Voices of courage in the eye of the storm: mediators in southern Kyrgyzstan
In the year since interethnic violence shook Kyrgyzstan’s southern part last summer, government authorities, international organizations and civil society have been asking themselves: what can be done to prevent such devastation from happening again? One of the answers can be found by looking back on what happened in the midst of the conflict. Small teams of mediators worked indefatigably before, during and after the violent events to calm people down, dissipate dangerous rumours and defuse tense situations and physically stopping mobs from joining the violence. Sometimes, of course, there was no stopping the rioting, looting and killing. But stories are emerging of many instances in which these courageous men and women were able to prevent worse from happening, an outstanding achievement that is particularly admirable given the passive role of the local police during the violence.
The institution of public diplomacy is not new in Central Asian countries. For centuries, community elders have been reconciling quarrelling neighbours or married couples and resolving disputes over land or water. Several years ago, building on this tradition, the non-governmental organizations IRET, based in Osh, began setting up teams of local mediators in southern Kyrgyzstan communities.
The first mediator team was formed in 2007 in Uzgen, the town that suffered the worst atrocities the last time ethnic fighting ravaged the region just over twenty years ago, when the Soviet Union was disintegrating. The Uzgen town council was looking for a way to address frequent skirmishes between Uzbek and Kyrgyz youth. IRET responded with a project to set up a network of public diplomats, respected, approachable and active men and women of all ages and from all walks of life, who could speak with the conflicting sides to instil calm and understanding. The OSCE Field Office in Osh supported the project by providing an impartial platform and funding for activities which were receiving no public funding at that time. It also advised the local partners how to go about setting up a partnership structure between the local authorities and the members of the local communities.
Last year, as soon as the threat of large interethnic clashes became evident, our city decided we would not let the terror of 1990 happen again.
He and his colleagues negotiated with the various groups passing through on their way to Osh, calling for peace and appealing to reason. They worked with the residents of the town and kept close contact with the neighbouring Kyrgz villages. Eventually, they were able to convince the youth of both ethnic groups not to believe rumours and managed to maintain peace in Uzgen town and Uzgen district.
Defusing tension in Jalal-Abad
In Jalal-Abad province, where tensions were especially high in the weeks preceding the June events, local authorities claim that mediator groups contributed to preventing the conflict from reaching the disastrous scale it did in Osh. These groups were established by IRET in 2009, and also supported by the OSCE.
“Already in April one could feel that something bad was brewing; extreme tension was in the air,” recall Kaldar Azhykulov and Shabdanbek Ermatov, both mediators in the Atabek village area in the Suzak district, to the west of the city of Jalal-Abad. “In May, we mediators of the district’s five villages got together to discuss the situation and developed an action plan. We established a close communication network, exchanging office and mobile phone numbers and addresses.” These efforts were funded from the OSCE Centre in Bishkek’s Contingency Fund approved by the Permanent Council in late April 2010.
"That helped a lot to prevent panic,” says Erkin Sultanov, a mediator from Tashbulak village. “For example, when rumours started to spread in our village that horsemen were coming down from the mountains, I called my colleague mediator. He informed me that there were no horsemen, and I was able to calm people down.
On another occasion, a few thousand Kyrgyz village youth, incited by rumours, were bursting to descend upon Suzak village, the district centre populated predominantly by ethnic Uzbeks. If the armed crowd had spilled onto the Suzak streets, a disaster would have ensued. Mediators were able to talk the infuriated youth out of their plan.
“The fact that in our province we managed to prevent major bloodshed gave us the opportunity to proceed more quickly to the stage of reconciliation,” says Akmal Mamadaliev, a young mediator from Jalal-Abad city. During the dark days of violence, Akmal himself saved several women and children whose lives were in danger and whose casualties could have sparked more violence. Later, he managed to convince local Uzbeks from Suzak village to remove logjams they had erected on the streets as barriers against potential attackers.
Braving danger in Osh
In Osh city, at the epicentre of the June inter-ethnic clashes, mediator groups within the official Public Prevention Centres operated under extremely difficult conditions. Just going outside onto the streets full of uncontrolled crowds and criminal groups from all over the region, was dangerous. Nevertheless, we approached people and tried to dissuade them from taking rash actions, recounts Rasima Osmonbekova from the Osh district Manas-Ata.
A few days after the fighting subsided, we gathered respected people and went in two buses to the neighbouring residential district, telling people that there was nothing worse than hostility and that we all had to live on this land.
Extending the network
The lesson of the June events was a bitter one for the mediators in southern Kyrgyzstan, in spite of the successes recounted here. Their efforts were impressive but too localized to have a wider effect. To really prevent the violence from gaining momentum and be able to stem it once it had, they would have had to work on a much larger scale. This is a lesson the OSCE Osh Field Office has been quick to grasp. Together with IRET and AIMIRA, a Jalal-Abad based NGO; it has launched an ambitious project to build a mediator network that will encompass all of Jala-Abad and Osh provinces, as well as Osh city.
In building this network, the Office is also drawing on a second important lesson learned from the June events. If state law enforcement bodies had been able to apply the conciliatory approach of mediators, they would have had a much better chance of earning the trust of the population and to resolutely act. Reciprocally, if mediators had been assured of government support, they could have worked much more effectively in the midst of danger. That is why the OSCE is working together with the Osh City Mayor’s Office and the Osh and Jalal-Abad Provincial Administrations to create a private-public mediator network that will work very closely with the security services to prevent large-scale conflicts from breaking out. According to Ross Brown, the Political Officer in the Osh Field Office overseeing project implementation, “the innovation of this project is not only that each team will have an ethnic, gender and age balance in addition to having citizens both from the government and civil society on each team, but also that the network as a whole will be sustainable and fully integrated into the overall Kyrgyz government security system.”