Kyrgyz President’s Secret Meeting with Predecessors Causes Controversy

Tuesday, 7 March, 2023

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CABAR

The Central Asian Bureau for Analytical Reporting is a project of IWPR

President Sadyr Japarov’s decision to call a secret meeting of all Kyrgyzstan’s former leaders has left citizens puzzled: they only learned about the mystery Dubai gathering from the head of state’s social media profiles.

“[My] cherished dream has become true for the sake of the republic… I could not stop thinking about holding a meeting between ex-presidents once elected by the people and who left their office tragically in order to unite people, and it would be the greatest gift,” Japarov wrote on his Facebook profile on February 18. The date of the meeting was not announced, but must have taken place in the previous four days as former president Almazbek Atambaev, who also attended, was only released from prison on February 14.

Several of the six presidents that Kyrgyzstan has had since independence in 1991 were ousted following street protests and power struggles. Japarov said that the former leaders had admitted their flaws, shared their grievances and forgiven each other at a meeting he said was “therapeutic” and aimed at “strengthening the unity and consolidation of the Kyrgyz”.

He called for all not to consider “our five-ten-year personal interests, but think about the eternal interests of Kyrgyzstan.”

“Japarov’s style in his presidency is based on his belief that he has some unique favourable moment, some Messiah’s function to resolve the country’s development issue, of course the way he sees it,” Medet Tyulegenov, professor of political sciences at Bishkek-based American University of Central Asia (AUCA), told IWPR. He said that Japarov had created the image of a person who had come to build anew and rectify the failures of others.

Demonstrating an exceptional leadership style was probably part of these goals, the analyst continued.

“He showed that everything that was before him was a backward world [as if to say] ‘a new epoch begins with me,’” Tyulegenov continued. “It is a declaration that we will have something new with him. In this sense, it was a sort of a publicity stunt.”

Japarov invited his predecessors individually, according to those who publicly commented on the meeting.

Independent Kyrgyzstan’s first president Askar Akaev was reportedly startled to see the others. The 78-year-old leader was overthrown in March 2005 after 15 years in power, in the so-called Tulip Revolution. In December 2022, several financial criminal cases against him were dismissed for lack of evidence. Akaev praised Japarov’s initiative, saying that it “demonstrated his political wisdom and human generosity”.

Atambayev was the only regularly-elected Kyrgyz president to lawfully leave office after completing his six-year term in November 2017. Apart from this distinction, the 66-year-old’s political career was far from smooth: in 2019 he was sentenced to 11 years in prison on corruption charges and attended Japarov’s get together after being released and on his way to Spain.

He said he was “also for peace and unity of the republic”, but he could not help hitting out at his long-time enemy, Kurmanbek Bakiev, stating that “the establishment of peace and unity in the republic and the return of Bakievs to Kyrgyzstan are two different things”. He also said that he left the meeting without saying goodbye to anyone.

Bakiev served as Kyrgyzstan’s second president between August 2005 and April 2010, when large opposition protests forced him to flee the country. He had been living in Minsk, received Belarusian citizenship and was sentenced in absentia to 30 years in jail: in July 2021, he was put on the wanted list for corruption in the development of the Kumtor gold deposit.

Japarov’s predecessor, Sooronbai Zheenbekov, lauded the initiative saying that the incumbent president “urged us to leave division of society into supporters of various politicians behind. We certainly approved of this noble initiative”.

Like Bakiyev, Roza Otunbayeva, who served as an interim president between April 2010 and December 2011, did not comment on the reunion. The only woman to serve as a head of state in Central Asia, the 72-year-old now leads the UN mission in Afghanistan.

The improbable reunion was attended also by Kamchybek Tashiyev, Kyrgyzstan’s head of security services who is widely considered to run the country together with Japarov.

DRAMATIC DECISIONS

Political analysts remain sceptical over the president’s real intentions.

“I think it was a hasty and premature action and it will hardly bring the outcomes that Japarov declared, like consolidation of people, forgiveness of all presidents, if it was at all discussed then,” Emil Dzhuraev, a political analyst at the OSCE Academy, told IWPR. “If it was not discussed and if the ex and the incumbent presidents just gathered to forgive each other, then people do not care about who humiliated who and why. So they should not have announced the meeting so widely, and they should have done it in a narrower circle.”

Tyulegenov noted that Japarov had been known to take sometimes hasty or dramatic decisions at times of pressure, as he did with announcing constitutional amendments or nationalising the Kumtor gold mine, Central Asia’s largest.

His predecessors, including Akaev, Bakiev and Atambaev, positioned themselves as pioneers, the analyst pointed out, adding, “[Japarov] however has a certain carte blanche; unlike the others, he did not come from the top league of political actors, from the top of the opposition.

 “The man who was the prisoner has become the actual head of state in a couple of weeks, literally. It created his opinion that he was favoured by destiny and he should seize the moment to build the country’s future the way he sees it.”

Arzuu Sheranova, doctoral candidate in political studies at Budapest’s Corvinus University, argued that the meeting was not important in terms of consolidation of power, since Japarov could easily achieve this using the new onstitution or the mass arrests of activists following the border agreement with Uzbekistan.

“The meeting indeed played in his favour, but it is unclear why he needed it right then. With a strong power in his hands, he did not need ‘games’ like this. There may be external factors,” she told IWPR.

This may have included Japarov trying to shore up his popularity by presenting himself as a generous leader amid widespread public discontent over social and economic instability, Sheranova continued. Amid rising inflation and worsening of living conditions, the authorities are increasing repressive measures and activism has plummeted to historic lows.

Analysts said it was hard to assess whether the get-together led to any kind of real reconciliation since Japarov was still controlling the narrative.

“I don’t think some attendees reconciled and I don’t think Japarov, who has some common sense, thinks there was some reconciliation,” Tyulegenov noted. “It was a sort of information and propaganda campaign intended not for its participants, but for the audience in the country.”