Qishloq Ovozi (Archive)

Campaigning for Kyrgyzstan's parliamentary elections does not officially start until September 4, but scandals, accusations, and confusion have already started.

Elections in Kyrgyzstan -- the lone democracy in Central Asia -- have always been raucous events. The 2005 parliamentary elections, for example, led to the ouster of President Askar Akaev in the Tulip Revolution.

But the vote set for October 4 might outdo all the previous polls as this time there are no clear favorites, which has raised the hopes of the at least 16 parties that will take part in the elections.

Three Minutes Late -- Confusion About Deadline

Just a few minutes after the 6 p.m. deadline passed for official party representatives to hand in registration documents -- including a list of candidates -- to the Central Election Commission (BShK) on August 24, there was the first problem.

The new Kyrgyzstan party apparently missed that deadline by three minutes, though party leader Kanat Isaev insists his people were not late.

On the registration book, the Kyrgyzstan party is signed in at 5:59 p.m., though there is evidence a previous entry had been written over and the person who handed over the documents neglected to put their signature next to the entry.

A video from the BShK office in Bishkek shows the Kyrgyzstan party representative in the office signing the book at 6:03 p.m.

At 6:20 p.m. on August 24, the BShK press service announced 17 parties, including the Kyrgyzstan party, had handed over the necessary documents but, shortly after, posts appeared on social networks in Kyrgyzstan claiming inconsistencies in the registration of the Kyrgyzstan party.

Representatives from several other parties along with civic activists came to the BShK office the next day to complain about the tardiness violation and were initially met by a BShK employee who reportedly said the clock on the surveillance camera was 13 minutes fast.

The group was not convinced and eventually the registration book was shown and inconsistencies in the Kyrgyzstan party's entry became apparent (see photo).

Representatives of the Ata-Meken (Fatherland), Reforms, Bir Bol (Stay Together), Ordo (The Center), and Chong Kazat (Great Crusade) parties complained to President Sooronbai Jeenbekov, the head of the state Security Committee, and the state ombudsman about the BSK decision to register Kyrgyzstan.

Later on August 25, the BShK announced it had rejected the Kyrgyzstan party's registration on the grounds that the authorized representative of the party was not the person who handed over the documents.

The party said their authorized representative was sick and could not deliver the documents.

Kyrgyzstan party head Isaev quickly announced the party would appeal the BShK decision in court and, on August 27, an administrative court in Bishkek ruled the BShK decision to reject the Kyrgyzstan party's documents was illegal, which party member Talant Mamytov said meant Kyrgyzstan could participate in the upcoming elections.

At the same time, the BShK's credibility was tarnished for initially registering a party -- Kyrgyzstan -- that is seen as pro-government, even if it later reversed its decision.

The BShK said on August 28 it would appeal the decision to reinstate the Kyrgyzstan party.

There might be other parties appealing BShK rulings soon. The BShK sent back the documents of 13 other parties, giving them 48 hours to make revisions or supply information that was lacking in the material originally presented for registration.

Who Is Running And Who Isn't?

As mentioned in a previous issue of Qishloq Ovozi, many Kyrgyz political parties have merged in previous elections, sometimes to boost their chances at the polls and sometimes because one or more parties were unable to register, so they joined ranks with a party that was already registered.

On August 18, the Mekenim Kyrgyzstan (My Homeland Kyrgyzstan) and Ata-Jurt (Fatherland) parties announced they were merging.

Ata-Jurt joined forces with Respublika (Republic) before the 2015 parliamentary elections and the combined effort resulted in Respublika/Ata-Jurt winning 28 seats in the 120-seat parliament, the second-highest number among the six parties that secured seats in those elections. The two parties formally split in November 2016 but maintained their alliance within parliament.

Ata-Jurt did not announce it would participate in the upcoming elections at the start of August when 44 other parties said they intended to. So its candidates will be running under the Mekenim Kyrgyzstan banner.

In early June, former Prime Minister Temir Sariev announced his Ak-Shumkar (White Falcon) party would join with Ata-Meken (Fatherland), the Liberal Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan, and other groups to form the Zhany Dem (New Breath) political alliance for the upcoming elections.

On August 5, Sariev announced Ak-Shumkar was withdrawing from that group and on August 18 it was reported that Ak-Shumkar had merged into the Butun Kyrgyzstan (United Kyrgyzstan) party.

But on August 23, Sariev announced that Ak-Shumkar was withdrawing from that alliance and added that it would not take part in the elections.

On August 15, the Bir Bol and Democrat parties agreed to merge to "strengthen the interests of ordinary citizens who are hungry for change," but two days later the Democrat party announced it also was withdrawing from the elections.

Since independence in 1991, Feliks Kulov has been Kyrgyzstan's vice president, interior minister, security minister, Bishkek mayor, and prime minister. He created the Ar-Namys (Dignity) party in 1999 and the party took part in the 2007, 2010, and 2015 elections, but on August 18 Ar-Namys announced it would not participate in these elections.

Omurbek Tekebaev is the leader of the Ata-Meken party, but he is still officially under house arrest after a 2017 conviction on charges of corruption and fraud that many felt was part of a political vendetta against him by former President Almazbek Atambaev.

Tekebaev had already signaled he would not be running in the upcoming elections, but on August 17 he stated it clearly and said several other top members of the party would also not seek seats in these elections, even though the party is still registered and will be on the ballot.

Tekebaev said it is time "to clear the way for younger people" and repeated that 33-year-old Janar Akaev (a former reporter for RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service) would top the party's list in the elections.

Several members of the Yyman Nuru (Ray of Faith) party complained on August 14 that their party was under pressure from other parties ahead of the vote, but the group declined to specify which parties or the form of pressure.

Mikhail Khalitov, a member of the party's political council, said they had advised any members "who have something to lose that they can leave the party."

Yyman Nuru party leader Aybek Osmonov, who interestingly was a founder of the Mekenim Kyrgyzstan party, was among the first to leave, formally making the announcement on August 18 without giving any reason. He was replaced by Nurjigit Kadyrbekov, a young religious leader who studied in the United States and Japan.

On August 16, the Chong Kazat party held its congress and replaced leader Tural Alimov, who made an unsuccessful attempt to run for president in 2017, with Maksat Mamytkanov, a former head of the state Security Committee's department for fighting organized crime.

All this activity is only the beginning, as the registered parties scramble to woo voters, parties that were not registered try to stay in the game by joining registered parties, and the courts deal with issues such as the late-registration charge against the Kyrgyzstan party.

It all adds up to what will certainly be an interesting campaign for parliamentary elections that appear to be highly unpredictable and the problems seen in Kyrgyzstan are on an entirely different level compared to those experienced by candidates and political parties in the other Central Asian countries.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service

More than 22 years after a deadly cyanide spill contaminated a remote mountain river of Kyrgyzstan, a Bishkek court has ruled in the case of more than two dozen residents of the northeastern village of Barskoon thought to have been poisoned by a transport accident near the Canadian-Kyrgyz gold-mining operation.

The court ordered on August 10 that the surviving plaintiffs each receive 400,000 soms (about $5,700) for being poisoned after the 1998 accident on a road leading to the Kumtor gold mine, which dumped nearly a ton of cyanide into the river that runs through their village.

The plaintiffs plan to appeal the ruling despite their notable lack of success in more than two decades of trying -- with time running out.

No Cause For Alarm?

On May 20, 1998, a truck from the jointly owned Kumtor gold-mining company carrying sodium cyanide used in cleaning gold overturned on the road and rolled into the river above the village of Barskoon, spilling some 1.7 tons of sodium cyanide (around 935 kilograms of cyanide).

The mine lies in what the environmental watchdog BankWatch described as "fragile conditions of permafrost and in the vicinity of glaciers that feed fresh waters into the transboundary Naryn River."

The company failed to notify Barskoon's 6,500 or so residents, who use the river water for drinking and irrigation, for around five hours after the incident.

Once authorities announced the accident, they warned residents in the area against drinking from the river -- the village's sole source of potable water -- but assured them that there was no cause for alarm.

It was not long before people started falling ill. Within a week, more than 500 people in the area had sought medical treatment; by June 9, that number had risen to nearly 5,000.

Within around two weeks of the spill, more than half the villagers in Barskoon had been evacuated. More would follow, from Barskoon and neighboring villages, until the entire area was essentially emptied of its residents.

At least several people died. Pregnant women reported being advised -- and in some cases forced -- to seek abortions.

Almost immediately, there were demands around the country that Kumtor's operator, Canada's Cameco Corporation (now called Centerra), be penalized and pay compensation. Some Kyrgyz called for the company to be expelled from the country.

BankWatch alleges that while Centerra "has been the client of the EBRD [multilateral bank] since 1995...the bank has failed to ensure that its client respects public social environmental concerns and social needs."

But still, things weren't so simple.

Kumtor Country

Cameco signed a deal with the Kyrgyz state gold company Kyrgyzaltyn in 1992, and they jointly produced their first gold in 1996.

In 1997, the Kumtor project's first full year of production, Kyrgyzstan's total gold output was some 17 tons of gold, 14 tons of which came from Kumtor. The gold-mining jump-started Kyrgyzstan's industrial output in 1997 and significantly helped the country cut its trade deficit.

By August 2019, the head of the macroeconomic policy department at the Kyrgyz Economy Ministry, Nasridin Shamshiev, said production at Kumtor accounted for more than 18 percent of national gross domestic product and nearly 45 percent of Kyrgyzstan's industrial output the previous year.

Kumtor was already important in 1998 and the decades that followed. But it is perhaps more important than ever in 2020, with Kyrgyzstan's industrial output generally forecast for a sharp drop due the coronavirus.

Immediately after the spill in 1998, a group of independent ecological experts headed toward Barskoon to inspect it, only to be prevented by the mine's operators from accessing the area.

SEE ALSO:

Questioning The Environmental Cost Of Kyrgyzstan's Kumtor Gold Mine

On June 3, a Barskoon woman who had been taken to a hospital in the nearby town of Karakol died, in what appeared to have been the first death attributable to the accident.

The same day, Michel Bernard, who was Cameco's president at the time, said the spill posed no serious threat to residents or to nearby Issyk-Kul, the pristine alpine lake into which the Barskoon River flows.

Cameco pledged to clean up the spill and pay compensation to those who were affected by the cyanide that had contaminated the river.

The Kyrgyz government vowed improvements in Barskoon, for example by piping running water to the village.

By the middle of June, less than a month after the spill, the residents of the Barskoon area were told they could return to their homes.

The Barskoon That I Knew

Barskoon lies near the south shore of Issyk-Kul, the massive lake in northeastern Kyrgyzstan that is the country's premier tourist attraction. The north shore hosts most of the tourist areas, which in the 1990s were even more modest than what exists there today.

The second-largest mountain lake in the world, Issyk-Kul is nearly 180 kilometers east-to-west and a bit more than 50 kilometers north-to-south.

There is a ring road around the lake from which a steep, windy road leads up some 2,000 meters of elevation to the gold-mining site at Kumtor around 4,000 meters above sea level, passing Barskoon along the way.

Barskoon was a nice place to live. I know because I spent weeks there in the winter of 1992 and again in the spring of 1993 (which is why I also know that the most famous former resident of Barskoon, once called Barsgan, was Mahmud al-Kashgari, an 11th-century scholar who wrote the first comprehensive dictionary of Turkic languages).

My friendships with the people of Barskoon were why I was following events in the area closely after the accident.

I finally returned there in the late summer of 1998 to see how the people who had so kindly taken me into their homes and fed me were faring.

Barskoon's villagers had been promised compensation. When I arrived at the end of August, they told me that village children had each received some candy and five new pencils. That had been the compensation, they said, up to that point.

There were promises: a new school, a new medical facility, repairs to the road. But there was no indication that any of that would be realized anytime soon.

The locals said European-looking men in uniforms -- presumably employees of the mining company -- had initially sealed off their village, not Kyrgyz police or soldiers.

SEE ALSO:

Kyrgyzstan: A Commercial Tragedy Revisited

Cameco eventually agreed to a settlement of $4.6 million, but it is unclear that any of that money ever made it to Barskoon.

In 2005, Tursunbek Akun, the head of the human rights commission under then-President Kurmanbek Bakiev, told RFE/RL that most of the funds had simply vanished.

And the contamination was doing more than just sickening and killing Barskoon's people, they said; it also temporarily robbed them of one of their main sources of income, the export of locally grown apples.

Barskoon's apples had been known for their quality and sweetness. But after the spill, the villagers told me, no one would buy them. Some locals had even tried taking their apples to southern Kyrgyzstan for sale, but their documents were checked and they were told to take their suspect fruit back home.

Since then, locals have tried unsuccessfully several times to force the company to pay compensation.

SEE ALSO:

It's Not Just About The Horse Penis, It's About The Gold Mine

Over the course of the past 15 years, the case has made it to Kyrgyzstan's Supreme Court four times. Each time, it has been returned to a lower court for review.

Local rights defender Erkingul Imankozhoeva has been trying to help the villagers to finally receive fair compensation, frequently crippled by a lack of documentation and other obstacles.

Imankozhoeva told RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service, known locally as Azattyk, that despite thousands of cases of illness from the spill, Kyrgyz courts only allowed individuals with medical documentation specifically linking their afflictions to the cyanide discharge to sue Kumtor for compensation.

In 2005, Jypar Jeksheev, who was the Barskoon region's representative in parliament when the accident happened, told Azattyk that the medical records of many of those who fell ill after the spill had subsequently been altered to suggest outside causes of medical problems, freeing the government and the Canadian company of responsibility.

When the lawsuit was first filed, there were only 29 locals in possession of the necessary medical records. Twelve of them have since died.

The Kumtor mine in northern Kyrgyzstan, run by the Canadian Centerra Gold company since 1997, is one of the largest gold mines in Central Asia. It's also at the center of a national debate in which some Kyrgyz officials are pushing for a heavier tax burden and environmental fines on the Canadian operator. RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service correspondent Janarbek Joldoshbaev visited the site high in the Tian-Shan mountains and filed these photographs. (15 PHOTOS)

One of the plaintiffs in the case, Mirgul Urmanbetov, said he felt 400,000 som was meager compensation, considering what the contamination's victims had been through.

"We have little hope that justice will prevail," he added. "We are afraid that the process will again drag on until the statute of limitations expires, and then they will close [the case]."

According to the Centerra website, the Kumtor gold mine produced 12.6 million ounces of gold between 1997 and the end of 2019.

Epilogue

Kyrgyz President Askar Akaev visited the Czech Republic in November 1998.

As an RFE/RL correspondent, I went to an accompanying press conference at Prague Castle.

Akaev looked pleased next to Czech President Vaclav Havel. People had compared Akaev, with his academic rather than political background, to Prague's famous dissident writer-cum-president. In the early 1990s, some people had even labeled Akaev "the Vaclav Havel of Central Asia."

I was allowed to ask one of the three questions that were permitted at the press conference.

Most of the journalists were there to hear from Havel, and the first two questions had been for him.

Then it was my turn. I introduced myself and said what organization I worked for and, in Russian, welcomed Akaev to the Czech Republic before asking my question.

"I was just in Barskoon," I said, "and the people there told me they were promised compensation but all they received was some candy and pencils. Does the Kyrgyz government plan to do something to help the people of Barskoon?"

The smile vanished from Akaev's face and he looked at me and replied, "It is not only Radio Liberty that is concerned for the people in Barskoon."

But despite whatever concern Akaev was alluding to, neither his (he was ousted in the 2005 Tulip Revolution) nor any other Kyrgyz government appear to have been trying very hard to compensate the people of Barskoon.