Kyrgyzstan's angry young lash out at foreign students

President Sadyr Japarov and his closest ally, security services boss Kamchybek Tashiyev, are adept at neutralizing political threats. But when it comes to sudden mass violence, they're at a loss.

A pogrom directed at Pakistani nationals in Kyrgyzstan’s capital late Friday night has elicited a telling spectrum of responses from the country’s leadership.

Mortified apologies from some. Stony silence, and even justification, from others.

The former camp is evincing signs of anxiety at the reputational risk posed by perceptions of Kyrgyzstan as a lawless hotbed of xenophobic sentiment.

But the populists that wield ultimate control — and this includes the likes of President Sadyr Japarov, who came to power in October 2020 on the back of similar street unrest — look unprepared to confront their base.

But how exactly did the trouble begin?

According to the Interior Ministry, the trigger incident occurred in the early hours of May 13. 

Two groups of people described by police as “unknown persons of Asian appearance” (young Kyrgyz men, in other words) and “foreign students” got into a brawl outside a restaurant in Bishkek’s Vostok-5 microdistrict. The students fled the scene and holed up at their place of residence.

The group of Kyrgyz men gave chase and barged into the hostel, smashing furniture and stealing money and possessions along the way. It was when they entered the sleeping quarters of the female residents that the foreign students fought back. The beating was apparently bad enough that an ambulance was called.

Four days later, surveillance footage showing the foreign students raining blows on the Kyrgyz men in the yard of their hostel surfaced on social media.

It is not known who shared the footage. 

After dark fell on Friday, a crowd of around 200 people formed around the hostel where the confrontation occurred. The mob demanded that the foreign students be adequately punished. Assurances from the police that a handful of men had been arrested and were being deported did nothing to calm tempers. Some people trying to get inside the building were detained by the police. 

Organisers among the rioters reportedly broadcast live online streams throughout the night, encouraging others to join in. More young men accordingly began to come out onto the streets and fanned out in clusters across the city. An alert was put out for all available police officers to turn up for duty, but it was too late. 

At around 1 a.m., the dormitory of the International University of Kyrgyzstan came under attack. A mob pelted the building with rocks, assaulted students and looted belongings. This appears to have lasted for about an hour.

Throughout the night, groups of young men roamed Bishkek downtown, apparently looking for new targets. The ranks of the police expanded too, but they were notably conciliatory, pleading with the mob to return home instead of confronting it. 

MUK rector Asylbek Aidaraliyev on Monday speculated that the assault on his university’s dormitory was pre-planned.

“At 1 a.m., people were coming to the dorm in cars, people were giving them lifts. Some are saying that vodka was being passed around,” he said. “The amazing thing is that the police just stood there, they didn’t do a thing.”

Among the first official reactions the following morning arrived from the powerful head of the security services, Kamchybek Tashiyev, who mingled his condemnation of unspecified “provocateurs” with a dose of sympathy for the anger of the mobs.

“This [incident] was connected to the influx of labor migrants,” he said.

This was an allusion to the fact that many students from south Asia — specifically Pakistani and Bangladeshi nationals pursuing medical degrees — work on the side as couriers for food delivery services.

This unlawful expat worker scare had been hanging in the air even before the pogrom. Two days before those events, the Interior Ministry announced that 400 foreign students were fired from their jobs as food deliverymen following a police crackdown.

While Tashiyev has equivocated, President Japarov has remained signally quiet on this whole episode. 

It has fallen instead to members of the Cabinet to express dismay and handle the diplomatic fallout.

Deputy Prime Minister Edil Baisalov visited the dormitory of medical students at the International University of Kyrgyzstan to extend an apology on behalf of all Kyrgyz people.

“Since time immemorial, our people have respected guests from afar. We call them ‘musapyr.’ I know the same word exists in Urdu, and this shows how close our people are,” Baisalov said. “Your parents and relatives should know that you are not in danger in Kyrgyzstan, and that the authorities bear full responsibility for your well-being.”

Labor Minister Gulnara Baatirova stuck her neck out even further by suggesting her fellow Kyrgyz citizens were shy of doing hard work — and thereby leaving that space open to foreigners.

“The shortage of labourers is most felt in sewing workshops and in construction. And our citizens often do not work reliably. So after working in sewing factories and getting trained up, they leave and set up their own workshop,” she told state news agency Kabar. “Many do not come to work on time, they disappear for two-three days after receiving their salary, and ask for time off for celebrations and birthdays.”

This is not the first time that Japarov and Tashiyev, the tandem running Kyrgyzstan, have looked at a loss to know how to react to random episodes of turmoil.

As seasoned rabble-rousers from their many years of doing grassroots opposition politics, they are well aware of the danger posed by the unpredictable mob.

Their strategy for holding onto power since they seized it almost four years ago has been to jail anybody even thinking of holding a demo that might escalate into a major protest. In the most notable enactment of this philosophy to date, dozens of activists and politicians were arrested in October 2022 on the spurious grounds that they were planning to use rallies against a contentious border deal with Uzbekistan as cover for toppling the government. 

Prison sentences are dished out with similarly flimsily justification on a routine basis. Earlier this month, a court sentenced writer and political activist Olzhobai Shakir to five years in prison for purportedly inciting civic disobedience and public unrest.

It is organic popular rage that Japarov and Tashiyev are unable to forecast or cope with. 

Last August, a top-level match of kok-boru, a form of polo played with a headless goat, caused a riot in the southern city of Osh amid claims of unfair refereeing from supporters of the losing side. Japarov, who was in attendance, had to be whisked away for safety. 

To make matters worse for the president, the match, which pitted a team from the north against one from the south, had been framed as a representation of national unity.

That ugly incident in Osh exposed the hollowness of official unity rhetoric and the superficiality of the Japarov-Tashiyev tandem’s pretense of having an iron-clad grip over the whole country. The anti-Pakistani pogroms, meanwhile, have laid bare an unfocused, simmering anger, most pronounced among Kyrgyzstan’s underemployed male youths, that looks liable to spill over at any time.