[Music playing]
Anastasiia: Hello listeners, welcome to our bonus episode of Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World. My name is Anastasiia Lapatina.
Jakub: And I'm Jakub Parusinski.
Anastasiia: For this week's bonus episode, we're giving you the extended version of last week's interview with Bektour Iskender.
Jakub: You'll remember that Bektour is a journalist and educator, who co-founded Kloop, an independent news publication in Kyrgyzstan. Kloop, is best known for its large-scale investigations on corruption, as well as its Journalism School, which teaches political and investigative journalism to young people.
Anastasiia: We discussed topics like Russian colonialism,racism, and even how Bektour has ended up speaking fluent Ukrainian.
Jakub: Yeah. What was the most interesting thing that came up?
Anastasiia: Even though I was coming into the interview knowing very little about Kyrgyzstan history, just the basics, I knew that I will understand how he feels and I will understand the history broadly because I'm Ukrainian, and because we both have very similar colonial histories. Both of our territories were occupied by Russia, at some point in time.it was just so sad to hear him talk about the genocide perpetrated by the Red Army and how to this day, there is a debate about whether we can call it a genocide or not.These things have happened decades and decades ago, and you'd think that when something as obviously evil as a genocide happens, we as humanity can come together and really call it what it is. But unfortunately, this is just my youthful naivete and we can't actually do that.But Bektour is lovely, and the story of his media outlet and just Kyrgyz youth in general, is very inspiring. So, I hope our listeners enjoy it.
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Anastasiia: I have so many questions, but first of all, introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do with your journalism and activism, and the civil society work.
Bektour: Hello everyone. My name is Bektour Iskender. I'm a journalist from Kyrgyzstan. I think I'm most famous for being one of the founders of a media organization called Kloop, which is based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan but also, has now an office in Warsaw, Poland.
I think we are most famous for our Journalism School. Throughout the 16 years of our existence, we've brought up a whole new generation of journalists in Kyrgyzstan.Many of them have grown up to be really amazing investigative reporters.
And at some point, Kloop, also started being known for our investigations of corruption and organised crime. And the most famous investigative series that we published was in 2019, when we joined our efforts with Radio Liberty Kyrgyz Service, and also, with OCCRP and then with Bellingcat.
And together we published a series of investigations about corruption at the Kyrgyz custom service. But also, we uncovered like the whole scheme of underground cargo empire that operated from China, and then within Central Asia.
Anastasiia: That's huge.
Bektour: This is, I guess, what we are mostly famous for. But we've done a lot of other things as well. Not only with journalism, like we monitor elections and we actually managed to build like the largest election monitoring mission ever in Kyrgyzstan.
We use technologies, we build technologies that make lives of journalists easier, lives of activists easier.
Anastasiia: And what's the story of Kloop? Why did you found it?
Bektour: Well, I was lucky, when I was 16, I joined an organisation, a very cool organisation that unfortunately does not exist anymore. It was called Children's Media Center, also based in Bishkek.
It was a place where teenagers, like I was, we would produce our own TV program and we would also publish our own magazine.
Anastasiia: That's so cool.
Bektour: Yeah. And what was really great about that organisation, that it was run by a woman.Her name is Galina Gaparova. She used to be like a theatre playwright, and she just wanted to create the space for teenagers where they can express themselves.
And she didn't actually herself, intervene into what we produced. We had two grownup employees who would help us with editing sometimes, but most of the things were actually produced by ourselves. That's where I got really interested in journalism, and we had amazing trainers. That's where I got most of my knowledge.
Actually, on the premises of Children's Media Center, Kloop was born. And it was me and my very close friend, Rinat. We together at some point, came up with an idea that, we should actually start something online.
The thing is, there is a really interesting historical and political context behind it. And here we get, for the first time ever, we come to these interesting parallels with Ukraine.
Now, in 2004, when Ukraine had the Orange Revolution, Rinat and I, we were one of the few young people in Kyrgyzstan who were very closely following what actually is going on in Ukraine.
We were very much inspired by the processes. We were very much inspired by the will of the civil society to actually restore like the fair results of elections and so on.We also hated Russia.
And I remember it was in November, 2004, if I'm not mistaken, and we gathered friends and we actually explained to our friends like what exactly is going on inUkraine, as we thought.And I remember we were like thinking, “Oh, probably it's not going to happen in Kyrgyzstan.” Something like that. “Like I'm not sure that we are so active. Our civil society is probably not that brave, like we're not going to do something like that.”
It’s so funny that half a year later, we had a very similar revolution, which was also caused by elections, which was also sparked by people being very angry at how authorities actually organised the elections, and how authorities actually made sure that through a lot of violations, people who were very close allies of the president would be elected into the parliament.
And then one interesting thing happened during that revolution, online sources suddenly became quite important, at least in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan,because most of the media outlets, they were blocked. Or if we're talking about newspapers, they were actually not allowed to print their newspapers if they were considered opposition, let's say newspapers. TV channels were not broadcasting anything that was worth watching.
And then suddenly, just a random blog of one young woman from Bishkek became like the main source of information for everybody. She was so brave. She was not even a journalist.
I think she used to be a coder or something, and she was just curious about the protests that started in Bishkek, and she just went with a camera and she just started photographing everything that was going on.
Anastasiia: That's amazing.
Bektour: And then every evening she would return home and she would start publishing basically her impressions of what has happened with photographs, with a lot of photographs. And then people flooded in like onto this live journal. It was still LiveJournal. Oh, my goodness, I even forgot that it existed.
Anastasiia: I was like four-years-old or something probably.
Bektour: Well, yeah, that was a long time ago.
Anastasiia: Yeah.
Bektour: And then this woman, she actually started on the day of the revolution itself when we had clashes with the police, when the president was forced to flee the country. She started something that had never been done before. She started like live text updates of what's going on.
Anastasiia: Yeah. It's a very typical thing to happen during the revolutions. The same happened during Maidan.
Bektour: Absolutely. It's really interesting how revolutions, they become a reason for a very sudden progress in communications. My input into that revolution sort of, was that I became a part of the team of volunteers who helped her to gather information because suddenly, her blog turned into like a small media outlet.
And suddenly, there was a team working on it. Suddenly, there was a team kind of gathering information from different parts of the country. It was very inspiring. It is kind of like a legendary story within Kyrgyzstan.
Anastasiia: Oh, wow.
Bektour: It is considered to be the story that gave birth to the power of online media inKyrgyzstan. And that inspired us to open Kloop. Because we thought, “Okay, this so-called classic media, they failed catastrophically.”
And suddenly, it was us, this young power kind of (we were very young back then. I was like 20 or something) that we should be the ones who would lead this revolution of how people get information.
That was the foundation of our idea behind founding Kloop. And we founded it in 2007, it’s still alive and kicking despite all the pressure from authorities that we've been experiencing from time to time.
Anastasiia: That's a fascinating story. It is very inspiring that just one person with a phone or a computer and a will to do a good thing can actually spark so many changes.
[Music playing]
You mentioned that you hate Russia, which I'm not surprised by. But when I was preparing for this interview and I was just reading up on Kyrgyzstan, the two basic Google searches that would come up, anytime I would Google anything about the country was, “Is Kyrgyzstan a part of Russia?” And, “Is Kyrgyzstan controlled by Russia?”
So, what is the context and sort of like the basic history of the relationship between the two countries, and why do you hate Russia?
Bektour: Actually, the fact that these results are coming like as top results when you search for Kyrgyzstan, is one of the reasons I really hate the Russian colonialism.
But anyway, some actually elements of the story would be very familiar to many Ukrainians. We were occupied by Russia in the 19th century — well, colonised. It's interesting that these terms were not even used for such a long time because–
Anastasiia: I think it's occupied both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
Bektour: Exactly. But I also love the fact that people started using the term “colonisation” as well, very frequently during last several years. Because again, Russian empire, Soviet Union and Russia today, it's the only kind of colonial empire that still has not admitted that it was the one.
They keep on promoting this narrative that, “Oh, like you were savage people and we kind of developed you, we built you factories” and whatever.
Anastasiia: It's the typical colonial narrative though.
Bektour: Exactly. And then they killed so many people in Kyrgyzstan, and then they made everything to make Kyrgyz language not an important kind of language anymore.They Russified our capital and so on.
But coming back to the 19th century and to the early 20th century, it's interesting again to see how some events in the history repeat themselves, sort of in a way. So, what Russia did when Russia occupied Central Asia, it was a long process. It started in 1850s I guess, and then it lasted for the next 20 years or so. Because it's a huge territory.
They actually made use of Kyrgyz and Kazakh people being divided into many, many tribes. And because we didn't have like a statehood in a European understanding of what statehood is.
So, like Kyrgyz people were a union of many tribes, dozens of tribes who were not limiting themselves to any political borders or something because we were nomads, we didn't need borders.
Anastasiia: You're right.
Bektour: We would just hang out on one mountain and then–
Anastasiia: Go to another one.
Bektour: Exactly. That's how things were. And Kazakhs the same. They just preferred steppe instead of mountains, which I'm not judging. I think mountains are better.
Anastasiia: Is this some sort of like–
Bektour: Local rivalry?
Anastasiia: Yeah. Is this some sort of local rivalry?
Bektour: Yes, it exists. We love Kazakhs, of course. We love each other. Like we are like the closest nations to each other you can imagine. Kazakh and Kyrgyz language are as similar as, I don't know, Ukrainian and Belarusians, which basically means that we can understand each other.
But we have this local rivalry from time to time. We think that Kazakhs are rich and not free, and they think that we are poor and well, sort of free. Anyway okay, I will not use this podcast to spread stereotypes about us. We are cool and amazing.
Anastasiia: This is amazing analytical stuff.
Bektour: Anyway, yeah. So yeah, they started with Kazakhstan and Kazakhstan it's so huge.Oh, my God. It took them a long time to finally capture it. They occupy the whole central Asia.
And then in 1916, there was this famous central Asian revolt against Russia. It was caused by Russia trying to mobilise indigenous people of Central Asia to fight in the First World War.
Anastasiia: Well, nothing changes in their tactics.
Bektour: Exactly. And we were like, “What do you want us to do? To fight Austria-Hungary?Like we don't care about Austria-Hungary.” Really, like I'm not sure we knew where is that actually. “Why do we have to fight them, Austrians? Like we don't care aboutAustrians.”
So basically, people in Central Asia started a revolt against the Russian Empire. It was the first like serious, like huge revolt against the Russian Empire, which ended up with Russian soldiers basically coming and killing us. And again, nothing new.
Anastasiia: No.
Jakub: Unfortunately, it's still not known how many exactly people were murdered byRussian soldiers back then, because there is very, very small amount of data available. Estimates suggest that something between 100,000 and 250,000 people were killed. It's terrifying just to think.
Anastasiia: It is.
Bektour: And then those who were not killed, they were forced to flee to China. And the scale of that — we call it genocide in Kyrgyzstan.
Of course, the term “genocide” is being manipulated so much by so many different nations. So, legally, it has never been acknowledged as a genocide by anybody. But that's how we call it in Kyrgyzstan.
Anastasiia: Did the Kyrgyz authorities, did they acknowledge that it's designated as a genocide?
Bektour: No, no. This is an interesting question, by the way. I think because of ties with Russia, at the same time, they acknowledged that something horrible happened. We have the Kyrgyz word for that, Urkun. Basically, it means like exodus.
And the scale of it was so huge that it's hard to find a family in Kyrgyzstan (indigenous, Central Asian ethnicity family, let's say) that does not have at least one person from the extended family who was not affected by that.
We were granted the status of republic eventually. If it could revive all the people who were killed, I would probably be thankful for that. But of course, it didn't.
Anastasiia: What was the Soviet time like?
Bektour: There were many terrible things that the Soviet Union did during that time. This whole campaign of [Ukaranian 00:14:36] is basically taking people's property and killing the ones who are not ready not to give it away.
With Kyrgyz people, they did not just take away the property. They actually forced people to change their lifestyle.
So, as I said, we had been nomads and we were comfortable with that. We had this really interesting relationship within Central Asia, between different ethnic groups, which worked really well.
So, like Uzbeks and Tajiks, they were mostly settled people. They lived in towns. And they had a lot of agriculture.
Kyrgyz and Kazakhs were nomads, and we would mostly deal with animals. And we would then exchange. Every season, Kyrgyz and Kazakhs would come down from high altitude, mountain valleys and exchange meat for vegetables or fruits or crops or whatever.
And then when Bolsheviks came to power, they forced Kyrgyz and Kazakh people to stop being nomads. Because they were like, “Oh, you have so much livestock. Like why the hell do you have it? You should give it to the Soviet state.”
Anastasiia: Yeah, of course.
Bektour: You will now live in a fucking cold house, whatever.
Anastasiia: Yeah. And we will call that civilised.
Bektour: Yeah, exactly. That's how they sort of civilised us. I once wrote a thread on Twitter where I basically explained why in the Russian language you should say Kyrgyzstan instead of Kirghizia. Because Kirghizia is a colonial name of our country, which is basically just Russians not being able to pronounce Kyrgyzstan.
So, I wrote the whole thread about it. I received a lot of support in replies, but then it became sort of viral. And then many Russian trolls came in and started replying.
Anastasiia: As they do.
Bektour: The problem is many of them were not actually like trolls in terms of like bots. They were actual people, who actually think this way. And suddenly, I started getting a lot of racist replies.
Anastasiia: That's terrible.
Bektour: Usually, revolving around the topic of migrant workers. Because there are many, many Kyrgyz migrant workers in Russia, unfortunately. And people started replying me with words, something like, “Thank you. Can I get two shower masks please?” Or something like, “Excuse us, we didn't receive like food delivery.”
Anastasiia: What? That is disgusting.
Bektour: Yeah. And then one person wrote something like, “You should be thankful because we taught you how to wipe your asses.” I replied to him like, “Excuse me, we washed our asses before. Most of us were Muslims, we care about hygiene.”
Anastasiia: So, this kind of colonial outlook is continuing to this day, huh?
Bektour: Exactly. It does. Absolutely. Unfortunately, this colonialism, it just never disappeared anywhere.
I recently was analyzing, like what was happening in 1991, for example, in ‘92, the period which is praised by so many Russian liberals, so-called liberals. I recently watched a video from Crimea that was dated like 1992 or something. And then in Russia, people would react to that, that Crimea should return to Russia, whatever.
Anastasiia: That was in ‘92.
Bektour: Yes, exactly. They started this narrative about Crimea. Even back then, even in movies like Brat Dva for God's sake, they also have the Crimea joke there.
Anastasiia: Yeah.
Bektour: Transnistria story, it was in ‘92 or something. Tajikistan Civil War, which started in 92, current president Emomali Rahmon, he was supported by Russia in that war, Abkhazia and Chechnya, of course.
Anastasiia: Of course.
Bektour: There were so many signs that the colonialism has not gone anywhere. I don't know. Somehow the whole world just was not giving enough attention to that.
Anastasiia: Yeah. No one cared. And I think to this day, few people care about the history of Russian colonialism in Central Asia, and about the history of all of the very diverse, interesting, and rich with history places, which have become a part of the Russian Federation, the Republics.
People see Russia as this monolithic big thing, and they completely brush off the fact that it has so much history and so much different culture. And unfortunately, the majority of this history is the history of oppression.
Bektour: Absolutely.
Anastasiia: So, I have one final question. How come you speak Ukrainian?
Bektour: I was fascinated by Ukraine since I was a kid. I'm not joking. And then I started travelling to Ukraine a lot from 2010. Actually, my first city was Donetsk.
Anastasiia: That's insane.
Bektour: I was an election observer in Donetsk, in 2010 when Yanukovych was elected.
Anastasiia: Really?
Bektour: So, that was my introduction to Ukraine.
Anastasiia: That's incredible.
Bektour: Isn't it great, actually? And it just happened somehow that I've been witnessing the most important historical moments in Ukraine.
I witnessed Euromaidan, I witnessed the beginning of the war in 2014. I was in Donetsk in May 14 again. And then I travelled to the frontline, three more times actually.
Anastasiia: That's incredible.
Bektour: Anyway, I spent a lot of time in Lviv, where I was quite often a guest lecturer at the Ukrainian Catholic University. They have an amazing Journalism School.
And then, we actually even did a joined project together, Kloop and UCU, we organised like videography workshops for young people from Central Asia, Caucasus and Ukraine.
It was my attempt to strengthen the post-colonial solidarity (that's how I call it) between civil societies and activists of our countries, because I believe that we really should cooperate, we have so many common threats and everything.
And then I would come Lviv and what language should I use in Lviv when I talk to students? For the first like three or four years or so, I would give all my public talks, in Lviv in Russian. How strange is that? Isn't it?
Anastasiia: That is a bit strange now.
Bektour: But not so many students actually spoke English well enough to understand me. So, we needed to find some language that everybody would kind of understand. So, Russian was unfortunately the only choice available for many occasions.
Anastasiia: That's the shared colonial past.
Bektour: Exactly. But then on the other hand, it totally ruined the Russian narrative that I'm going to be like (I don't know) killed in Lviv immediately for speaking Russian. Of course, it never happened.
Anastasiia: Of course, that's not true.
Bektour: Nobody ever told me anything for it. But then I was really curious about, can I actually learn Ukrainian? And then at some point, I started talking just a little bit. It was very slow and awkward, but it was getting better and better. And today, I'm totally capable of even giving public talks in Ukrainian.
Anastasiia: That's amazing.
Bektour: It’s not perfect, of course, but I try my best, like I really enjoy speaking Ukrainian, actually.
Anastasiia: Well then, since you can speak Ukrainian, I'll say thank you in Ukrainian:
[Speaking Ukrainian]
Thank you so much for coming. It was really interesting to listen to you.
Bektour: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed talking to you.
[Music playing]
Jakub: Thank you for listening to Power Lines. Next week, we'll be speaking to the writer and investigative journalist Oliver Bullough, about the rise and impact of oligarchies.
Anastasiia: Power Lines is a partnership between the Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott, and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.