Kyrgyzstan, west of China and south of Kazakhstan, is about the size of South Dakota and has a population of only 6.1 million. But what is unfolding there offers a worrisome example of democracy’s global retreat and the smothering of press freedom.
The latest victim is an online news and investigative outlet, Kloop, founded in 2007 by two friends, Rinat Tuhvatshin and Bektur Iskender. In contrast to the ideological journalism of the Soviet era, they set out to create a balanced and independent publication. They trained young people ages 14 and older in journalism basics, hoping to spawn a new generation of reporters. “People started seeing that we were doing something very, very different from what was actually available at the time,” Mr. Tuhvatshin told us. Kloop became one of the most daring and penetrating news organizations in the region.
Last August, Kloop revealed that a plan by Barcelona’s soccer club to open a training academy in southern Kyrgyzstan was backed by powerful Kyrgyz families, including sons of the head of the country’s state committee for national security. One month earlier, Kloop questioned the sale of “huge volumes of scarce electricity” to bitcoin mining firms that have sprung up in the country. “While Kyrgyzstan makes up for its electricity shortage with expensive supplies from abroad, its own electricity goes into private hands for pennies,” Kloop reported.
The stories hit a nerve. After the soccer exposé, the president complained, “The work of publications such as Kloop brings only harm, not benefit, to the Kyrgyz people.” He added, “It won’t go on like this. I have a request for you: If you cannot work for the benefit of Kyrgyzstan, then at least do not harm.”
On Aug. 22, the Bishkek City Prosecutor’s Office filed suit against Kloop, seeking to permanently close one of its three legal entities in Kyrgyzstan. The suit claimed that disseminating information was “beyond the scope” of Kloop’s nonprofit license; Kloop says there is no prohibition against doing so. The complaint also declared that Kloop’s news reporting “has a negative emotional and psychological impact on society, thereby generating emotions of fear, anxiety, despair, panic in a huge mass of people, constantly feeling the instability and uncertainty of the social situation, losing confidence in their strength and hopes for the future. Gradually their fate becomes spiritual depression, hopelessness, dreary expectation of life’s collapse, leading to the development of socially stressful mental disorders with aggressive-criminal behavior, sexual anomalies, chemical and nonchemical forms of addiction, suicidal mood and other disorders of social adaptation.” The case is still pending.
Next, in September, the Culture Ministry demanded that Kloop retract a story in which an opposition politician was quoted as saying he was tortured while in pretrial detention. The government denied it. The editors said the article contained nothing false, and they refused to delete it from their website. The ministry ordered the website blocked inside Kyrgyzstan for two months. Kloop had already prepared unblockable mirror sites, which give users an exact reproduction of an original site, so the website remained online. (Some internet providers also refused to block it.) But the pressure is growing, not only on Kloop but also on other news media and civil society groups in Kyrgyzstan. In the 2023 World Press Freedom Index released by Reporters Without Borders, Kyrgyzstan tumbled to a ranking of 122 out of 180 countries, compared with a ranking of 72 for 2022.
Human rights groups said in a statement defending Kloop, “The accusations made against Kloop to justify the request to close it down are absurd, partly even ridiculous, and it is apparent that they stem from officials’ dislike of being publicly scrutinized, criticized and held to account.” Kloop has worked jointly with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an international network of investigative journalists, and it has been supported by the National Endowment for Democracy since 2014, including a grant in 2021 to support “daily, live, investigative, and data journalism” and to promote civic engagement.
Journalism is not a threat to Kyrgyzstan or any other country. Kloop and others like it must thrive if freedom, democracy and government accountability are to survive.
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