Popular Politician Barred From Kyrgyz Polls

A high-profile scandal over the exclusion of one of Kyrgyzstan’s best-known politicians from the list of candidates only two weeks before the parliamentary election has caused an uproar, fuelling suspicions that the authorities are resorting to dirty tricks to sideline opponents.



Edil Baisalov, 30, who was running for the Social Democratic Party, SDP, was barred from the race by order of the Central Electoral Commission, CEC, on December 4.



His offence was to download a photograph of a blank ballot paper onto his web blog.



Baisalov said he only wanted to show that the ballot papers are poor-quality and printed on plain paper, making it easier to forge them.



When the picture appeared on his website, it triggered a feverish discussion on the net about how simple it would be to forge such ballots.



Ballot stuffing and fraud has been a major concern in past elections in the Central Asian republic.



The CEC was unapologetic about its decision to ban Baisalov from running for parliament.



It said no one had the right to reproduce the ballot paper only a few days before the elections, as people might copy it to make forged documents.



“The blank ballot paper was of a non-standard size and had security features, but that doesn’t make it impossible to forge,” said CEC member Gulya Ryskulova. “Even dollars can be forged on printers. The point is that before an election, no one should know what the blank paper looks like so no one can fabricate it.”



Baisalov’s action may cost him, or his party, dear. The CEC said that because of his action, it had decided to cancel and destroy the more than 2.7 million ballot papers, and claim money for damages.



CEC representatives say the Social Democrats must foot the entire bill, estimated at more than twenty million soms, equivalent to about 600,000 US dollars.



“The previous ballot papers were blue, and the new ones will be pink. We need to change the colour spectrum to make it hard to forge them,” one CEC member told IWPR.



On December 4, the CEC announced that the new set of ballot papers would be printed within the next four days, after which they would be sent out around the country.



The CEC also asked the prosecutor general’s office to look into whether Baisalov could be prosecuted.



As a non-voting member of the CEC, he had enjoyed free access to the printing house where the papers were being made ready. He used this access to take a picture of one with his mobile phone camera.



Ryskulova said Baisalov had misused his position in the CEC, as members were barred from copying internal documents.



Baisalov insisted he had not broken the law and said the SDP was filing a court appeal against the CEC decision to exclude him.



Galina Skripkina, a well-known lawyer and Social Democrat member agreed, saying that only the party itself had the right to remove Baisalov from the list of candidates drawn up for this election, which is based on proportional representation.



“It will have to be proved that Baisalov’s actions as a non-voting CEC member really were illegal,” said Skripkina, who argues that the candidate could not be barred from standing until he faced criminal action.



According to human rights activist Cholpon Jakupova, it is the CEC, not Baisalov, that exceeded its powers because it “assumed the functions of a judicial body”.



Tamerlan Ibraimov, director of the Centre for Political and Legal Studies, said that while the election code provides an exhaustive listing of reasons why candidates can be excluded, the grounds cited by the CEC are not among them.



“If Baisalov is accused of a breach of criminal legislation, there must be a court verdict proving his guilt,” he said. “Under current legislation, Edil Baisalov ought to be reinstated in the SDP list.”



Human rights activists say the CEC ought to have been grateful to Baisalov for informing the public about the low quality of the blank ballot papers.



Nazgul Turdubekova, coordinator of the Youth Human Rights group, alleged that the CEC had been going to get rid of the ballot papers anyway.



“The election commission is now trying to place the responsibility on Baisalov’s shoulders, because he was the first to talk about how standards had been breached in the production process, and he wanted to prove this using the photo,” she said. “They [CEC] had decided to destroy the entire consignment, so they wanted to cover their tracks.”



Baisalov agrees that his real offence was to expose the poor quality of the ballot papers. “As a member of the CEC… I had an opportunity to see that the ballots were printed on plain paper, in defiance of the election code,” he wrote on his site.



“Now they are saying that if there is a possibility that ballot papers will be forged, it will be because of me. Such accusations by the CEC are nothing but an attempt to shift the responsibility to me and make me a scapegoat. These ballot papers are low-security documents. I spoke about this yesterday and I’ll say it again today”.



Aziza Amirova is the pseudonym of an independent journalist in Bishkek.