A Murder in Kyrgyzstan

Is a prominent human rights activist also a cop killer?

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The bust of slain police officer Maktybek Suleimanov in Bazar-Korgon, Kyrgyzstan. Suleimanov was killed during ethnic clashes last June. (Philip Shishkin)

• Slideshow: A Murder in Kyrgyzstan

By Philip Shishkin

BAZAR-KORGON, Kyrgyzstan, June 10, 2011 — The night before he was stabbed and burned to death, a small-town cop named Maktybek Suleimanov brushed off his wife's pleas that he stay home and sit out the commotion on the streets. Suleimanov had wanted to be a policeman ever since he was a kid growing up in this turbulent corner of Central Asia. He'd ask his mother to pin strips of fabric to his t-shirt so they'd resemble rank insignia. Sometimes he'd go so sleep that way. Now Suleimanov was 41 years old, had four kids of his own, and wore real shoulder straps of a police captain. A broad-faced ethnic Kyrgyz with a buzz-cut and a thin mustache, Suleimanov was a gregarious man who liked to sing at family gatherings. He had been a cop for 20 years.

As his hometown in southern Kyrgyzstan stared at civil war between the region's two main ethnic groups, Suleimanov wasn't going to hide at home. "I told him whenever something happens, it's always the police who get caught in the middle," recalled his widow, Chinara Bechelova. "I said, "Don't go. They'll sort it out without you.'" When Suleimanov heard this reasoning, he smiled, shook his head, and enjoyed dinner with his family. Then he changed into a fresh set of clothes and headed back to the precinct. Because of the tension on the streets, the cops were pulling all-night duty. Bechelova had trouble falling asleep that night, and was relieved to get a phone call from her husband.

"Please watch the kids," he said over a scratchy cell-phone line. Before clicking off, he added, "Everything's going to be OK. Just go to sleep." Around 8 a.m. on June 13, after a couple of hours of fitful rest, she speed-dialed his cell phone, but it rang and rang without an answer.

Suleimanov's charred body was later found in the weeds by the side of a highway.

In death, Suleimanov became a national hero. But his murder remains a riddle. Most surprising about the killing is the identity of the alleged mastermind, arrested within days of the crime: A modest Uzbek artist and grandfather named Azimjan Askarov, well-known here for his human-rights work. Could a man with a track record of helping victims of violence have instigated the savage execution of a policeman?

Kyrgyzstan is a strange place squished into a spectacular landscape of mountains and lakes. An old legend says the Kyrgyz were asleep when God was distributing lands to the peoples of the Earth. When the Kyrgyz woke up landless, they begged God to give them at least something. Taking pity on the Kyrgyz, God handed them a nice piece of land that he initially wanted to keep for himself. The legend claims God kissed the land before parting with it.

Kyrgyzstan's history is every bit as vertiginous as its mountains. In April 2010 — two months before Suleimanov ignored his wife's advice to skip work — a corrupt authoritarian regime collapsed in a popular revolution of the kind now familiar to every American with a television set and a passing interest in the Middle East. An interim government took charge, and fumbled on many fronts. The same thing had happened in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 when an earlier authoritarian regime crumbled in another popular revolution. The interim government of 2005 quickly mutated into the new corrupt regime, which was overthrown in 2010.

I've been coming here for the past six years. Every time I began to think Kyrgyzstan's wild ride was finally about to slow down, it only got wilder. In the weeks following the 2010 revolt, the country was drifting into chaos. In Jalalabad, a major southern town, for instance, I met a former running champ who proclaimed himself mayor purely on the strength of a loud mob of local women yelling and shoving on his behalf. He lasted on the job only a couple of days. By June, the post-revolutionary machinations and scramble for power had sharpened the ethnic rivalries here. Kyrgyzstan's geography is not all about lakes, mountains and divine gifts.

Bazar-Korgon, the hometown of Capt. Suleimanov, sits at a jagged meeting point of peoples and histories. The name translates as "fortified market," a reference to its long history as a trading outpost. For centuries, a network of merchant routes now known collectively as the Silk Road traversed these lands. Some things haven't changed much since the days of the caravan. On a recent drive nearby, I saw villagers riding horses and donkeys down a snowy hill and across a frozen stream to watch teams of horsemen toss around a goat carcass, a timeless Central Asian sport.

The Kyrgyz, nomads and mountain dwellers, wandered over here thousands of years ago from the banks of a Siberian river. Just like not all Texans are cowboys, not all modern-day Kyrgyz are nomads, but many of them still raise cattle in mountain villages. Then there are the Uzbeks, descendants of warring Turkic tribes. The Uzbeks tend to live in towns, and work as shopkeepers, craftsmen or laborers.

For centuries, the Kyrgyz and the Uzbeks lived side by side in the crowded melting pot of the Ferghana Valley, alongside other ethnicities. A Russian journalist who grew up near here has written of his childhood street: "There weren't even two houses next to each other where the nationality of the occupants would be repeated."

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who inherited Central Asia from the tsarist empire, drew borders that sliced up ethnic groups and made it harder for them to mount any coherent challenge to Soviet rule. If you look at a map of the Ferghana Valley where Bazar-Korgon is located, the feverish lines dividing states zigzag wildly, resembling a cardiogram of a racing heart.