Good news from Batken

 

By Chris Schuepp*

 

When people in the Kyrgyz Republic hear the name of the 11,000-citizen town of Batken, they associate it with islamic fundamentalist, civil war and instability. Since the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) first tried to cross Kyrgyz territory in 1999, the Batken region has a reputation of instability and violence. The armed rebels came back in 2000 and seem to have plunged the whole Ferghana Valley into turmoil and fear.

Now, for the first time in years, good news reaches the rest of the region from Batken. Good news, that is exactly what the staff of the newly opened radio station Radio Salaam in Batken want to do. “We want to fill the information vacuum, we want to inform, educate and entertain the young generation here” says Maksuda Aitieva, the editor-in-chief of the station. Radio Salaam was set up by UNICEF, the NGO Foundation for Tolerance International (FTI) and Internews Kyrgyz Republic. The idea to start radio broadcasting in Batken came from FTI who have a field office in the small Kyrgyz town in the far southwest of the mountainous country and anticipated a need for professional information and entertainment. FTI-Director Raya Kadyrova approached the local UNICEF representative with the idea and found out that UNICEF was ready to fund media projects in the Kyrgyz Republic. “We were in the right place at the right time – and we had the right ideas” says Kadyrova at the opening presentation in Batken on April 12^th, 2001. It still took months and months of proposal writing and fine-tuning between FTI and UNICEF to combine the interests of the two NGOs to a sound project narrative. Internews Kyrgyz Republic was identified as the ideal partner to facilitate technical needs and to do training seminars for the journalists.

It is not easy to start projects in the Batken regions nowadays as only a handful of international organizations are willing to invest in the shaky border region. Civil society building projects are few, the latest US Embassy’s travel warning for the Kyrgyz Republic “cautions U.S. citizens to avoid all travel to areas of Kygryzstan south and west of the provincial capital of Osh” and flight connections from Bishkek operate on a once-a-week basis unless they are cancelled on short notice, which is frequently the case. Batken is thus very remote and it takes a 3 ½ hour ride over bumpy roads from Osh in a 4W-Drive jeep or 6 hours by bus to reach the area surrounded by Tajikistan in the South and Uzbekistan in the North. The administrative city of Batken has a mere population of 11,000, 99 percent of which are ethnic Kyrgyz. Men wear the traditional Kyrgyz felt hats called Kalpak which distinguishes them from the Uzbek tupeteika you see while passing the enclave of Sokh half an hour before you get to the dusty streets of Batken. Arriving in Batken the outsider cannot imagine a rebel army overrunning this seemingly peaceful place. The locals are friendly and open and answer questions about the threat coming from the Tajik mountains with clear determination: “We are not afraid of them. But we don’t want them here either. We want to live in peace with everybody. I am 65 years old but if I have to, I will become a sniper and fight them off to protect our city”, says a local man while pointing to the mountain range to the South.

It’s a sunny day in Batken, which is nothing special. There are 320 days of sunshine in the region every year. The climate is perfect for agriculture and the fruit on the market is abundant and is regarded the best in the whole country. Mamat Aibalaev, the governor of Batken, mentions this while hosting the official guest at the opening presentation for Radio Salaam. Aibalaev has ambitious plans for his home-region. “In five to ten years we will have the best hotels in the Kyrgyz Republic. We will have tourists from all over the world coming to see our mountains, drink our wine and enjoy the sunshine and the hospitality of the people. We also have natural gas and oil here and are negotiating contracts with two Russian companies at the moment to exploit these resources. The German company Thyssen might be interested in building a bottle-factory here because we have 400 tons of grapes that we cannot use for making wine every year just because we do not have enough bottles. If we succeed in attracting foreign investors, we will be able to cut the prices for airline tickets to Bishkek by half and we will once again be linked with the rest of the country.”

          Asked about the IMU and the incursions that happened in 1999 and 2000 and the threat of another one coming up soon, Aibalaev replies: “We have 10,000 contracted soldiers in the region, we have helicopters, the best equipment possibly available in this part of the world. We face approximately 2-3,000 rebels coming from Tajikistan. Let me tell you, we are prepared, we will shoot them on the border just like birds.”

          And he might be right, too. Last year, the Kyrgyz government spent the equivalent of thirty million US dollars, about thirteen percent of the country's entire budget for the military in Batken. This year's defense budget has already been raised by more than two million dollars in anticipation of new fighting. These measures are supposed to bring stability, but they have also brought a new, formerly unknown problem to the region. With 10,000 soldiers based in the mountains close to the city, prostitution and reckless drinking are on the rise in the administrative center. “It has become a real problem here lately”, says Bruno de Cordier, UNDP’s southern coordinator who has lived in Batken for six months now. “The soldiers are young, they have been away from home for a long time and they drink a lot, get violent and do not want to live without contact with females. But of course, it’s hard for them to get in touch with the local girls, so they turn to prostitutes. This is also the case in some of the areas North of Batken, where truck drivers take advantage of the bad economic situation of the local population while detouring the Uzbek enclave of Sokh on the way to Osh. And there is not very much we can do about it.”

          Maybe Radio Salaam offers an answer to this problem, too. The radio station targets young people between the ages of 12-25. Although the radio staff only numbers seven young people from Batken, the number of volunteers has skyrocketed in the first two months of the station’s existence to more than 40. Young local girls present flowers to the official guests at the presentation while others wearing Radio Salaam T-shirts ride their donated bicycles across town to raise public awareness for the station broadcasting 18 hours every day in Russian and Kyrgyz on 105 FM. “I am very grateful for this station. Since they went on the air, I have seen more smiling faces than in the last two years together, there is this team-spirit that has to be seen to be believed”, explains Arstan Khojaev, the mayor of Batken. “The radio station is not only producing news locally, they also send a signal out to the rest of the country saying: We are alive, we are part of the Kyrgyz Republic, and we want to hear and be heard like anybody else, too. Radio Salaam really means good news for us.”

 

* Chris Schuepp is Country Director for Internews Network in the Kyrgyz Republic