My Trip to the City Formerly Known As Frunze

Now that the Parliament of the Kyrgyz Republic has approved a new coalition government, I figure it might be time to finally get something to print about my election observation there last October.  Of course, there may be no real cause for hurry – they formed a government in November and that lasted only a few weeks.  But what the heck – waiting for the final outcome to shake out has really had little to do with my delay in writing anyhow.

My real problem is that when I’ve written about past elections – in Bosnia and East Timor – I’d stayed in those countries long enough to feel that I really knew something about them, plus what was going on in those places was considered worldwide news at the time.  However, Kyrgyzstan, as the Kyrgyz Republic is more commonly known, remains obscure, its politics fairly impenetrable to the outsider.  What I can really describe with any authority is mostly limited to the experience of being an electoral observer.  Still, it seems somehow disrespectful not to at least first say something of the specifics of the election I observed.

Before being selected for the mission, I could not even have told you the name of Kyrgyzstan’s capital city – Bishkek.  My first glimmer of recognition, really, came when I saw the airport code letters on my baggage claim – FRU.  Ah, this was the city that used to be called Frunze!  Although I don’t know much about central Asia, I do know something about the history of the Soviet Union, so this meant something to me.

Mikhail Frunze was a military hero of the Russian Revolution who later succeeded Trotsky as leader of the entire Soviet military apparatus.  Some even considered him a possible successor to Lenin.  Frunze had a medical problem involving ulcers. He apparently did not consider the situation all that serious, but Comrade Stalin – always greatly concerned over the well being of possible successors to Lenin – did.  In 1925, he convinced Frunze to undergo an operation for his condition, an operation he did not survive.  Frunze was given a hero’s funeral in Moscow; people named their sons after him; the authorities named a military academy in his honor; the city of his birth also took his name.  And Stalin had one less rival.  (Strangely, the four doctors involved in the operation are said to have all died in 1934.)

THE SWITZERLAND OF CENTRAL ASIA

All of that, of course, is part of the history of another era.  Today, the former Soviet republic has a population of about 5.2 million – 69% Kyrgyz, a Turkic people; 15% Uzbeks, mostly living in the south; and 9% Russians, mostly in the north.  The country is sometimes called “the Switzerland of Central Asia.”  Its similarities with that wealthy European nation are entirely topographic – 80% of the country lies in the Tina Shan mountainous region, and not economic – it was the second poorest of Soviet republics and is now the second poorest country in Central Asia.  It is rich in mineral resources, but has negligible petroleum and natural gas reserves and must import these products.  Some believe as much as 40% of its GDP derives from the up to 800,000 Kyrgyz migrants currently working in Russia.

Kurmanbek Bakiyev

Kyrgyzstan enjoys the unusual distinction of hosting both Russian and American military airbases on its soil.  The Russian government is there because it aims to dominate the area that used to be the Soviet Union; the U.S. is there because it aims to dominate the world.  The American Manas Air Base opened in 2001 to support U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.  In February 2009, then-President Kurmanbek Bakiyev announced plans to close it, a decision supported by a 78–1 vote in Parliament.  The decision was reversed in June, however, and the base remains under a new contract with annual rent increased from $17.4 million to $60 million.

This past April, Bakiyev, the country’s second president since independence, was ousted  in an uprising that took about 85 lives. Two months later, 90% of voters approved a referendum creating a new 120-member parliament.  We – the 200 short term and 40 long term observers from 23 member nations of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – would be observing the first elections to that body.

This was my eighth OSCE mission, but the first where I can recall the existence of an emergency evacuation plan being so prominently discussed in our briefings. Group visas for Kazakhstan were secured for those of us deployed in the north and for Tajikstan for the observers in the south.  The impetus for the heightened security concerns was less the April events than the June clashes between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz.  Centered in Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second largest city located in the southern part of the country, that conflict left more than 200 dead, perhaps 2,000 injured, 400,000 people internally displaced and about 110,000 seeking refuge in Uzbekistan (almost all since returned.)  The evacuation plans weren’t needed, though, as no serious incidents occurred on what turned out to be a quiet election day.  So, although I was far enough north to see Kazakhstan for a good part of that day, we never had the occasion to go there.

With 29 parties in the running, none received more than 16% of the vote; five parties exceeded the threshold required for representation in the new parliament.  In my own, obviously limited, election day experience, voting seemed rather normal.  And if the counting we observed at day’s end seemed somewhat raggedy, it did not appear to be with intent.  Recommendations were made for improvements, as is the norm, but as one mission coordinator said, “I have observed many elections in Central Asia over the years, but this is the first election where I could not predict the outcome.”

As was the case with the earlier short-lived one, the new government will be led by the Social Democratic Party which finished second overall.  Sometimes described as a party of entrepreneurs, it counts the country’s acting president Roza Otunbayeva among its members.  The coalition also includes the Ata Zhurt, or Fatherland Party, the largest party in parliament, which supports past president Bakiyev; and Respublika, a new party founded and led by Omurbek Babanov, said to be one of the richest people in Kyrgyzstan. Parties in Parliament but not in the coalition are Ar-Namys (Dignity), considered conservative and pro-Russian party, and Ata-Meken (Motherland) which is considered liberal and pro-Western. All of the above descriptions of the government parties should be taken with a grain of salt and I do not pretend to have any real sense of the dynamics involved in the creation of the coalition. From here on I will confine myself to describing what the observation mission was like.

Like most OSCE missions, this one began with a centralized training in the capital, after which most observers were deployed elsewhere in the country. Some will always stay put, however, and this time I was one of that group. Although I would not get to see any other part of the country, there was an upside to staying put – I would not be among the group flying on a domestic airplane.  Not that I have anything against such things generally, but Kyrgyzstan appears on a list of countries whose airlines may not operate services of any kind within the European Union, due to their inadequate safety standards, a distinction not generally considered reassuring by the group that did have to fly.

DID YOU HOUSE THEM IN A BROTHEL?

Bischkek

My Bishkek-area assignment also meant that I stayed put in the quite comfortable but more expensive businessman’s hotel where we had trained.  We had been advised to bring sleeping bags, but I wound up not having to deal with any iffy accommodations – and had wireless Internet in my room. My friend Nancy, whom I’ve known since Sarajevo in 1997 and was my housemate there the next summer, was not so fortunate.  She called about 9 PM the night before the election.  Said she needed to vent – she’d been put up in a brothel.

First she’d noted all the cars parked outside. And then there was the fact that her room had only neon lighting – she’d complained to the management that she couldn’t read by it. (She showed us a picture later and, yup, it’d have been pretty hard to study your election manual in her room, I think.) Finally the doors opening and closing through the night got her out of her room and downstairs where she came upon a group of customers mingling with the service providers – a bunch of young naked men eating meat with the prostitutes, as she described it.  Our LTOs (Long Term Observers) had somehow missed this aspect when they were sizing up potential accommodations. Nancy won “Best story of the 2010 Kyrgyzstan mission” hands down, I’d say. And  I couldn’t help but imagine mission review forms containing the question:

Did Long Term Observers house Short Term Observers in a brothel?   Yes __ No __

My encounters with the, uh, night life were much tamer. My only accomplishment of any note was getting to what I understood to be both of Bishkek’s brewery pubs. Our LTOs took care of one of them for me by organizing the local group get together at the Blonder Pub.  (The beer seemed pretty much entry-level brewery pub fare – distinct from the bottled Russian Sibirskoe Koronna back at the hotel, but in itself nothing special.)  The evening’s highlight – which I missed due to having an internal clock sufficiently grounded to deliver me to the event my customary a-little-bit-late, even though thirteen time zones ahead – was being wanded for weapons at the door. The word on this was that it probably was less the likelihood of people actually carrying weapons that accounted for this than the fact that wanding was all the rage in the major clubs in Moscow, so that any place in Bishkek with aspirations of being a serious destination needed to wand.

The Steinbrau brewpub was another matter. First off, they had a beer garden, built by the Volga Germans who settled here after World War II, having been removed from the Volga region during the war. I understand that they pretty much all cleared out of Kyrgyzstan during Perestroika when they were finally able to exercise their right to return to Germany, from their ancestors had come in the days of the Tsars.  But you could still see signs of them in towns with names written in Latin rather than Cyrillic letters, like Luxemburg (named not for the country, but after Rosa, the World War I era German/Polish socialist leader), and places like Steinbrau. No one on the premises looked remotely German the day I was there, but they had clearly left the recipes behind because the place served a very creditable line of German style beers.

There’s a certain summer camp atmosphere to these missions – a bunch of people thrown together for a short time grappling with sorting out the personalities and backgrounds (and accents) that present themselves – that can make them habit forming. You might meet Social Democrats from Berlin, Republicans from Colorado, Left Party members from Sweden, naturalized Russians living in Marin.  The most interesting part for me is trying to root out any potential foreign soul mates who might be there – say, Europeans who consider being socialist a matter of common sense.

When I met Jan from Germany and learned he was active in the Social Democratic Party (SDP), I immediately told him I was an admirer of Oscar Lafontaine and received a mock scowl in reply. Of course, if I had thought about it for a moment beforehand, I’d have no reason to be surprised – LaFontaine, after all,  represents the party’s most prominent defection in decades. Once the SDP chairman and lead candidate, in 1999 he resigned his position as Finance Minister in the SDP-led government and subsequently took up leadership of the upstart Left Party. Jan did concede, though, that Lafontaine does give the best speeches. (I’ll admit that although it hadn’t been my goal, I kind of enjoyed out-lefting a German leftist – I don’t think they expect that from an American, you know.)

In 2005, the parties of the (lower case) left actually won the German election, and yet the Social Democrats dropped from senior party in a coalition with the Green Party to junior partner in a “grand coalition” with the conservative Christian Democrats, their principal opponents.  The problem was that the SDP and Greens wouldn’t consider a coalition with the Left Party, even though it received more votes than the Greens.  They considered its democratic credentials tainted by its partial roots in the Socialist Unity Party that governed the former East German Democratic Republic. And, for its part, the Left Party professed antipathy to a coalition with the “reformist” parties.

Jan explained that, as a member of the left wing of the SDP, he would personally prefer to have the Left Party in a coalition because he thought that making them do what you have to do to actually be in government (as opposed to criticizing it from the outside) would diminish their appeal, along with their vote, as has already happened in Berlin.  But for now, he says, talk of an all-left coalition has subsided since current polls show that a simple red-green (SDP-Green) coalition could defeat Angela Merkel’s government. Well, this was a certainly a discussion not to be had back home.

WHY DO YOU SPEAK SUCH GOOD ENGLISH?

Observers on these missions have to work in English: all briefings are in English and local translators are hired for their ability to speak English. You will hear some interesting accents. A Scandinavian sitting next to me at our local Bishkek-group debriefing asked, “Do you understand the Frenchman?” referring to one of our two LTOs. In my experience, you can expect Scandinavians you meet on these occasions to speak pretty darn good English and this fellow was no exception, but I suppose he still wondered if somehow a native speaker might be able to hear through the accent better than he. But no, while our other LTO from Belarus spoke good international English, the French LTO’s accent was about as difficult as any I’ve run into on one of these missions – among anyone who was said to actually speak English, that is. I suspect he encountered a lot of nodding assent.

Still, he probably went home thinking that at least I understood him better than my Swiss German observing partner Cristoph did, anyhow. At one point on election day Cristoph’s phone rang just as he had started asking a local poll worker the standard list of questions on how the election was going, so he handed it off to me.  It was the French LTO. Well, he and I were having a very difficult time of it, things not made easier by there being some type of music broadcasting out front of the polling station. I told him to hold on while I looked for a better place.  He hung up and called back but it was no better, so he hung up again. Five minutes later my own phone rang and it was he. He explained that he had called my partner but couldn’t understand him so he thought he’d try me. And, in fact, now that we’d practiced a little (and I suppressed my laughter), he and I managed to communicate significantly better than when he had called Cristoph!

That conversation certainly gave me my biggest laugh of the day (second best was observing the drunken wedding guest reduced to crawling across the floor of a restaurant we stopped in), but Cristoph and I generally amused each other through the long observing day and night.  In fact, our foursome – including Ashkat, our ethnic-Kyrgyz translator, and Evgeniy, our ethnic-Russian driver – got on quite well, I thought, through our entire assignment that included pre-election reconnoitering of the assigned area, election day visits to maybe eleven polling places, observing closing and counting at one of them, and then several hours at a regional tallying center. We did not, however, have any kind of post election lunch where people promise to name their children after each other and that sort of thing, which will sometimes occur at these affairs.  No women in our group, you know.

Of course, so far as language goes, not everyone might say that all of us Americans necessarily spoke the best English, either.  After a few evenings’ conversations, Jan (from Germany, as you may recall)  asked, “As an American why do you speak such good English?”  I laughed.  He said, “No, I’m serious,” and motioning toward a woman from Seattle said, “I can’t understand her at all.”

I’ll have you know this was not the first time I have been complimented on my English. I explained that what he heard from me was a conscious effort to speak slowly, clearly, loud and without unnecessarily complicated construction. I suppose I had the advantage over a lot of the Americans in that the first mission I went on was long – nine weeks registering voters in Sarajevo following the Bosnian civil war – so I’d had time to absorb the fact that an effort to speak like that would go a long way. On these short, week or so missions it may just never occur to some of the Americans that they’re frequently being understood only with difficulty – and that there’s something they might do about it.

On one occasion, also in Bosnia, the overall observation group was so large that the U.S. delegation alone filled an entire charter flight (on an airline, by the way, that no one had heard of before, with on-flight films subtitled in Hebrew and Arabic, which prompted much speculation as to the company’s “normal” business.)  With numbers like this, the usual effort to mix the nationalities was dispensed with and observers simply deployed en masse as they arrived. This resulted in a hotel in the town of Bugojno chock full of American observers most of whom had not done this sort of thing before.  This meant there was even less awareness than usual that someone might have difficulty understanding you if you spoke as if you were in a supermarket in New York or Kansas. Our trainer from the Netherlands who, by any reasonable measure, spoke excellent English, found himself periodically flummoxed by a rapid fire paragraph delivered in American. Jan probably would have encountered an entire hotel bar full of people he didn’t understand.

Since I knew the entire country of Kyrgyzstan has only five million people or so, and the capital was, to my reckoning, way out there in the middle of nowhere – 6750 miles from either San Francisco or New York City, 2150 miles from Beijing and 1850 miles from Moscow – I figured it for a population of maybe 50-100,000.  So I was quite surprised when our LTOs said that it was upwards of a million.  Elsewhere I see the figure put at 800,000 and it’s always hard to know whether people are speaking of a city proper or its metropolitan area, but you get the idea.  The place was no doubt quite a bit more sophisticated than I’d figured.

I had the good fortune of seeing the national history museum in the company of an American colleague who was a Russian native.  Naturally she could read all the material about the Russian Revolution and seemed a bit taken aback by my knowledge of and interest in the subject. Someone once said that you could define the entire American left by the point at which they thought the Russian Revolution went bad, but that’s some time ago and I don’t really think I was ever able to satisfactorily explain my interest to her. The museum had a couple of shops with Kyrgyz artifacts, including a large piece of locally made tapestry that greatly interested the very conservative Republican Colorado state legislator in our group (whose his presence at a foreign election not a month before his own apparently stemmed from his representing the fifth most Republican district in the state and perceiving little real challenge.) Unfortunately the tapestry turned out to have the image of V.I. Lenin sewn into it. I suggested he might just have it replaced with Ronald Reagan when he got back home, but he decided against.

Frunze Museum

I made two unsuccessful tries at the art museum – the second time it was closed for a party, but I did make it to the most unusual of the city’s museums: the Frunze Museum opened in 1974 and built over the actual house in which Frunze grew up, with upper floors devoted to photos and clippings of his life and the Revolution. It was as spare a museum as I’ve ever visited. There was not a brochure, postcard, or memento of any kind in sight. Even the admission tickets seemed to be the sort of generic item you’d buy at a discount store to use for a raffle.  I suppose they weren’t beating down the doors to reminisce about Frunze these days.

TAXI TO THE SNOW LEOPARDS?

Of course, you wouldn’t generally travel to Bishkek for the museums.  On the other hand, it did have a feature that I haven’t seen the like of in any other large city: You could get a taxi at your hotel that would take you to a national park that purported to have snow leopards.  Try that in Manhattan.  And, no, the Central Park Zoo doesn’t count – there were no cages here, or anything. Of course we didn’t actually see any snow leopards, but that was probably just as well, and we were definitely farther out there than at Far Rockaway, or even Walden Pond.  I’d probably have seen a lot more national parks if you could take cabs to them – or if they were on subway stops or something.  And, as a bonus, on the way back, we happened onto what I’d call a monument park, for lack of knowing any better way to describe it, dedicated to Manas, the hero of the Kyrgyz national epic poem, done in the most wonderful colors.  The significance of the place was simply beyond the comprehension of us westerners not familiar with the poem – which is said to run 500,000 lines.

You learn a pretty random collection of things about a city or a country in eight days. You’ll probably pick up something about their bars and their money changing: I discovered that they made quite good cognac in the country and that their currency exchange offices refuse to take any currency (or at least any American currency, anyhow) with any kind of stray ink or other mark on it.  I later hear that they will accept it at a discount, though – they’ll offer you, say, $40 for a $50 dollar bill.  And Evgeniy tells us that they’ll then sell it back to you if you trade for dollars – at full value, of course.

Perhaps my favorite part of any mission is that last night in the hotel lobby when the observers are all there drinking away their remaining local currency.  This one was particularly leisurely because most flights to and from Bishkek happen at three or four in the morning in order to fit into flight schedules of the more mainstream parts of the world. The last night is a time when you can turn to chat with the person sitting next to you whom you haven’t previously met, find that he’s a member of the Left Party (another “reformed Communist party,” but in this case one free of the stigma of having run a dictatorship), and have one final conversation like you won’t be able to have back home.

And you might even get one final shot at tourism. My college friend Joe (who’s also been on a number of these missions but never before with me) and I made use of about three and a half available hours in Istanbul to grab visas, take the subway down to the Blue Mosque, look at several famous places that there wasn’t time to enter due to prohibitive lines – even on a drizzly midweek morning – and drink Turkish coffee overlooking the walls of the Topkapi Palace.

The next morning I will be trying to explain to American fifth graders where these places are.