Land Seizures Continues Unabated
Monday, 25 June, 2007
Land Seizures Continues Unabated
Monday, 25 June, 2007
On June 16, over 200 people tried to seize 15 hectares of land in the southern suburbs of Bishkek, but police managed to evict them from area, which is private property.
The tradition of grabbing a piece of land, building a house and hoping the state will eventually recognise squatting rights began in the early Nineties, when landless newcomers seized farmland and started building homes for themselves on the outskirts of Bishkek. Almost all such homes were subsequently registered as legal, and the authorities provided them with utilities.
A new wave of seizures began in Bishkek after March 2005, when the opposition came into power and the then president Askar Akaev was ousted by a popular uprising. By the beginning of April that year, several informal squatters’ associations had already taken over nine different areas of the city and its suburbs. As of April 14, 2005, over 21,000 people had applied for land ownership rights from the authorities. The government agreed to allocate land to the most needy cases, and many people acquired a plot legally.
The land-grab frenzy died down shortly afterwards, as police started cracking down on offenders and charged some of them with criminal offences rather than merely fining or cautioning them as was the case before.
Dooronbek Sadyrbaev, a member of the Kyrgyz parliament, believes the trend is continuing into 2007 because the state has not done enough to generate employment in the regions.
“It’s the authorities’ fault that unemployment people come in from the provinces and try to seize land here [in Bishkek],” he said. “The regional and district governors are to blame for leaving their people with no jobs.”
At the same time, Sadyrbaev argues that the law must be unforced asas allowing such infringements to go unchecked could result in the authorities losing control of the country. “This anything goes attitude has given rise to a new state of mind among the nation,” he said.
Dosmir Uzbekov, who is deputy head of the government committee for migration and employment state committee, and who headed of Bishkek city council’s crisis management group during the peak of the land seizures in April-June 2005, agrees that misappropriating land must be roundly condemned, and society must be made to obey the law.
“It’s very important to shape public opinion,” he told NBCentralAsia. “NGOs and the media should say it is forbidden to take somebody else’s property. One might think that it is of little consequence if a couple of people seize some land – but the very fact that it happens undermines the stability of the state itself.”
The authorities show they are weak when they give into the squatters’ demands, he said.
However, Tolekan Ismailova, director of the Citizens against Corruption group, says hard-line methods could simply aggravate the problem, so the authorities would be better off concentrating on how to manage state-owned land properly.
“There should be an open and transparent procedure in place, people should know how much land is available, and cases should be prioritised. Only then will people stop seizing lands,” she said.
(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)
