Kyrgyz authorities forced the founder of Temirov LIVE, a YouTube-based investigative news outlet, into exile, and, 14 months later, imprisoned his successor — his wife.
Makhabat Tazhibek-kyzy, 34, was arrested in the early morning of Jan. 16, 2024, as Kyrgyz authorities conducted dawn raids of the Temirov LIVE newsroom and the homes of 10 of its journalists.
She and the others were arrested, then charged with “calling for mass riots” after broadcasting stories that exposed corruption by Internal Affairs Minister Ulan Niyazbekov that included his ownership of hidden real estate and ties with organized crime.
Tazhibek-kyzy was sentenced to six years in prison. Through a court order, authorities threatened the family that their then 12-year-old son be taken from his grandmother and placed under state guardianship.
Leading researchers and journalists from there say that Kyrgyzstan, once considered a newborn beacon of democracy surrounded by autocratic former Soviet states, seems to have reversed course under President Sadyr Japarov, who came to power in 2021. Today, the government controls almost all media, and both press freedoms and human rights have declined at an alarming rate.
“[Presidencies in Kyrgyzstan] started out with promises of freedom, a little bit of brief liberalization… but then, they would start tightening the screws on the opposition, journalists, non-governmental organizations,” said Emil Dzhuraev, a research fellow at Crossroads Central Asia, an independent research institute based in Kyrgyzstan. “This government is doing it in a wholesale way.”
The Embassy of Kyrgyzstan in Washington declined to comment on the allegations in this article.
Bolot Temirov, Tazhibek-kyzy’s husband, hasn’t been able to speak to his wife since her arrest but keeps in touch with relatives who visit her. As of December, their son still lives with his grandmother but can be taken away at any moment, “effectively held hostage,” Temirov said in a written response to Capital News Service.
“The hardest thing for me is not thinking about the future,” Temirov told CNS in an interview from an undisclosed location in Europe that he keeps secret for safety reasons. “I understand that if we stop and cease doing our journalistic work, corruption and criminality in power will prevail, and the people of Kyrgyzstan will have no hope for a just and free future with equal rights, without dictatorship and lawlessness.”
An unpredictable state
Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked country in Central Asia, gained its independence in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed and has since faced swings of authoritarianism, government corruption and waning human rights.
Some experts say that Kyrgyzstan’s volatility is due to its frequent regime changes, but the downward shift in democracy is clear under Japarov’s presidency.
“Twenty years ago, you could call it a democracy. Then it gradually began to erode. But, I would say it really got super bad after Japarov,” said Ilya Lozovsky, a senior editor and writer at Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization based in Amsterdam.
The government’s increasingly restrictive control over the media was intended as a preemptive measure against protests and opposition groups that might arise if journalists exposed corruption, Dzhuraev explained.
Japarov signed several media laws since the start of his presidency, including a vaguely worded “false information” law that allows the government to remove content or penalize the author of reports that the government considers defamatory to the “honor and dignity” of an individual.
“Almost from the beginning, they began to install a much tighter, much more controlled, less free civic space,” Dzhuraev said. “The new leadership’s motivation was to close down all possibilities for new protests and new groups to form, mobilize and overthrow them.”
Though some privately owned news outlets still exist, including Temirov LIVE, Kaktus.media and 24.kg, they are often harassed, raided and persecuted on accusations of anti-state activities.
“Generally, they’ve been exercising a lot of self-censorship and caution,” he said.
Mounting pressure
Temirov founded Temirov LIVE in 2020, at the height of a political crisis in Kyrgyzstan. It focuses on exposing government corruption. Several investigations uncovered illicit enrichment schemes among relatives of high-ranking officials, corruption within Kyrgyz Railways and wrongdoing in other agencies.
“Bolot Temirov and his team were some of the most productive investigative journalists,” Dzhuraev said.
In 2022, a year after Japarov was elected, Temirov LIVE published investigations alleging corruption involving him and the country’s national security agency chief, Kamchybek Tashiev.
Experts say it was because of that investigation that authorities took action against Temirov and his publication.
A day after the video premiered, revealing how Tashiev and his family seized control of a state-owned oil refinery with the aid of Japarov, authorities stormed Temirov LIVE and arrested Temirov, asserting they had found drugs in his pocket. He was deported to Russia when authorities accused him of falsifying documents to receive a Kyrgyz passport. Two months later, he left Russia and reached his current location.
Temirov LIVE’s team and some press advocacy organizations said at the time that the drugs were planted and all other claims were baseless.
Lozovsky said that the raid was a memorable one.
“We did a few investigations into how the steps the security services took against [Temirov] were completely illegal and not any kind of legitimate law enforcement,” he said. “You can see that it’s such bullshit, what’s going on. The reasoning that the courts use, the way they prevent the defendants from making their arguments.”
The court acquitted Temirov months later on drug charges, calling the investigation against him prejudiced. He was still found guilty for forged documents. He continues to work for Temirov LIVE from exile.
Wave two
After Temirov left the country, Tazhibek-kyzy took over newsroom operations.
In an interview with CNS, Temirov suggested that the arrests could have been linked to the outlet’s recent investigations involving high-ranking officials, specifically Niyazbekov, and Urmat Jumabekov, who works within the ministry as the chief of service for combating extremism and illegal migration.
Temirov said the criminal case was opened by the ministry, which Niyazbekov heads, based on a report signed by Jumabekov. “This was a direct conflict of interest and a politically motivated conspiracy,” he told CNS, referring to translated government documents from the ministry.
The interior ministry issued a statement shortly after the raids, stating that Temirov LIVE and its sister channel, Ait Ait Dese, had “called for riots.”
When most of Temirov LIVE’s journalists were charged with mass unrest, operations nearly halted, Temirov said in an email.
Temirov LIVE had to be restructured into a remote format, with the entire editorial team working abroad.
“Working in Kyrgyzstan became impossible,” he said. “It was very hard for our team to find the strength to move on after so many blows. But we managed.”
The raids surprised some experts on Kyrgyzstan, because they included women staff members.
“Somehow, I thought the authorities would not touch them because in that team there were a lot of women and young people,” Aksana Ismailbekova, a Kyrgyz anthropologist based in Berlin. “This was harsh compared to other regimes.”
Temirov said that journalists who remained in Kyrgyzstan are under constant surveillance and essentially banned from working in the media.
“They have been forced to find other ways to survive: some drive taxis, others open online stores, and others take up studies or farming,” he said.
“I left Kyrgyzstan in March 2022, right after Bolot was arrested,” Eldiyar Arykbaev, the former editor-in-chief of Kloop Media, another independent outlet, said. “Warning signs for me had already begun.” In 2024 a court in Bishkek, the capital, shut down Kloop.
In Arykbaev’s case, fake social media accounts began using his name and calling for mass unrest, he said. The use of fake accounts is a tactic that other investigative journalists in Kyrgyzstan have found themselves the targets of, according to an investigation by Kloop.
“At the same time, my bank started to ask suspicious questions about my financial transactions. Those are not questions banks usually ask you,” Arykbaev said. “The pattern was kind of clear… they started to build a fake pretext, and then they eventually come after you.”
“You trade security for safety,” he said. “In my home country, I felt much more secure because I have my social connections: friends, family, people I can call in case of trouble…But right now, I don’t have such a broad network of people.”
Arykbaev now works at the OCCRP from an undisclosed location.
“It’s tough, but I had to leave in order to keep reporting on sensitive and critical issues,” he said.
A light put out
The state hadn’t always been so restrictive with press freedoms, experts say.
“Kyrgyzstan has long had the best media situation of any of those countries out there [in Central Asia],” said Bruce Pannier, a longtime journalist covering Central Asia for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “Kyrgyzstan didn’t used to be like this.”
Other journalists share this view.
“We had journalists in Kyrgyzstan working on other countries because Kyrgyzstan was a relatively safe place to be,” Lozovsky, of OCCRP, said. “That’s completely changed. We’ve reached a level of, basically, Russia.”
When Russia passed a law in 2012 requiring media outlets and non-governmental organizations receiving foreign funding to register under strict rules, other countries in the region took note.
Kyrgyzstan’s law is “almost a carbon copy of the Russian law,” Pannier said. “What [Kyrgyzstan] wants is the result. Everyone knows that if the government gets really angry at a particular media outlet, they can just pull this law out and say, ‘We’re going to send in our dogs.’”