Power Struggle Hampers Kyrgyz TV Reform

Bitter conflicts between staff and management at Kyrgyzstan’s state broadcasting company are obstructing the already slow progress towards converting the station into a truly public TV and radio company.

The latest conflict erupted on January 31, when several staff members of the National TV and Radio Company, NTRC, declared a hunger strike.

They were demanding the resignation of director-general Melis Eshimkanov, who had been appointed by President Kurmanbek Bakiev only three months earlier.

At the start of the protest, about ten staffers from the channel joined the chief organiser of the strike, Beyshenbek Bekeshov, a former deputy to the previous director-general.

After protesters were barred from entering the TV building in Bishkek, the hunger strikers, now numbering 13, continued their action in Bekeshov’s house.

Bekeshov said they were protesting against the “arbitrary” and “lawless” leadership style of their new boss.

“He commits lawless acts and violates our civil, creative and labour rights,” Bekeshov told IWPR. “There has never been such lawlessness in the whole history of the Kyrgyz TV and radio station.”

Bekeshev, whose programme Kolomto (“Hearth”) was axed after the new chief was appointed, said Eshimkanov wanted to get rid of the station’s most experienced workers and put his own cronies into place.

“He wants to turn the national TV channel into Eshimkanov television,” Bekeshev maintained. “You could call it the privatisation of state property, Eshimkanov style.”

In an open letter to President Bakiev, the hunger strikers lambasted Eshimkanov’s personnel reforms as “adventurist” and “harmful”.

Amid signs that the protest may be spreading, it was reported that staffers at regional TV and radio in the Batken and Jalalabad regions also joined the protest this week.

Eshimkanov rejects the strikers’ accusations, saying what they really oppose is his drive to slash bloated payrolls and scrap substandard shows.

“At 1,400 employees, the staff is incredibly inflated,” he maintained. “At the same time there is a lot of poor production and too many outdated, unprofessional programmes.”

The director-general noted that the company’s recently-created Artistic Council had already criticised 150 shows as “flawed”, which is why NTRC had spent a month updating its programme schedules and outlining new strategies.

“Any attempt to improve the channel causes protests,” concluded Eshimkanov.

He hinted that Bekeshov and the other strikers had their own agenda, saying, “There are certain forces that don’t want reforms.”

Eshimkanov says he remains committed to root-and-branch reform of the broadcaster. “A complete structural reorganisation will entail cuts. I plan to introduce new management based on the experience of the Baltics, Georgia and Ukraine, and to develop our work according to international standards,” he said.

Some NTRC staff agree with their chief’s diagnosis. Jyldyz Muslimova, who monitors the broadcaster’s social affairs and political output, said she backed Eshimkanov.

“This is all about the personal ambitions and power struggles of Bekeshev and the other hunger strikers,” she complained.

“They don’t like the new leadership’s reforms, or the fact that airtime is now taken up with higher quality programmes than the old ones they produced.”

The need for root-and-branch reform of the NTRC has been bubbling away in Kyrgyzstan for several years.

It emerged as a priority after the abrupt change in the country’s leadership in March 2005. One of the complaints voiced by protesters at the time was that the national TV station’s coverage of elections earlier that year had been biased.

Demands for immediate reform of the channel were high on the agenda during demonstrations against the new Bakiev administration that recurred through 2006 and 2007.

In June 2006, parliament passed a law setting out basic principles for transforming NTRC into a public service corporation.

The law provided for the creation of a supervisory board whose 15 members would be confirmed by parliament after being nominated in equal measure by the president, the deputies and civil society groups.

However, the board did not meet until November 2007, and was soon suspended. (See Kyrgyz TV Reform Falters Ahead of Polls, RCA No. 518, 03-Dec-07.)

As a result, President Bakiev stepped in and unilaterally appointed Eshimkanov - albeit on an acting basis - without going through the board.

Shamaral Maychiev, who is Kyrgyzstan’s Media Representative, a non-government position that functions as an ombudsman for the sector, believes the current conflict at NTRC stems from the fact that the supervisory board is playing no role despite having supreme responsibility for the company under the law.

Elvira Sarieva, a board member nominated by non-government groups, said she believed the body was deliberately stopped from working before last December’s parliamentary election.

During the election campaign, many opposition parties accused the state broadcasting company of bias. They said NTRC, the only station covering the country’s entire territory, displayed a marked preference for pro-presidential forces and candidates in its election coverage.

Ilim Karypbekov, director of the Media Representative Institute, a non-government watchdog organisation which supports Maychiev’s work, says the current stalemate will do nothing to advance the stalled reform process.

“This scandal will not improve the channel,” he said. “It’s just about personalities and a fight for power. At issue is not reform, only personal intrigues.”

Almaz Ismanov of the Centre for Extreme Journalism agreed that the dispute was about personalities as much as policy, but added that it had in the process “laid bare” fundamental problems affecting the station.

He listed some of these problems, saying, “NTRK definitely has to be reformed in all areas, especially on the technical side. One of the problems is that the signal doesn’t reach everywhere – NTRK has a multi-million budget, it supports a massive staff yet it can’t broadcast to all corners of the country.”

However the current dispute is resolved, few analysts disagree that the state broadcaster’s performance could be improved.

Marat Tokoev, who chairs the Journalist’s Association, says it is going to be extremely difficult to turn around this “complex organism” with its large staff roll and decades of doing things in a certain way. Coming from the private media sector, Eshimkanov’s mistake, he said, was to underestimate all this cultural baggage.

Eshimkanov, formerly an opposition deputy in parliament, used to own the popular Aghym newspaper.

Like the TV boss himself, Tokoev prescribes staffing cuts as part of the cure, but he recommends that the process be carried out transparently, testing people’s ability to do the job, and ensuring that they get help to find other employment if they are made redundant. Most important of all, he said, the cuts should start with top managers, “to get rid of all those who’ve held management posts for years but have done nothing useful for the channel”.

Yet before any of that can happen, Tokoev says the question of the supervisory board needs to be sorted out, as Eshimkanov’s hands will be tied as long as he only holds his post in an acting capacity.

“The supervisory council needs to be given a chance to work at full capacity, so that it can legally elected a director-general who will be invested with broad powers and who will be in a position to push through reforms to the TV channel,” said Tokoev.

Yrys Kadykeev is an IWPR contributor in Bishkek.