The Big Hillbilly Bluegrass Band will play at Bishkek’s main ex-pat bar on Tuesday. Their regular gig is at Madam’s Organ in D.C., which besides being know as one of the best bars in town was also Euan Blair’s favorite hang out while an intern in Congress. Clearly this means the Big Hillbilly’s have some [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘bases’
June 12, 2007
Bishkek Manas base | Get your aspersion on!
Posted yesterday at Jamestown, an intriguing response from US Embassy officials to three Eurasia Daily monitor articles about recent Kyrgyz opposition to the Ganci base in Bishkek. If you’re reading this site, chances are you’ve read the articles concerned (here, here and here) by Jamestown analysts John C.K. Daly, Erica Marat, and Roger McDermott. In [...]
June 9, 2007
Putin’s missile shield – Bishkek boon or Russian bunt?
Putin’s surprise offer for Dubya at the G8 summit to jointly work on a missile defense shield in Azerbaijan rather than the contentious Czech-based proposal has commentators buzzing. Even as Washington and Moscow have agreed to discuss such potential, many, such as the NYT and this blogger are listing “daunting, and possibly insurmountable, hurdles.”
James over [...]
June 3, 2007
Bishkek’s Ganci base | Yankee ketsin!
50 peaceful protestors rallied outside the US embassy in Bishkek for an hour today in the first public action from the “Movement for the Withdrawal of American military bases from Kyrgyzstan.” Spurred on by outspoken Parliament deputies, the movement is based on America’s poor (bureaucratic?) handling of the killing of a driver at the [...]
May 28, 2007
Ivanova on US double standards
Last week, I posted this quote by Maria Ivanova, the widow of Aleksandr Ivanov, a Kyrgyz citizen truck-driver who was shot and killed by a US soldier at a Ganci airbase checkpoint on December 6, 2006.
America shouts about their democratic rights which it imposes everywhere, but today we have seen that this has not been [...]
May 27, 2007
Mediaspin | Ganci airbase news roundup
Getting through the past week’s news surrounding Bishkek’s American ‘Manas-Ganci’ airbase has been a journey through an echo-chamber of Russian-influenced rumor and sloppy contradiction. Plenty of paranoid logic (Bely parohod, Interfax, 24.kg repeating Russian newswires) and some sound reasoning (mostly on the Bishkek Press Club site, and reprints of the same commentators). What I’m interested [...]
May 22, 2007
Yankee Ketsin! | Bishkek’s Airbases
Both of Kyrgyzstan’s airbases got plenty of newsplay today, neatly coinciding with a visit today from the CSTO Secretary General Nikolai Bordyuzha. Most of the news agencies make much of the ‘working visit,’ which follows Kyrgyz Parliament Speaker Marat Sultanov’s mission to Moscow last week where he plead for more CSTO forces to help guard [...]
