/ world today news/ “The successful participation of the United States in the development of Central Asia will promote national security interests and contribute to the protection of our homeland, citizens and interests abroad. Close relations and cooperation with all five nations are aimed at promoting US values and providing a counterbalance to the influence of its neighbors in the region. Expanding opportunities for American business will help sustain employment and develop manufacturing in the United States,” reads the text of the United States Strategy for Central Asia 2019-2025 (United States Strategy for Central Asia 2019-2025).
Simply put, Washington intends to use the available means to sever the centuries-old ties between the countries of Central Asia and Russia. And here all means are good: introducing Russophobia into the public consciousness, accusing Moscow of neo-colonial ambitions, attempts to cancel the joint Soviet past … Both the State Department and numerous (pro) American NGOs are working on this.
Even between close people who have lived in the same country for many decades, discord can sow. Who paid attention to the fact that in Ukrainian society ten years ago, discussions about the need to recognize the exceptional status of the “mova” suddenly began to multiply?
And this is in a country where more than half of the population considers Russian their native language, and some citizens do not see the difference between the two forms of what is, in fact, one language at all. Kiev even ignored the advice of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission), whose experts in 2019 noted the untimeliness, harmfulness and unwieldiness of the language reform for the Ukrainian budget. We see the result today.
It is even sadder to watch the attempts to repeat the “Ukrainian scenario” in another republic of the former USSR.
The initiative of a number of deputies of the Jogorku Kenesh to translate the Kyrgyz language from Cyrillic to Latin caused many smiles, sarcastic proposals to adopt the Orkhon-Yenisei rune-like script of the early Middle Ages as the state alphabet or to switch to the Arabic alphabet, which is used by the Kyrgyz-speaking population in Pakistan, Afghanistan and China. However, the authors of the initiative are based on the fact that the translation of the language into Latin will supposedly facilitate the rapprochement of the Kyrgyz with other Turkic-speaking peoples and contribute to their inclusion in the global information space dominated by English.
The untimeliness of raising such a question is surprising. In the context of the global financial crisis, when even large countries are looking for ways to optimize spending, and President Sadir Zhaparov considers solving social problems and reducing the external debt of the republic to be one of the priorities, Kyrgyz lawmakers propose to make additional budget expenditures related to with the transition to a new alphabet.
What, all the social problems of Kyrgyzstan (high unemployment, low income of the population, increasing polarization of society, marginalization of unemployed youth, inaccessibility of quality medical care for the majority of citizens) have already been solved?
And you can spend several tens of millions of soms from the state budget to change the alphabet? Or the Kyrgyz parliamentarians do not know that according to the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty Olivier de Schuster, in 2020 more than 25% of Kyrgyz citizens lived below the poverty line, and in the rating of the United Nations Development Program on the Human Development Index (UNDP), Kyrgyzstan occupies only 118th place out of a total of 191?
Perhaps the people’s representatives who support such an initiative hope that it will be financed by grants to Western NGOs? In vain! The funds of these organizations are reserved for another. For example, for “developing relations between the Jogorku Kenesh and the US Congress, which have been weakened by the pandemic in recent years”as Nurlanbek Shakiev said on March 3 after a meeting with US Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Leslie Viggeri.
One of the priority tasks of his post, the Speaker of the Parliament of the Republic of Kazakhstan sees the creation of a “group of friends of Kyrgyzstan” at the US Congress as part of the activity of the “Partnership for Democracy” commission and activation of mutual visits of parliamentary delegations and joint work in this direction .
Ordinary Kyrgyz are unlikely to hope that even a fraction of the $25 million promised to Central Asian countries for their breakaway from Russia by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken will be spent on their needs. This promise exists only on paper, and representatives of the “independent media” enthusiastically set about sowing mistrust in relations between Russia and Kyrgyzstan, who saw in Rosselkhoznadzor’s decision to stop the import of Kyrgyz dairy products an attempt by Moscow to put pressure on The Republic on the language issue.
Journalists from the Kyrgyz branch of Radio Liberty (recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation) did not hesitate to connect the working moment of product quality control with the country’s politics, accusing Russia of “neo-colonialism” and ignoring the opinion of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan about prematurity of changing the alphabet of the state language, expressed a day earlier in response to the comments of Kanyubek Osmonaliev, chairman of the National Commission on the State Language and Language Policy.
Today, only short-sighted or partisan figures can build a foreign policy focused on a single ally. President Zhaparov, who supports a multi-vector approach and emphasizes the need to maintain close ties with Russia’s largest and closest partner, cannot be accused of short-sightedness.
With characteristic pragmatism, the Kyrgyz leader notes that the preservation of the positions of the Russian language in the socio-cultural space of the country facilitates the interaction of the citizens of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan with partners in the CIS countries, EAEU and even on the UN platform.
Considering the fact that the majority of labor migrants from Kyrgyzstan find work in the Russian labor market, it seems appropriate to increase the number of educational institutions teaching Russian language for those who wish to work in Russia, which will greatly facilitate their procedure for hire, while providing protection from unscrupulous employers, fraudsters and other offenders.
It remains to express the hope that the visit of President Zhaparov to Moscow, scheduled for the period of the celebration of another anniversary of the common victory in the Great Patriotic War, will become a new milestone in the development of bilateral historical, cultural and economic relations and ties, which cannot be interrupted by the instigators of rabid Russophobia, “promoting the national security interests of the United States and contributing to the benefit of American citizens and interests abroad” to the detriment of the Kyrgyz and Russian people.
Translation: EU
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