BISHKEK -- This time last year, six women activists were among more than two dozen people arrested and jailed in a crackdown on dissent that marked a turning point for the rule of Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov.
They spent between three and eight months behind bars before being released into house arrest, as they await verdicts in a closed trial over what Japarov has insisted was a plot to overthrow the government.
The raids in October 2022 were the largest targeting government opponents since the eve of the 2010 revolution that unseated Kyrgyzstan’s second president -- Kurmanbek Bakiev -- one of three presidents overthrown in a turbulent three decades of independence.
But even Bakiev did not go as far in cracking down on women activists as the current regime led by Japarov and his de facto co-ruler, the national security chief Kamchybek Tashiev.
Earlier this month, authorities shrugged off a fresh outcry after detaining and imprisoning two residents of southern Kyrgyzstan -- a 70-year-old woman and a 44-year-old single mother -- on serious anti-constitutional charges.
Leila Nazgul Seiitbek, chairwoman of the Vienna-based, Central Asia-focused Freedom For Eurasia nonprofit, argues that this trend is likely to continue given what she called the ruling pair’s determination to crush all forms of activism, which she argues “often has a female face” in Kyrgyzstan.
“In their own political struggles in the past, when they were in opposition, Japarov and Tashiev often relied on female activists,” Seiitbek told RFE/RL. “They know very well that their activism can be very effective in terms of criticizing the authorities in the public space and organizing peaceful protests. Therefore, they consider them a real threat to their power.”
A Water Reservoir And A Watershed Moment
Arrests with apparent political motivations are a well-established tradition in Kyrgyzstan, where crackdowns on the opposition -- and no shortage of corruption – have fueled political instability.
Yet for all that, Kyrgyzstan has retained a reputation as the only Central Asian country where political pluralism and civil society still exist.
The current administration has indicated that it views this fact as a hindrance rather than an achievement, with last year’s crackdown serving as a clear demonstration of the new limits for political opposition.
The 27 arrests came as the government pushed to get a historic border deal agreed with Uzbekistan over the line with minimum fuss.
But news that the neighboring country would increase its control over the shared Kempir-Abad water reservoir inside southern Kyrgyzstan made the deal a political hot potato, spurring a string of protests.
In Bishkek, activists and opposition politicians established a Committee To Protect Kempir-Abad.
Not long after, members of the nascent committee who met in an Italian restaurant in Bishkek found themselves behind bars and formally accused of coup-plotting.
“What fool would talk about a coup d'etat in a restaurant, in a public place?” asked Klara Sooronkulova, a former constitutional court judge and NGO leader, in an interview with RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service.
Sooronkulova was one of several women jailed after that meeting and only released with bail-like conditions in April of this year.
Rita Karasartova, a career rights defender and onetime presidential candidate, was kept behind bars even longer -- until the end of June.
Speaking to RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service ahead of the anniversary of the Kempir-Abad arrests, Karasartova said she drew strength from the courage of her next-door neighbor in confinement, Asiya Sasykbaeva, who was 71 at the time she was imprisoned with the others.
A longtime activist and former lawmaker, Sasykbaeva spent time in jail making salads for the other prisoners and teaching them Russian. She even helped a 24-year-old woman who had been wrongly sentenced walk free from jail.
“I thought, how can I complain about my health when [Sasykbaeva] is holding up so well?” Karasartova said.
Karasartova added that her eight-month stint has given her strength to face whatever punishment might come her way whenever the secretive coup-plot trial reaches its conclusion.
“We used to have concerns about what it would be like to be arrested,” Karasartova said.
“Now, I wouldn’t say we are brave, but we have stopped being afraid of prison,” the activist said, vowing not to “shut [her] mouth.”
'Number Of Victims Will Increase' If Anti-NGO Law Passed
In some ways, the arrests of the two women in southern Kyrgyzstan this month appear linked to the conflict over the Kempir-Abad water reservoir.
The younger woman, single mother Chynygul Sherkulova, is still in detention.
But it was the arrest of pensioner Saliya Tashtanova, finally released on October 17 after more than a week behind bars, that shocked so many people.
“In the history of Kyrgyzstan, there has never been such cases -- the arrest of elderly women,” Dinara Oshurakhunova, a longtime civil society leader based in Bishkek, told RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service.
Both Sherkulova and Tashtanova face charges of calling for the violent overthrow of the government.
Tashtanova’s accusation is rooted in a social media post that she addressed to Tashiev which railed against injustice and the increasing cost of living. But the pensioner is also understood to have participated in one of the original rallies against the transfer of land surrounding Kempir-Abad.
And she published the post not long after the arrest of lawmaker Adakhan Madumarov, the head of the Butun Kyrgyzstan opposition party, on treason charges in September.
Although Madumarov’s case is linked to his activities as a state official more than a decade ago, pressure on the politician only began in earnest after he joined the ill-fated Committee to Protect Kempir-Abad last year.
He is also arguably the country’s most popular opposition politician remaining, after others -- having been detained on various pretexts -- withdrew from politics in the months after Japarov and Tashiev came to power following unrest in 2020.
Sherkulova, for her part, is a registered member and coordinator of the Butun Kyrgyzstan party in Jalal-Abad Province.
Her lawyer, Toktosun Zhorobekov, told RFE/RL that his client is accused of spreading rumors about a piece of land being handed over to Tajikistan in border demarcation talks with that country -- rumors that Tashiev’s State Committee for National Security (UKMK) saw fit to refute in a statement published earlier this month.
“I’ve read the charge sheet. There is nothing in it,” Zhorobekov said. “She was simply accused [by someone] and they ordered her arrest.”
Leila Nazgul Seiitbek of the Freedom For Eurasia nonprofit told RFE/RL that her group is currently monitoring around 70 cases of what the group deems political pressure on individuals in Kyrgyzstan, at least 20 of which involve women.
Moreover, “victims are likely to increase” if Kyrgyzstan’s parliament passes a law -- now being considered -- that would dramatically tighten restrictions on foreign-funded NGOs, Seiitbek said.
“And it is likely that among those victims there will again be many women, because in the NGO sector the overwhelming majority of leaders are women,” Seiitbek predicted.
