Kyrgyz Officials Spent Cash Straight Out of Safe

Questions are being asked about the fate of some two million US dollars which Kyrgyzstan’s interim government distributed among officials at the height of violent disturbances last year.

After the April 2010 revolution, when then president Kurmanbek Bakiev was overthrown, the incoming government seized cash assets of some 21 million dollars from accounts held by the ex-head of state and his entourage.

As sporadic disturbances broke out in southern Kyrgyzstan in May, the interim government earmarked seven million dollars from the “Bakiev money” to enhance security. Funds were dispensed to officials and to the defence and security agencies.

Omurbek Tekebaev, then a deputy prime minister, said he took the 20,000 dollars in cash that Finance Minister Temir Sariev gave him to Osh and “handed it out to the police and soldiers who were on duty and had virtually no food or water. At the time, there was no other option”.

The same process happened when mass ethnic violence broke out around Osh and Jalalabad in June, and in the end a total of 2.6 million dollars is believed to have been disbursed by the finance ministry.

The question is where it all went and who is supposed to account for it.

Member of parliament Marat Sultanov says disbursements were questionable but necessary under the circumstances.

“If one takes a purely legalistic view, any confiscated property is subject to a final court decision,” he said. “Unfortunately, the mechanism adopted in this case was a little bit different – they took it straight out of the safe with no court ruling. But there’s a reason for it – the times required it, and moreover they had halted the effect of laws [under a state of emergency] and were ruling by decree.

“It’s another matter, however, whether these funds were used effectively by the individuals who received them. And when you go further down the chain, the mechanism isn’t clear at all…. what’s happened is that some people got money to organise a volunteer force. Now that’s a very informal thing. How can we now tell how much they spent on volunteers, how much on fuel, when there are no accounts?”

Analyst Sheradil Baktygulov argues that if – as he is certain – the funds paid for a troop deployment that prevented the violence spreading to other parts of Kyrgyzstan, it was money well spent. That being the case, it will be hard to launch prosecutions against officials for misusing funds.

The audio programme, in Russian and Kyrgyz, went out on national radio stations in Kyrgyzstan, as part of IWPR project work funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.