20 years later, Kyrgyz people are still waiting for police reform
President Zaparov has raised the issue again. As in Soviet times, the police remain a 'punitive' force. Money from international organisations is only spent on anti-riot activities. The officers are at the service of the potentate of the day. The first objective is to increase street patrols.
Moscow (AsiaNews) - For over 20 years police reform has been on the agenda n Kyrgyzstan. It was initiated with the aim of forming police bodies that the population can trust. The issue has been raised again these days by President Zaparov as part of the basic aims of the fight against corruption in the country.
Already in 2002, the government had declared police reform indispensable, after militiamen opened fire against a crowd of demonstrators in the town of Aksy on March 17; the victims were defending a deputy under arrest. The authorities had involved international organisations, from the OSCE to the UN, which had provided material and technical aid to the Kyrgyz police for an effective fight against crime and ensuring security at all levels. However, humanitarian and civil activists denounce the lack of concrete results in this twenty-year period, while the Ministry of the Interior denounces a chronic lack of adequate funding.
The Aksy massacre ended with six dead and many injured, but it seems that the lesson was not enough. Then-President Askar Akaev had invited many international experts to change the way the militia, which was only used for strong-arm tactics and repression, works, but activist Aziza Abdirasulova says the methods have not changed, and the police remain a political weapon that stands between the people and the ruling caste: "There have been many other occasions of bloodshed, and the ruling fractions have always succeeded each other through the use of force, even in October 2020, when it seemed that the police had become a little more civilised; civil society must keep this issue in teh spotlight."
The lack of means, according to activists, prevents the continuous provision of adequate training programmes for new police officers, and the habit of politicians to use the police to defend their own partisan interests remains chronic. Reforms have often been limited to name and facade changes, at best a few training expeditions to Georgia or Turkey.
As Aziza puts it, 'we have remained at the conceptions of Soviet times, when the police was only a punitive organ, despite the millions of dollars donated by international donors; at least 20 million have been poured in from the OSCE alone, with which they bought the blinding grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets that they fire at demonstrations'.
The chairman of the Interior Ministry's Social Committee, Yalkun Daudov, repeats that much more funding is needed to achieve real results: 'In Georgia, for example, billions of dollars have been invested in police reform; it takes very substantial funds, it is not a light job, and it is no use continuing to kick policemen by accusing them of every social problem, while their possibilities are very limited'. As he explained, in Biskek each neighbourhood policeman answers to 5-6 thousand people, and due to the limited resources the shortage of personnel is chronic and deep. The international sponsors themselves are so far unable to give full evaluations of the reform attempts.
The head of the press office of the Kyrgyz Interior Minister, Tilek Otorov, tries to be a little more optimistic: 'Lately we have been training the tourist police corps and the digitalisation of the investigation offices is continuing, we have many more mobile patrols and the necessary technical and material basis is slowly being completed; we have given the officers on the streets uniforms equipped with video cameras, and we have reformed the forces dedicated to the fight against organised crime'.
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05/11/2021 13:13
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