tunnels—a major investment that usually requires help from foreign donors. It is difficult and expensive to transport goods, deliver the mail, or provide medical services; in winter, a trip to the town market or the hospital may be impossible. At higher elevations, the first snows come in October; some settlements are cut off from November to May.
The mountains are as much a cultural and political as a physical barrier. The major concentrations of population are in two large valleys—the Chuy in the north, with the capital Bishkek, and the Fergana in the south, with Osh and Djalalabad, the second and third largest cities. About half the country’s population of 5.3 million live in the south. The Ala Too and Fergana ranges separate the valleys, splitting the country and its major urban centers into two distinct regions. In Kyrgyz society, where identity and loyalty are still defined by family, clan, and village, the government in Bishkek can seem very distant. The north is more industrialized and secular, oriented to Kyrgyzstan’s larger and more prosperous Central Asian neighbor, Kazakhstan, and to Russia and the West. The south is more agricultural, conservative, and Islamic, looking to Uzbekistan and further west to Iran. Some northerners fear separatism, Islamic fundamentalism, and the influence of Uzbekistan in the south; some southerners believe the government in Bishkek exploits their region, while shortchanging it on tax revenue and social services. Polls show that most people in Kyrgyzstan consider the differences between the north and south to be the major challenge to national unity.
MAP 2.1 Kyrgyzstan and the Fergana Valley (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)
Landing in Osh
It’s a one-hour flight from Bishkek to Osh over a rugged landscape of rocky, treeless mountain slopes, with fast-running rivers, patches of green pasture, and the occasional settlement. Even in summer, there’s snow on the mountain peaks. On my first flight in early December 1995, snow covered most of the valleys. From the window of the Soviet-era, twin-prop Yak-40, I felt as if I could almost step out onto a summit. The pilot flew low to avoid the cloud cover, trusting his view from the cockpit more than his navigation instruments. Flying into the wind, the plane shook and rattled but held its course. My traveling companion, Kuban Tabaldiev, assured me we would be safe. He said he had taken this flight many times. The plane might be old, but the pilots were well trained. They had experience flying in bad weather across all kinds of terrain, taking off and landing at small airports throughout Central Asia and Siberia.
Kuban was the media specialist for the United States Information Service (USIS), the agency which in the 1990s administered US-funded educational and cultural programs. In 1995, USIS partnered with the UNESCO regional office to provide training and resources for journalists in Kyrgyzstan. A media center was planned at the National Library in Bishkek. My assignment was to establish a center in Osh for Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Russian-language journalists in the south.
USIS and UNESCO staff assured me that they had successfully negotiated space for the center at the oblast (provincial) library. My job was to meet with local journalists and media owners to assess training needs, hire a manager, compile a list of equipment, and write a report. The tasks were enumerated in the usual bureaucratic language. On the ground in Osh, it didn’t work out quite as smoothly.
Kuban and I checked into the Hotel Intourist (post-independence, it was renamed the Hotel Osh, but no one seemed to use the new name) for three nights until I found an apartment for the three weeks I was to spend in the city. Like all Soviet-era hotels, the Intourist was centrally located, but that was about its only competitive advantage. When we arrived, the lobby was dark, and the elevators weren’t working; the clerk said that the electricity would come on at 5:30 p.m. It did, but the elevators still didn’t work, and there was no heat or hot water that night. The first edition of the Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia, published a few months later, warned travelers to stay away from the hotel restaurant with its “ear-splitting music and no customers beyond a few pinstriped thugs.”4 Fortunately, when dinnertime arrived, it was closed. We went out to buy bread, cheese, and fruit, ordered tea and extra blankets from the cheerful dezhurnaya (the floor lady who was a fixture in all Soviet-era hotels), and made it an early night. After 10:00 p.m., the second-largest city in Kyrgyzstan was dark and quiet. The only nightlife was the occasional car on the main drag, Kurmanjan Dakta, a few barking dogs, and some Russians down the hallway complaining about the economy over a bottle of vodka.
Ethnic Tension on the Silk Road
At least from the fifth century BCE, Osh has been a crossroads city, a trading center attracting people of many races, religions, and cultures. It lies in the east of the largest and richest agricultural region in Central Asia, the Fergana Valley, where the Ak Burra River, flowing out of the Pamir Alay, emerges from its gorge and flows into the once-mighty Syr Darya, on its way to the Aral Sea. Osh was on a branch of the Silk Road that ran east along the Fergana Valley, crossing the Pamir Alay to Kashgar in China. From as early as the eighth century, Osh was known as a center for silk production and for its huge bazaar. According to archaeological data, the city with its citadel and mosque was surrounded by a fortified wall with three gates. The Mongols razed the city in the thirteenth century, but because of its strategic location Osh soon revived. By the sixteenth century, it was a religious and trading center with mosques and madrassas, markets and wealthy merchant homes. As the tsar’s armies advanced through Central Asia, Osh was annexed in 1876. In the Soviet era, it was the administrative center of an oblast (province) in the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), and its demographics began to change. Like other trading cities in the Fergana Valley, most of its population was ethnically Uzbek. From the 1960s, as the Soviet Union began building textile and other industrial plants in the south, authorities encouraged ethnic Kyrgyz to move from the countryside to take factory jobs. The growth in the Kyrgyz population contributed to social tension with the Uzbeks. As long the Soviet authorities maintained tight control over the region, tensions remained largely dormant. When the empire began falling apart, they exploded.
By the late 1980s, economic disparities between the Uzbek and Kyrgyz populations were becoming sharper. The Uzbeks, traditionally traders and arable farmers, benefited from the market conditions of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. The Kyrgyz, most of whom were animal herders, suffered as the collective farms were broken up and they lost their jobs and housing. Uzbeks feared for their future in an independent Kyrgyzstan where ethnic Kyrgyz would dominate politics; although Uzbeks accounted for over a quarter of the population of southern Kyrgyzstan in 1990 (and about half the population of Osh), they held only 4 percent of official posts. In the spring of 1990, an Uzbek nationalist group petitioned the oblast government for greater representation and freedom for Uzbek-language schools, publications, and culture. Meanwhile, a Kyrgyz nationalist group called for the redistribution of land from an Uzbek collective farm. The authorities decided to reallocate most of the land to Kyrgyz farmers with little compensation to the Uzbeks.
Clashes between gangs of Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, many of them young and some intoxicated, began on June 4, 1990, in the town of Uzgen, and soon spread to Osh, thirty-five miles away. The local militsiya (police) stepped in, sometimes with excessive force; some policemen supported their own ethnic group by taking part in the riots. In the countryside, Kyrgyz herders on horseback terrorized Uzbek farmers and attacked chaikhanas, the traditional Uzbek teahouses. Under orders from Gorbachev, army units moved in to Osh and Uzgen, and closed the border with the Uzbek SSR to stop Uzbeks joining the conflict. Official estimates from the three days of fighting put the death toll at more than 300, although unofficial estimates claim it was closer to 1,000. In 1991, the government of newly independent Kyrgyzstan held trials for 48 accused, most of them ethnic Kyrgyz, on charges of murder, rape, arson, destruction of property, and other crimes; 46 were convicted and sentenced.
Despite their symbolism, the trials did not mark a new phase in ethnic relations in the south. Under President Askar Akayev, ethnic Kyrgyz dominated both the national government in Bishkek and the regional and local administrations in the south, including the police and the
