Kyrgyzstan’s President Almazbek Atambayev has fired his most senior military official following a series of violent and deadly incidents that point to growing disorder within the armed forces.
On May 11, Zhanybek Kaparov was dismissed and replaced by Raimberdi Duishenbiyev as head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, one day after a soldier in the southern Jalal-Abad region reportedly stabbed a comrade in a squabble over chewing tobacco.
That incident, which did not result in any fatalities, followed news that a 19-year old recruit in the northern Naryn province appeared to have hanged himself after he abandoning his post on May 5.Earlier in the month, a brawl between two soldiers, again in Jalal-Abad, culminated in the death of another 19-year-old conscript.
According to well-regarded human rights organization Kylym Shamy, there have been over 60 deaths in the armed forces in the last four years — most of them suicides.
Militaries across the Central Asian region — particularly its poorest countries Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan — are notorious for providing conscripts with dismal living conditions and paltry wages.
Hazing, or the bullying of young conscripts by older officers, is also widespread. Tajikistan is famously, if only unofficially, said to resort to “oblava,” or the kidnapping of recruits, as a method of hitting conscript quotas.
The series of disturbing stories from Kyrgyzstan follows a restructuring of the military command last year that saw the defense ministry dissolved. That move was seen at the time as being linked to the arrest last October of the-then minister of defense on embezzlement charges.
But while sorting out the mess in the military appear to have soared to the top of Atambayev’s agenda in recent days, the May 10 fight over nasvai, a pungent type of sucking tobacco beloved of working folk across the region, may also have consequences.
As recently as last month, a Kyrgyz MP proposed legislation to ban the manufacture and consumption of nasvai, while the city government in the capital, Bishkek, made similar noises last year, albeit to no discernible effect.
The tobacco-related violence in the military, allied with persistent complaints that teenagers are using nasvai in schools, may hasten its transition into a banned substance, however.
Local tobacco farmers, who have benefited from production bans in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan to ramp up exports, have predictably pushed back against the proposed legislation
Ominously for them though, Russia’s Health Ministry is another anti-nasvai lobbyist and has proposed a ban on a complete ban on the product across the Eurasian Economic Union, which also includes Kyrgyzstan.
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