Peaks and Valleys

Geography keeps the news away from rural Kyrgyzstan
By Kubanychbek Taabaldiev

Kyrgyzstan is the only country of the five Central Asian states with comparatively free media, and the press covers all current affairs in the country without exception. Theoretically, the Kyrgyz population has every opportunity to know what is going on through the media to make decisions pertaining to the country’s young democracy. However, in the two years since the March 2005 Tulip Revolution, when the previous head of state, Askar Akayev, was forced out and replaced by opposition leader Kurmanbek Bakiev via an election the same year, the situation in the media has seen little improvement.

According to the Kyrgyz Justice Ministry, about 1,000 media sources have been registered in the past four years, including print media, radio and television, and online.

As the number of Internet users in Kyrgyzstan

 
Beautiful and rugged, Kyrgyzstan’s mountains have long been alluring to hikers. trekkers and mountaineers. But they also pose challenges for getting news to rural areas in a country with limited technology, after emerging from a long period of Soviet control.

increases, the influence of online media also grows. According to data published in 2006 by international organizations in Kyrgyzstan that study the media, the number of Internet users in the country has reached 500,000, or 9 percent of the total population. Kyrgyzstan leads all Central Asian countries in number of Internet users.However, an enormous part of Kyrgyzstan’s Internet users, about 90 percent, live in urban areas — and most of them live in the country’s two largest cities: Bishkek, the official state capital, and the so-called southern capital city Osh. Altogether, 1.5 million people live in these two cities out of the country’s total population of 5.2 million.

By comparison, CIA data shows that in neighboring Uzbekistan, with a total population of 27.3 million, 800,000 people have Internet access, which is just 3 percent of the total population.

And Kyrgyzstan’s more industrial neighbor Kazakhstan has a population of 16 million people — a million of whom have access to the Internet — around 7 percent of the population. But this figure will soon increase dramatically, as Kazakhstan is experiencing one of the world’s fastest growing economies.

Government interest and financial support in newspapers comes now only on the occasion of big political events, like elections or referendums, when politicians need support from local voters. Also, the poorer economy in the countryside means that there are too few advertisers, and newspaper circulation is too small to make it worthwhile for advertisers.

Also, there are fewer people interested in working on local newspapers’ editorial staffs, and current staff members have no experience working in the new free-market economy because they have not been educated on how to work in such conditions. There are fewer occasions for them to go outside and get new skills and knowledge.

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Kubanychbek Taabaldiev has been in charge of Kyrgyzstan's national news agency, Kabar, since 1998. He is a 2007 Fulbright Scholar researching rural Montana's press to learn how Kyrgyzstan might transition to independent media from state-controlled news.