ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- Just one day before the well-known Kyrgyz media outlet Kloop informed its readers of a government bid to shut it down, a powerbroker the outlet had covered in multiple investigations into corruption and smuggling was completing his rehabilitation.
Raimbek Matraimov, the former deputy head of the Customs Service, smiled and posed for photos with famous bloggers at the opening of the new headquarters of the Muftiate – Kyrgyzstan’s government-endorsed Islamic spiritual authority.
He had good reason to be content.
The building was paid for by his family foundation, which was implicated as a money-laundering tool in joint media investigations carried out by Kloop, RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service (Azattyk), and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
Sitting close to the U.S.-sanctioned Matraimov at the August 27 opening of the Muftiate building in Bishkek was Shailoobek Atazov. The lawmaker is known for his calls to block TikTok, along with other controversial proposals.
The Culture Ministry issued a directive three days later blocking the popular video-sharing app, ostensibly to protect children, officials said, following what it said was a series of requests from NGOs, which were not named.
In some ways, this story is neither about Matraimov -- a reputed kingmaker in Kyrgyz politics who was convicted of large-scale embezzlement in 2021 but managed to avoid real jail time -- nor Atazov, one of his most visible supporters.
But in other ways it is, since it is Kyrgyzstan’s self-serving political elite that stands to gain the most from officials’ efforts to control an information space that has historically been the freest in Central Asia -- a deeply authoritarian region overall.
At present, those efforts currently seem to know no boundaries.
Only this year, Azattyk appeared to survive a similar government shutdown attempt to the one now facing Kloop.
Additionally, dozens of journalists, activists, and civic leaders have been jailed in the past year after being charged for their apparent opposition to President Sadyr Japarov’s government.
Most of them have spent more time behind bars than Matraimov, who has brought legal action against Azattyk and Kloop in the past.
Mahinur Niyazova, editor of an independent news website called 24.kg, channeled the famous poem First They Came by World War II era Pastor Martin Niemoeller in an ironic summation of Kyrgyzstan’s grim freedom-of -speech trajectory.
“First they came for Azattyk, and I did not speak out, because I do not work for Azattyk. Then they came for Kloop, and I did not speak out. Now they have come for TikTok,” Niyazova wrote on Facebook.
'All Harm And No Good'
According to the liquidation application filed with a Bishkek court by the Prosecutor-General’s Office this month, the state’s pretext for wanting to shut down Kloop is a discrepancy in the registration of the parent organization, Kloop Media.
The office noted that the organization’s founding documents do not mention “distribution of information” as a mission, and that Kloop is not registered as a media organization.
Other passages in the text make it clear that any attempt to reregister on Kloop’s part would be unsuccessful.
Citing expertise sourced by the State Committee of National Security (UKMK), prosecutors concluded that Kloop’s coverage is “aimed at sharp criticism of the current government's policies…[and] discrediting representatives of state and municipal bodies.”
A psychological survey of the website’s output had moreover found “hidden manipulations of public opinion” intended to encourage opposition to the government, the Prosecutor-General’s Office said in the filing.
It added that reading Kloop could make citizens vulnerable to everything from “spiritual depression” to “aggressive criminal behavior” and “sexual anomalies [and] chemical and nonchemical forms of addiction.”
That more or less matches the sentiment of Japarov’s comments on Kloop on the same day about the website that confirmed the closure threat.
"The work of outlets such as Kloop brings all harm and no good to the Kyrgyz people,” Japarov said in an interview with government mouthpiece Kabar.kg.
Japarov furthermore accused Kloop and other media outlets of frightening away investors from the country while “praising those who plundered the state” in the past.
“They paid you from the state budget -- from the taxpayers’ pockets -- and that’s why you praised them. We cannot give you the people's money. Their money needs to be put toward their own good!” he said.
That certainly didn’t sound like a description of Kloop, which has covered all Kyrgyz governments with a critical eye since it was founded in 2006 as a media school with a mission to grow a new generation of journalists.
By 2010, Kloop was one of several independent media outlets facing threats for its coverage of the corrupt and authoritarian regime of President Kurmanbek Bakiev, where Japarov headed a department that was supposed to be fighting graft.
Bakiev was overthrown in a revolution later that year, but Kyrgyzstan’s next elected president, Almazbek Atambaev, was also no Kloop fan. He likened reading one column published on the website to “stepping on a turd.”
And when a 2017 Kloop investigation suggested that the presidential election had been marred by the use of administrative resources in favor of Atambaev’s handpicked successor, Atambaev called it a “provocation” and compared Kloop to “bedbugs on the body of Kyrgyzstan.”
TikTok And You Don't Stop
The Prosecutor-General Office’s request to the court refers to the fact that authorities were investigating Kloop as early as 2021, but a more recent development may have moved things forward.
Japarov’s comments about Kloop for Kabar were a response to a mini-investigation the website published on August 22 on the founding of a Barca football academy in Jalal-Abad -- the southern region from which the chief of the UKMK and Japarov’s de facto co-ruler, Kamchibek Tashiev, hail.
The investigation found evidence that relatives and in-laws of Tashiev and Japarov were the main local business partners for the storied Spanish soccer club, which has dozens of academies in countries across the world.
The pair came to power in 2020 after Sooronbai Jeenbekov became the third Kyrgyz president to resign over political unrest in the space of three decades.
Japarov pledged during that turbulent period that he would pursue a stronger, centralized government, punish Matraimov -- known locally as “Raim Million” for his huge wealth and corrupting influence on successive administrations -- and end the practice of targeting political opponents and journalists.
Of those promises, he only really kept the first one.
'And Now They Have Come For TikTok'
While the bid to shutter Kloop seems by many to be a fairly cut-and-dried case of political repression, already triggering several statements of condemnation from international rights watchdogs, the TikTok ban has given rise to multiple theories.
Officially, the Culture Ministry has complained that TikTok “engages users in a virtual realm of brief clips, and subsequent to viewing these clips, teenagers attempt to replicate certain actions depicted in [them], some of which endanger their lives.”
But Atazov, the lawmaker, complained that TikTok contravened Kyrgyzstan’s “national ideology” when he called to block the China-based service in 2023.
Another lawmaker that backed the proposal was Nadira Narmatova, who said that TikTok encouraged “meaninglessness” among young people.
Both parliamentarians have in the past lobbied a Russian-style foreign agents law that would tighten control over nonprofits that receive foreign funding -- such as Kloop -- if passed.
And both of them spoke out against Azattyk recently opening an office in the southern city of Osh.
But Borubek Kudayarov, an editor at the independent website Kaktus Media, argues that the government will be aware that political dissent has been steadily growing on TikTok.
And in comparison to Facebook and Instagram, where well-oiled, pro-government “troll armies” regularly wade into the social conversation, officials are relatively unprepared for such a development on TikTok, Kudayarov noted in a recent social media post.
One person that the block on TikTok leaves in a tight spot is Culture Minister Altynbek Maksutov, who signed off on the directive. As Kaktus Media observed, Maksutov’s daughter is a relatively popular TikToker in Kyrgyzstan, with over 112,000 followers on the platform.
Maksutov has even made some cameos in her videos. But that initiative is unlikely to have come from him.
Instead, activists point to Tashiev’s UKMK, an independence-era successor to the Soviet KGB, as an ever-expanding weapon against freedom of speech.
“This organ is everywhere in our country now, and it influences absolutely everything,” said Gulshair Abdirasulova, a Kyrgyz civil rights activist who was speaking at a conference on Central Asia in neighboring Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty, last week.
“Correspondingly, its powers are growing. Supervisory powers, investigative powers, even judicial powers -- it has them all,” said Abdirasulova, who heads the Kylym Shamy Center for the Protection of Human Rights.
