On 24 August a video from the Ala-Archa gorge south of Bishkek showed a nameplate being changed on a rock 4,050 metres up. The peak had been called Pioneer. Eduard Kubatov, who runs Kyrgyzstan's tourism agency, said to the camera: “Peak SCO, 4,050 metres, in honour of the 25th anniversary of this organisation.” The president's decree caught up with the plate a week later, and in the decree, as Time.kg carried it, the mountain has no past: “an unnamed peak of 4,050 metres” in the Ala-Archa park “received the name Peak of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation”, in connection with the anniversary and the forthcoming meeting of heads of state. The decree has no Pioneer in it. A blank of 4,050 metres received a name.
A small thing, and the whole week in miniature.
Count the guests. Before the summit the president's press secretary, Askat Alagozov, was quoted expecting 21 heads of state. Economist.kg counted 18 countries. Vedomosti counted 17 heads and the UN secretary-general. On the day RIA Novosti counted 17 states and 6 organisations. The SCO's own website does not count at all: its report of the day records “the 26th meeting of the Council of Heads of State and the SCO Plus meeting”, held in Kyrgyzstan. By Thursday morning no list of who actually sat in the hall had surfaced in this desk's reads of the presidency's channels or the organisation's site. Turkmenistan may or may not have been there: Interfax placed it in the SCO Plus format without naming anyone, the roster The Times of Central Asia printed did not list it, Kaktus.media's list of participants did not either, and Ashgabat's state wires, as far as this desk could read them, named no envoy.
The paper counts no better. Interfax said “more than 20 documents” at dawn. By lunch Economist.kg had 28, 24 signed by heads of state and 4 by governments. EADaily had 29. RT listed a declaration on nuclear and radiation safety that Economist.kg's list does not carry. The organisation's documents page, if you open it, shows nothing newer than April and, further down, the Samarkand declaration of 2022; the Bishkek papers sit behind a button that did not load for this desk.
The precision runs out exactly where a number would bind someone.
Only the minutes agree. Erdogan and Putin were given 30 and sat for about 90, most of them with the press outside, Kommersant reported. It is the week's steadiest number, and it measures how long two men talked with the door shut.
The rhyme is in Astana, the same week. On 28 August Kazakhstan's new Kurultai elected its speaker by secret ballot and did not publish the count. On 31 August it approved a prime minister and a vice-president by a majority, and the majority has no number: Tengrinews, Informburo, 24.kz, Vlast and Kursiv all reported the outcome and none of them a figure. The election that produced the chamber was counted to 2 decimal places, 71.17% of the votes into 75.86% of the seats. The precision runs out exactly where a number would bind someone.
Counting has a history here. In the 1980s the cotton harvests of Uzbekistan were reported to Moscow to the tonne, and a good share of the tonnes had never been picked; the men who signed the reports were the men who ran the republic. The mechanism has not changed in 40 years, only the reader. Then the number was written for the Central Committee. Now it is written for the communique, the investor deck and the foreign wire, and it inflates in the same direction: guests up, documents up, votes unstated.
The Bishkek Declaration, which the Kremlin published in full, sets up a Universal Centre for countering challenges and threats to the security of the member states, with a centre for information security and a centre against transnational organised crime inside it, and it declares that “Central Asia is the core of the SCO”. A universal centre against challenges can count whatever it likes, since a challenge is what the centre says it is. It is the right institution for a week like this one.
Somewhere in the Ala-Archa gorge there is now a plate that says Peak SCO and a decree that calls the mountain nameless. Both are official. Pick the one you need. The region does.
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.