On March 17, Kyrgyzstan will commemorate participants of the rally in support of ex-deputy Azimbek Beknazarov in Bospiyek (Aksy district, Jalalabad region) in 2002. Law enforcement agencies opened up on the demonstrators then, killing six.

The pain lingers even now. Families of the victims and the wounded remain thoroughly upset by the investigation and lack of adequate prosecution of the guilty. Nobody has been sentenced to imprisonment for six deaths.

Frustrated with the authorities' unwillingness to organize a fair trial, families of the victims and the wounded initiated the so called People's Court and scheduled it for the next anniversary of the tragedy.

Suspects' list (42 people in all) includes ex-president Askar Akayev, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, and various officials who occupied positions of power in 2002. Not one of them has confirmed his participation so far.

The People's Court is essentially an act of despair. Practically all politicians are stone-cold confident that the tragedy in Aksy will never be investigated in the proper manner and that it will never culminate in a fair trial.

Elders commemorate Aksy tragedy victims. Photo by Feghana.Ru

Lies

The opposition once laid its hands on the tape of the massacre made by secret services. Its publication fomented a political explosion in Kyrgyzstan, exposing numerous lies told by Akayev's regime.

It is known for example that secret services handled bodies of the executed demonstrators and did their best to make gunshot wounds look like they had been made by protesters themselves in a fit of violence (the hypothesis suggested then was that these people had murdered one another with metal rods).

District hospital staff, however, wouldn't participate in this infamy. Doctors refused to authenticate the cause of death secret services had been insisting on and informed families of the victims. Officers barely escaped being lynched then.

Local law enforcement agencies in the meantime were arresting survivors and threatening them into signing written confessions that the bruises and wounds had been result of a fall from apple trees.

It never even occurred to the police that hundreds of people would never climb apple trees in Aksy on March 17, well before their bloom (much less fruit-bearing season).

This frantically absurd actions on the part of the authorities and the manner in which the tragedy was handled by the parliament convinced the Kyrgyz that a regime like that had no right to be in charge, much less to talk morals.

No progress

Made the prosecutor general, Elmurza Satabaldiyev pronounced completion of the Aksy investigation a priority and had it put into motion again. Unfortunately, no progress at all has been made so far. Satabaldiyev seems unable to finish the matter that already defied the efforts of his two predecessors including Beknazarov himself.

Meanwhile, it was in support of Beknazarov that residents of Aksy staged that fatal rally in 2002, protesting against the criminal charges pressed against Beknazarov by Akayev's regime.

Beknazarov, one of the staunch opponents of the regime nowadays, told Bishkek-Reporter that the blood shed in Aksy toppled Akayev's regime within three years and predicted that the same lot awaited Bakiyev now.