Centre for Applied Human Rights
Aida Baijumanova
Kyrgyzstan, CAHR, Autumn 2015
Hello, I'm Aida from Kyrgyzstan. Not so many people have heard about my country and usually people only know that we were part of the Soviet Union and that we are located in Central Asia. Those, who had chance to visit the country, tell about its beauty, great mountains and about its pearl – the Issik-Kul Lake.
I was born thirty-eight years ago in a wonderful family and grew up in a caring and warm atmosphere. My main life principles and attitude to people have been influenced by my parents and family.
With the beginning of "Perestroika" in the USSR in 1985, the situation had started to change: "Glasnost", "Democracy", and "Market economy" were announced loudly in the situation of economic deterioration in the country; big factories were closed, causing a loss of jobs. In this difficult period people tried to survive in a new political and economic reality. My parents also learned to live in new conditions, and despite all the difficulties they have done everything to give a good education for me, my sister and brother.
1991 was the year of big changes such as the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the declaration of independence of Kyrgyzstan, development of movements for democratic reforms and civil society. During this period of high expectations for change, and hope for a better future, I was studying at university.
After graduation from the university, I started my career as a lecturer of political science. That was a time of continuing education; active work on development of my skills; interesting and hot discussions in the university rooms. Once one of my students asked me to help an NGO organize an observation of local elections, and that was a new experience of practical work on promotion of election transparency and election rights as well as a new step in my career.
Later I became more and more involved and interested in the activities of this organization and the work in the NGO sector became my main activity. Here I saw a real opportunity to influence the improvement of the situation in the country and a chance to protect and promote human rights.
My colleagues and I are often under pressure and persecution from the police, the security services, nationalistic and radical groups, and the media.
The work of our NGO, "Human Rights Movement 'Bir Duino Kyrgyzstan'", is an example of how our victory in the Constitutional Court can protect the rights of all Kyrgyz citizens in peaceful meetings and demonstrations; how we can protect the rights of victims of ecological catastrophe through the support of one local leader; how the protection of rights of one small group of teachers for legal additional payments gave strength to teachers around the country to protect their rights independently; and how a victim of torture, who was sentenced to life imprisonment, received a reply from the UN Committee on Human Rights requesting Kyrgyzstan to restore his rights.
But the most difficult time of my human rights protection work was the year of 2010, when an interethnic conflict took place in the south of the country. Hundreds of people were killed, cases of illegal detentions and torture occurred, people lost their relatives and their houses. In this situation the most vulnerable part of the population were national minorities, who did not have access to justice. We established a public reception, where we invited professional lawyers and every day hundreds of people came for juridical help, and dozens of people received protection in the court.
It was a difficult period for all of us, when - because of pressure and persecution - the head of our organization had to leave the country. As a deputy head I took full responsibility for our activities and security of my colleagues. Despite all the difficulties, our organization survived and our public reception in the southern region became a legal regional representative office, which supports the ordinary people there.
As a member of an organization, which protects the civic and political rights of citizens and vulnerable groups of people, my colleagues and I are often under pressure and persecution from the police, the security services, nationalistic and radical groups, and the media.
In my professional life there have been cases, when my colleagues and I were arrested for participation in a peaceful rally; when the head of the organization Tolekan Ismailova together with young activists were arrested for 7 days; when she was arrested again at Tashkent airport in Uzbekistan; when our south office was under search by the security services and our lawyers were accused of storage of drugs. Each situation was a new challenge for me, however, together with our colleagues, we struggled for justice for our lawyers and our organization and won the court case without education or experience in dealing with such cases.
In the last 3 years, as a result of the integration processes with Russia, the civil society in Kyrgyzstan feels the weakening of the political space for NGOs and a growing pressure from the special forces, radicals, and parliamentarians, who limit the activities of the whole civil society sector through the copying of Russian legislation on "Foreign agents". This is a new reality we face in our human rights protection work. Thus, we need to be prepared to react in situations of risk.
Today as a fellow of CAHR program at the University of York I'd like to study more the international mechanisms on protection of the rights of human rights defenders at risk, through learning from the experience of the leading human rights organizations and I plan to develop a manual for human rights defenders in Kyrgyzstan. I hope that this will be a useful and important instrument for my colleagues in the human rights protection sphere.