A Failure to Register: Lessons on Democratic Immaturity in Kyrgyzstan

On November 4, a new law went into effect in Kyrgyzstan requiring all foreign travelers – except Russians – to register with the state within five days of arriving in the country, regardless of whether they were covered by a pre-existing visa-free regime.

It was an immediate fiasco.

Kyrgyzstan has for years moved toward openness in order to capitalize on its tourism potential, setting up visa-free regimes with more than 50 countries. The new law – passed quietly and unanimously by Parliament in late October – was met with deep concern by Kyrgyzstan’s large expat and development community, not to mention students and backpackers surprised by the new regulation.

One account shared by Kloop, a Kyrgyz news organization, in the days after the new law went into force was a first-hand account from Veronica Bezumova, a Kazakh woman who had studied at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek and traveled frequently to Kyrgyzstan. She was told at the border of the new requirement. She was not terribly surprised, saying, “For me, it is obvious and logical that foreigners should register in a foreign country.” But Kyrgyzstan, she came to find out, simply had not thought through what asking so many travelers to register would require in administrative and communication terms.

Bezumova spent two of the five day registration period looking for information. Once she figured out where to go, however, she discovered that the registration office was swamped with people on the same quest.

“Every day I was refused for new reasons,” she says. First, there was no physical room in the line and she was turned away. The next day she was told she needed her bus ticket from when she crossed the border. On the third day, she was told they were waiting for confirmation from customs that she had, indeed, cross the border.

A Canadian Kloop spoke to who had come to Kyrgyzstan to study Russian discovered that the staff in the registration center did not speak English and he spoke no Russian, having just arrived in the country to study. A Russian-speaking Kazakh, however, didn’t really have better luck. He said it was difficult to figure out just where to go and what was necessary to bring, a complaint shared by some French tourists.

Temir Sariyev, the most recent former prime minister, called the registration requirement “crass stupidity.”

“This negates the whole point of a visa-free regime,” he said.

It turns out even the Kyrgyz parliamentarians who voted unanimously to pass the law didn’t know much about it. Kloop’s inquiries to various MPs came back with a satirical range of answers, including, “I don’t know… I’m busy right now.”

Rada Tumanbaeva, a Respublika-Ata Jurt MP, recalled voting against the measure and seemed unaware that it had been passed. Abdumazhit Yusurov, an Onuguu-Progress MP, said he was on a business trip when the law was passed but Kloop noted that his name was on the list of those voting for adoption. An MP from the Kyrgyzstan Party, Kubanichbek Nurmatov, said many laws are brought to the parliament in a hasty manner and sometimes analysis doesn’t happen before a vote.

It seems urgency may be a culprit in the law’s passage. Several MPs linked the law with the necessity to combat terrorism. Elvira Surabaldiyev, from the leading Social Democratic Party, pointed to several warnings that had been issued by Western embassies in October. Indeed, both the U.S. and British Embassies in Bishkek had issued vaguely-worded threat warnings for the month of October.

Kloop’s co-founder, Bektur Iskender, said in a column recounting the “year of disappointments” that the registration law was “like a shot in the head of a man riddled with bullets.”

Unsurprisingly, there have been movements to moderate and adjust the law. Less than two weeks after the new registration requirement went into effect, the government announced a new regulation, which would extend the five-day period to 30 days for foreigners coming from a list of 67 countries that have various visa-free regimes with Kyrgyzstan. Then the government said it would expand the list to 90 countries and some may be extended to 90 days. But Bishkek had not published the new list as of this writing.

Much of the discussion about the registration law has centered on its potential impact on tourism in Kyrgyzstan. A bigger discussion worth having, however, is specifically about Kyrgyzstan’s immature democracy and weak institutional capacity.

States have sovereignty; they certainly can set strict registration requirements if they desire to do so. But Kyrgyz lawmakers obviously didn’t think through the implementation of the law. Not only were the requirements poorly assembled – for example, foreigners renting apartments or homes are required by the initial law to actually bring their landlord to the registration office, where he must prove his identity and ownership of the property rented by the foreigner – but the requirements were also badly communicated. Furthermore, the registration offices were not administratively prepared for the inundation of foreigners they received and had no clear plan for how to register thousands of people within five days.

As the saying goes, winning elections is easy, but governing is harder. Kyrgyzstan’s politicians like to tout the state’s democratic progress and parliamentary system, but its legislative body seems inept at serving the people responsibly. How the registration law was passed so uncritically (it was approved unanimously, after all), reflects poorly on the MPs who did not bother to investigate the law they were passing.

Hopefully this episode will be embarrassing enough that Kyrgyz politicians will actually read the documents they sign their names to, but such an awakening may not happen soon enough.

On December 11, Kyrgyz voters will be presented with a yes/no option on a constitutional referendum, which if approved will make more than 30 changes to the country’s 2010 constitution. Among the changes are a strengthening of the prime minister's power, a lessening of judicial independence, and the removal of a powerful human rights protection clause that allows Kyrgyz to seek international recourse against state abuses.

If Kyrgyzstan’s lawmakers couldn’t be bothered to analyze one bill, why would they bother to analyze the myriad changes put forth in the referendum? And if the lawmakers couldn’t spare the time or energy to do so, why would the average Kyrgyz citizen?