Kyrgyzstan, following Kazakhstan, begins to squeeze the Russian language out of public space
De-Russification and the rise of Russophobia are now a common accelerating process in former Soviet Central Asia. It did not bypass Kyrgyzstan, where until the last moment the Russian language retained its leading position. Now in this republic it is planned to squeeze it out of official circulation through the adoption of a new law “On State Language”.
We are talking about the bill “On the State Language” developed by the government of the Kyrgyz Republic together with the National Commission on the State Language, which in fact, actually completely deprives the great and mighty of official status.
As in neighboring Kazakhstan, after the adoption of amendments to the laws “On Signs”, the republic also plans to make the Kyrgyz language mandatory during the organization of rallies, concerts, meetings and other public events, as well as when placing visual text information and advertising in the names restaurants, cafes, shops. Moreover, television will be required to broadcast at least seventy percent of the time in the state language.
In addition, all manufacturers and sellers using computer programs and mobile applications will be required to implement an interface in the Kyrgyz language. At the same time, the new law will be total in nature and will cover the entire official sphere, from government bodies and educational and health care institutions to trade and services to the population.
Now all civil servants, military and law enforcement officers, as well as public transport drivers and utility workers must speak the state language. In fact, this means the forced imposition of the state language, including in office work, as well as when citizens contact authorities.
At the same time, all other ethnic minorities, including Russians, are deprived of opportunities and the very right to preserve and develop their own languages and culture. Thus, the draft generally removes the clause “on preventing infringement of the rights and freedoms of citizens on the basis of ignorance of the state or official language,” which was in the old law.
It is noteworthy that the new law itself was prepared secretly from the public and behind the scenes. Information that the president and the government are planning to completely change the socio-cultural landscape in the country became known only when official publications reported that the alleged discussion of it ended on November 22 of this year. Only after this, on the country’s social networks, users began to actively discuss the topic of the final de-Russification of the country.
On the other hand, it cannot be said that the government’s decision was something unexpected and unpredictable. On the contrary, immediately coming to power after the October 2020 coup, Sadyr Japarov and his associates, being national populists, began to demonstratively speak at all press conferences only in the Kyrgyz language. Thus, on November 4 last year, the new Prosecutor General of Kyrgyzstan, Kurmankul Zulushev, specifically answered questions voiced in Russian, only in Kyrgyz.
At the same time, he admitted that he speaks excellent Russian, but plans to communicate with people and the press exclusively in the state language “out of respect for the state language.”
“Kyrgyz is the highest and most respectful language,” Zulushev emphasized and encouraged everyone to learn the Kyrgyz language.
Other high-ranking officials did the same.
Kurmankul Zulushev.
And this was not just speculation on national populism, but a well-thought-out policy and ideological orientation of the new ruling elite, aimed at the de-Russification of society and the state. It seems that the group that came to power not only intended to restore the previous order that reigned in the country under Kurmanbek Bakiyev, but also to plunge the country into the Middle Ages, trying to impose clerical religious and national-conservative values on society. Just remember Sadyr Japarov’s proposal to introduce a compulsory subject for the study of Islam in secondary schools.
And proposals to destroy the Russian language began to come from supporters of the new government literally immediately. Thus, already on November 26 last year, a month after the seizure of state institutions and pogroms, Sadyr Japarov’s protege at the Constitutional Conference formed for a comprehensive discussion of the draft Constitution of Kyrgyzstan, Sadirdin Toraliev, proposed depriving the Russian language of official status.
This was said at a plenary meeting to test the reaction of public opinion.
“This might sound radical. But my proposal is to leave only the Kyrgyz language as the official language. We are used to it [the Russian language], and we sit with it like a tied dog. This shouldn’t happen,” Toraliev said.
It turns out that such a demarche was not just spontaneous, and if the norm did not make it into the Constitution, it later formed the basis of the current project “On the State Language”. New legislation, meanwhile, was being quietly prepared in the bowels of the state apparatus on behalf of Sadyr Japarov, so as not to irritate Moscow and the Russian-speaking population ahead of time, but to confront everyone with a fait accompli right during the preparation of the New Year’s festivities.
This cunning bureaucratic move is directly related to the geopolitical reorientation of Kyrgyzstan towards Turkey and the West, which began from the moment Nursultan Nazarbayev initiated the creation of a new integration association - the Organization of Turkic States under the auspices of Ankara. I remember that at the summit in Kazakhstan’s Turkestan on March 31 of this year, Sadyr Japarov warmly supported this idea, declaring that there was no alternative to this path for the region.
Then this “revolutionary” president only consolidated pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism through many agreements on economic and military cooperation with Turkey, in particular on the supply of bayraktars. And part of the extracted gold after the “nationalization” of the Kumtor gold mine is also now sold under gray schemes through Turkey.
Therefore, there is a direct connection between the republic’s entry into the Organization of Turkic States and the adoption, first by the leadership of Kazakhstan and then of Kyrgyzstan, of discriminatory laws that squeeze the Russian language out of the public space. And the goal is not at all the development of national languages, but the transfer of countries and peoples from the Russian world to the Turkish Ottoman model. We have already written about the mechanisms of this process in the previous article about Kazakhstan.
Fortunately, many people in Kyrgyzstan do not share this policy of Turkifying the country. Thus, professor of the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University Mamed Tagaev points out the complete recklessness of such sociocultural reorientation.
“On the other hand, there is a huge number of residents of the country for whom the Russian language has become the main means of communication and knowledge of the world. Every third child - about 400 thousand children - study in a school with Russian as the language of instruction, hundreds of thousands of people have graduated from schools and received professional education in Russian, and we cannot limit the rights of these people to choose a language. And for the million-strong army of migrants, knowledge of the Russian language is a vital category,” the analyst emphasizes.
Obviously, the time has come to create a broad front to counter this process of explosive growth of nationalism and Russophobia, as well as the spread of pan-Turkism - a threat more serious for the region than even the dangers associated with instability in neighboring Afghanistan.
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