Page 75 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine December 2023

bne December 2023
Opinion 75
risk perceptions, or the same intensity of risk perceptions. There is a different capacity for risk taking as you move away from the flank. In the east there is a clear sense this is about Russia; as you move further west this sense of urgency declines.”
“We have a regionalised security optics across Europe and that is something that requires a lot of work.”
This is most visible in defence spending, as well as the building up of defence industries, where Western Europe is still behind the pace.
“The larger point is that if Nato does not step up on rearmament ... it will become a hollowed out organisation. While the flank countries are stepping up, the western
PANNIER
countries are shrinking their armies. There needs to be a sense of urgency, that I see lacking on the continent,” he argues.
“Europe has disarmed to the extent it would take a decade for countries like Germany to come back.”
At the same time, the huge ongoing military build-up in Poland will “completely transform the hard power picture on the flank”.
Michta argues this will require a shift in the US force structure from Germany towards the Eastern Flank, so that in the future one Nato brigade is stationed permanently in Finland or the Baltic states, two in Poland and potentially one in Romania.
Piece by piece, Japarov is dismantling Kyrgyzstan’s celebrated independent media
Bruce Pannier
Independent media outlets have set Kyrgyzstan apart from its authoritarian neighbours since the country became independent in late 1991. The current Kyrgyz administration, however, seems to see such media as a threat and since the start of 2022 an unprecedented campaign has been under way in the country to silence outlets that publish information that the authorities find inconvenient.
Signs of trouble down the road for independent media were evident as early as October 2020. That was when now-president Sadyr Japarov was busted out of his Bishkek prison cell by supporters during unrest sparked by the results of the quite obviously rigged October 4 parliamentary elections.
Japarov was described in one report as “a former MP from the nationalist Ata-Jurt political party and disgraced politician”.
He was arrested in October 2012 while trying to storm the government building in Bishkek and convicted in 2013 for trying to overthrow the government, but he was released from prison within weeks. Japarov was then implicated in the November 2013 kidnapping of a local official in Japarov’s native Issyk-Kul Province during protests against the company mining the country’s flagship gold mine Kumtor. A wanted man, he fled the country.
Apprehended along the Kazakh-Kyrgyz border in March 2017,
Japarov was sentenced to 11 years and six months in prison. And that was where the sixth-Kyrgyz-president-to-be
was when crowds chased the government from power in October 2020.
Hours after he left his prison cell, word started spreading on Kyrgyz-language social networks that Japarov should be the choice to be president. The ploy worked and the path to a meteoric rise to power was thrown open to Japarov.
Japarov became prime minister, then acting president by mid-October.
On November 6, 2020, Japarov told journalists, “I am always for freedom of speech... if the correct information is given.”
Pursuit of Temirov Live
Bolot Temirov is an investigative journalist who founded Temirov Live, a YouTube programme that reports on corruption.
On January 20, 2022, Temirov Live reported on corrupt deals in the state oil industry involving family members of Kamchybek Tashiyev, head of the State Committee for National Security (GKNB), and a close friend of Japarov.
Subsequently, police raided the office of Temirov Live. They then claimed to find a small packet of marijuana on Temirov
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