groups, such as Islamic fundamentalists.
IWPR analysts recommend having the government formulate policies to defuse this divide, while CXW points out that the government needs to concentrate on ‘tangible improvements in the living standards’ so people feel like they can ‘live, rather than just survive.’ Any of these changes seem unlikely to happen any time soon but even if less well-off Kyrgyzstan citizens can see past all the regionalism hype, what can they do to help themselves? The only immediate option visible to me is to vote for that deputy who’ll partially redistribute resources, while fighting for his share of limited resources/power in Parliament.
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June 11, 2007 at 10:40 pm
[...] goal was to raise awareness on Kyrgyzstan’s poor educational system and apparently help bridge the country’s North-south divide. An avid mountaineer, Fluch has also made similar awareness-runs in Ukraine for another school he [...]