Ed is in Chicago

It has been a while since I last clocked in (or blogged on, or whatever the lingo is). This is due to a period of frenzied papershuffling when the Boss was still in Kabul, a short period of illness, and my subsequent impetuous journey across Central Asia. Feeling sick and sorry for myself the Thursday before last, and bored of waiting for the Afghan film bigwigs to produce a peacock from their arses, I booked a flight to Dushanbe to go and see my love in Kyrgyzstan. In fact I should have gone ages ago. We have a kind of extra holiday allowance here called R&R – Rest and Recuperation, which is designed to knit the ravelled sleeve of care after working in a dangerous, dusty country for 3 months. It’s a very welcome perk and we get flights and pocket money paid.

So I arrived in Osh last Tuesday. The journey was a bit hairy, and very foolish. The planned route was plane from Kabul to the Tajik capital Dushanbe, and from Dushanbe to Khujand in northern Tajikistan, then by car from Khujand to Batken, Kyrgyzstan, then on to Osh, where Flora lives. The main problem was that I had neither Uzbek nor Kyrgyz visa, and on arriving in Dushanbe I was told that both take at least a week to procure. This was very frustrating, as I only had a week, and having left Afghanistan, my time was already trickling through my fingers. Nonplussed, I asked the people in Dushanbe to get me a flight to Khujand anyway, the next day, and ordered a car to take me on from the airport through the border into Kyrgyzstan by hook or by crook. I had left Kabul with alacrity, and enjoying the little propeller plane that the UN operates for NGO workers (I like the way that in these little planes, the pilots are not separated from the passengers, and so you can see through the front windscreen as they land – lining up for the runway, correcting, and bouncing down safely.) But by the time I got to Dushanbe, I was beginning to feel a bit anxious. There was no guarantee that I would even get a plane ticket to Khujand. During the winter, the road through north the mountains connecting up Tajikistan’s two major cities, Dushanbe and Khujand, is impassable due to ice and snow. It means that everything goes by plane, and flights are always booked up unless you book a good week in advance. However, our people do a lot of business with the airport people, and they know that there are always a few seats kept apart ‘just in case’. If you have an urgent need to fly, you just pay an extra unofficial booking fee, and bob’s your uncle, a flight to Khujand. Well, much as I find this sort of thing distasteful, I wanted to get to Osh to see Flora. Bob became my uncle, and I was soon in Khujand.

In Khujand we had a parley, I called Osh and got their point of view, and we decided on a plan of action. The problem was not only that I no visa to enter Kyrgyzstan, but that the sensible route from Osh to Khujand takes in Uzbekistan as well, due to the lunatic map drawing of the Stalin era. (Say what you like about Churchill being pleased with himself for drawing the borders of Jordan in an afternoon, Stalin had the most devilish cartographic skills in imperialist history). The borders in the Ferghana valley were drawn, so the story goes, precisely with the object of splitting up populations, and making the people of the Valley, an historically rich and fertile, and independent entity, less likely to rise up and cause trouble. I am not sure I quite believe this version of the facts, but any rate the map is as complicated as you like (I will post it above this posting for you to have a look.) It’s a mess, however it came about. Some of the borders cut across ethnic blocs with no particular logic – Northern Tajikistan makes more sense geographically and ethnically as part of Uzbekistan. Sometimes though, ethnic differences are followed with bloody-minded pedantry – so the ethnically Tajik enclave of Vorukh in Kyrgyzstan is Kyrgyz. The Uzbek enclave of Shakhimardan in Kyrgyzstan however, was apparently given to Uzbekistan in order to provide the Uzbek communist party officials a nice place in the mountains for a holiday. As for the Sokh enclave, it is ethnically Tajik, stranded in Kyrgyz territory, and belonging to the Uzbeks.

And it was Sokh that caused the problems. Crossing the border into Kyrgyzstan without a visa is no problem, as the Kyrgyz are notably relaxed about policing their borders – there is a back route round the hills in Isfara with no border post. Chugging along in the car, watching the multicoloured, vegetationless hills go by, the driver suddenly said – ‘this is Kyrgyzstan’. There was no other way of knowing that we had arrived. What a relief! – first hurdle crossed. We arrived in Batken – a one-horse town if ever there was one, and I changed cars, bid farewell to one driver and said hello to the new one, and set off. I felt relieved, but knew that Sokh was still ahead of us. The Uzbeks are notoriously cagey about their borders – at least on an official level. Informally, you can normally bribe your way though, but this rule is subject to rapid change if the Uzbek government is feeling upset about terrorist violence - an undoubtedly internal problem which they persist on blaming on other countries. As we approached Sokh, the driver was also getting sweaty. He was also worried about the Uzbek border guards. He was a Kyrgyz, and so not too worried about the Kyrgyzes. The alternative to going across Sokh was to go round the enclave – not so far, but the road has been all but washed away during the winter rains and snows, so this would have added an extra 6 hours to the journey. I left the negotiations to the driver, preferring to play the ignorant foreigner (a part I feel particularly qualified to take on.) As it happened, the guards let us through the first post on entering Sokh with little problem – a bit of an argument about prices, but then we handed over the normal fee of $2, and went on our way. We were both still on edge as we drove through Sokh – a shame as it is a very beautiful place, nestled on the valley floor between rocky hills, apple orchards and poplars pointing at the sky, the people looking like the paradigmatic Tajiks – the men with moustaches and their little square brown hats with white embroidery, and the women with round faces and pink cheeks and colourful velvety gowns and bright headscarfs, worn so that the hair spills out at the front, all walking from one place to another with a simple bucolic ease, or standing around, watching us in our cars flash by. In fact we had nothing to fear from the Uzbeks at the post on the other side of Sokh – they did not even check my passport, and the driver grinned and I felt elated as the teenage soldier swung open the gate. Too soon. Contrary to expectation, a Kyrgyz soldier ushered us to the side of the road and had a look at my passport. He then called his superior over. The superior read every page in my passport, and as he was doing so, the driver asked incredulously ‘Have you got a Kyrgyz visa?’ I was surprised because I thought that one driver had explained it all – apparently not, and my heart sank. No doubt his did, but we put on our best toadying faces for the superior officer. I admitted my offense, and the driver dissappeared again into the guard’s shed, and returned another couple of dollars lighter. He did not like it though – the officer – he said next time if I tried this on, he would arrest my ass (or whatever the equivalent Kyrgyz idiom is).

So you get an idea of how things work in Central Asia. It is not great. I have never indulged in such a bribe-fest before, as one would like to practise a zero-tolerance policy to the dominating system of patronage and corruption. But when it came to the crunch, I showed my colours and said.. ‘everyone does it, and I need to get to Osh, damn it!’ Then it becomes a question of calculating the risk and the expense of the bribes. A colleague of mine in Osh, an collosally tall Dutchman has been having horrid torments over getting to Russia where he too plans to visit his love. When he found out that he should suddenly fly to Bishkek to wrangle with the Russian consulate it turned out that there were no seats on the plane. No problem, says one helpful soul – I know the pilot, and he comes back a few hours later to offer the enourmous Dutchman the tempting opportunity to bribe his friend the pilot a bribe, and fly to Bishkek sitting in the toilets. He stayed in Osh and went on a later plane, but you get the idea. Anything is possible if you have the right friends.

Anyway – I got there. I arrived on the evening of women's day, which in Central Asia is an extension of Valentine's day, where you offer your lady an expensive rose, and relieve her of some of her cooking and cleaning. I have had a lovely week in Osh lounging around going horseriding in the hills and watching the occasional political demonstration. After the last few months of pro-democracy ‘revolutions’ all over the former eastern-bloc, Kyrgyzstan opposition has decided to have its own, in response to the vote-stuffing, candidate-buying, neither free nor fair election that they have just had for parlimentarians. To follow up the rose revolution and the orange revolution, the opposition have now called for a tulip revolution to replace Akaev, the current president. As such about two-three hundred protesters were stationed outside the local government building all the time I was in Osh, shouting things in Russian such as ‘Rah-rah-rah! Rahdy-rahdy-rah! Rah-rah AKAEV - rah-rah rahdy!’ (Don’t ask me to translate – it would be impossible to render the exact idiomatic nuances of these slogans into English – you get the idea though)

In Osh at any rate it did not escalate much beyond that, and seemd to be largely Krygyz, leaving the other, Uzbek, half of the population out of it (one of whom told me ‘Protest schmotest – there’s only FOUR of them!’) But still enough to get people a bit twitchy – not being used to public expressions of political will, and I was told that this was why I had problems with the Kyrgyz at the border. It made for a bit of a dilemma on returning after the holiday though. How to get past without getting arrested? We looked at all the options, and ended up with... doing things exactly the same as I had done on the way in. We tried to get me a visa at the consulate in Osh, which is normally possible, but the right person to bribe was not there, and the others were feeling a little under seige. Yet another driver came to pick me up from Batken, and was instructed to negotiate with the Kyrgyz border guards on his way through Sokh to see whether I could get through safey. However the message got garbled, and he had spoken to the Uzbeks instead, who were fine with taking a bribe – this didn’t surprise me. Based on my experiences so far, the Uzbeks seemed to take bribes with an alacrity which made the seeminly ominous border posts transform in my mind from stern outposts of national security to little more than a queer kind of shop.

I made my way back across Osh oblast to Sokh listening to the Kinks to try and calm my nerves, and as we approached, the driver and I steeled ourselves for more justified ill-use from the Kyrgyz. Just as before though, the gate on the Kyrgyz side swung open, and it was the Uzbeks who caused all the problems. After looking at my passport, the driver was called in to explain, and then I was called in five minutes later. A bad sign. A young and zealous soldier said that no, it wasn’t possible for me to enter the Uzbek enclave of Sokh, and he would have to send me round the long way, and incidentally he was disgusted that I didn’t even have a Kyrgyz visa. I told him that my Uzbek visa was waiting for me in Dushanbe (true, as a matter of fact) and that I would go directly to pick it up from the embassy, but I just had to cross a couple of international boundaries to get me back to Tajikistan. He clearly didn’t like this, and was not won over by my charmingly broken Russian, but it won us a little time, and he brought in the customs official for consultation. The customs man was clearly an older hand, though similarly youthful. He asked me why I didn’t have a visa, and I repeated the Dushanbe story, and added that I was going to see my love in Osh, and had not had time to wait for visas, else my holiday would have been gone, and I would have passed up my chance to see Flora (also true, though I omitted that it was due to my impetuous impatience that I had left Afghanistan before getting round to getting the appropriate stamps in my passport). The customs guy seemed to respond to this, and his dark eyes were set a-twinkling. We raised the price offered to $4, though the young soldier was greatly offended, and we quickly drove off before anyone could change their minds. Another $2 to the other Uzbek post on the other side of Sokh and we were through. The Kyrgyz-Tajik border was no problem again, and I could enjoy the blossom of the apricot orchards, and the colours of the freshly rained-dampened hills all the way back to Khujand.

I won’t try this again though. It has been bothering me that the young Uzbek soldier was clearly right. We should have been sent packing, and it offends my sense of right that we were conspirators with the more worldly customs officer.

# posted by Ed @ 3:46 pm