The complaint Ikramidin Aitkulov sent to Kyrgyzstan’s prosecutor general on Monday has one sentence worth the whole file. His client, it says, learned what new accusation he should have been defending himself against at the same moment he learned he had been found guilty of it.
His client is Kamchybek Tashiev, until February the head of the State Committee for National Security and the second man in the state. The old accusation was article 326 of the Criminal Code: preparation for a violent seizure of power, 10 to 15 years with confiscation. The new one, produced by the Bishkek City Court on 10 September in the act of deciding the appeal, is article 195: obstruction of the exercise of electoral rights, up to 5 years under its heaviest part. Four years for all eight defendants, 2 years of probation supervision, no confiscation, by Kloop’s reading of the ruling. The defence is going to the Supreme Court, and now to the prosecutor as well, about the judges.
What the eight did, on the record of two courts, was sign a letter. On 9 February, 75 people asked the president to call an early presidential election. They were accused of preparing a violent seizure of power; the first-instance court in July agreed; the appeal court found something else in the same pages, an obstruction of the right to vote.
Hold them side by side. A letter asking for an election is, in the first reading, an attempt to take power by force; in the second, an attack on elections themselves. Between the two readings the state changed its mind about what the crime was and kept the sentence. The complaint is procedural. That is the small part. What interests me is that the second article is the mirror image of the letter.
The article travels with the building.
On 24 September the Jogorku Kenesh will call the presidential election. The date is Wednesday 27 January 2027, the law’s default; the Central Election Commission has priced a candidacy at 1 million som, paid into the budget and returned to no one, the winner included. The letter asked for this. Now the calendar is granting it, eleven months on and with a fee, and the people who asked will follow it as convicted obstructers of the electoral process.
The rhyme is in the same building. On the night of 5 to 6 October 2020 a crowd freed Sadyr Japarov, then serving a sentence in the correctional colony at Moldovanovka for the 2013 hostage-taking of a regional governor, and brought him to Bishkek’s central square; the chant was his name and the office he now holds. Ten days later the Supreme Court left in force a 2013 acquittal of Japarov, Tashiev and four others on the charge of a violent seizure of power, for the day in October 2012 when the crowd they led tried to get over the White House fence in a protest over Kumtor. The case had been reopened on newly discovered circumstances. The hostage conviction went back for retrial on the day the crowd opened the gate.
So the article about seizing power has been in both men’s files. In 2012 it was the charge they faced for the fence; in 2020 it dissolved when the fence was theirs; in 2026 it took Tashiev from the second office in the state to a probation register, and then dissolved again on appeal into a smaller article about elections. The article travels with the building.
Armenia has been running the same experiment with a church. Its quarrel with the Catholicos has been conducted at the volume of a state crisis; the article that reached a court against Garegin II is 507 part 2 of the 2021 code: in January he defrocked a bishop, Gevorg Saroyan, against a court’s interim order. Three Yerevan judges declined the case; the Court of Cassation sent it to Armavir on 7 September. A story told for months in the language of the state’s survival arrives in court as a matter of disobeying one ruling.
The pattern is common enough to have a shape: announce the large crime, prove the small one, keep the sentence. Kyrgyzstan’s version has a twist the Armenian one lacks. Its crime is the request.
Aitkulov’s complaint will go where complaints about judges go. The Supreme Court will read the same letter a third time. What it finds there is, on the evidence of the first two readings, a question of which article suits the season, and the season will be an election campaign, with agitation from 22 December and the vote on 27 January.
The letter’s authors wanted a date. They have one.
Peter Lidovsky writes on Eurasia and the politics of the spaces between empires. He contributes a weekly column to Central Asia Wire. The views expressed are his own.