The Independent: Where have all Kyrgyz men gone?

“Where have all the Kyrgyz men gone?” the British newspaper The Independent wonders.

Entire generation of young men has left Kyrgyzstan’s countryside to find work abroad, the edition said. “So, at least 75 percent of working age men have already departed from Temir Kanat village in Tian Shen mountains (Ton district, Issyk Kul region- note of the news agency 24.kg), while some 800,000 Kyrgyz migrants, in particular men aged 18 to 35, have simply left Kyrgyzstan,” the article said.

“At this time of year, in temperatures that regularly reach minus 40C, the burden of sustaining the village – a strip of tumbledown houses some 200 miles east of the capital, Bishkek, and reached by an icy track that twists through 2,000m mountain passes – falls on its ranks of wizened grandmothers or babushkas and their meagre pensions of barely £25 a month. As a result, Temir Kanat is a ghost village, populated almost uniquely by the very old and the very young,” the article said.

Kaken Kyrgyzova, 74, said: "My son has left to work in the city. I look after my three grandchildren. It is my duty. My son cannot send money so we survive on my pension of 1,600 som (£23) each month. It is hard. We eat noodles and tea because I can no longer tend the crops. Our fire is heated by animal dung.”

“The cycle of departure, and debt, is beginning to erode the communal customs that hold together culture of Kyrgyzstan. The departure of so many young men, a trend critics of Kyrgyzstan's increasingly autocratic government claim the authorities are happy to accept because it removes the strata of society most likely to lead a political rebellion, means there are diminishing numbers in the jailoo ready to continue such traditions,” the newspaper said. “It used to be that the skills of shepherding, hunting and riding were passed on from grandfather to grandson. What child will now spend 40 years in the same place to care for a hunting eagle?” Salamat Omurov, 78, a village elder said mournfully.

The country is ranked in the United Nations' poverty index below Equatorial Guinea and Guyana. But between 2004 and 2008, about 800,000 Kyrgyz men, and increasingly women, scratched together the $100 to $500 required to make the journey from Kyrgyzstan's agricultural hinterland to work in often wretched conditions on building sites, tobacco farms and sweatshops from St Petersburg to Siberia.

With up to 90 per cent of migrants working illegally in their host country, the true figure could be higher. The annual sum sent home by the country's diaspora rose from $481m in 2004 to $1.2bn in 2008, accounting for 27 per cent of GDP,” the edition said.

“There is much talk of a hardening of attitudes among the haves and have nots of a newly stratified society where the certainties of the Soviet era are viewed with yearning. The custom of koshumcha and raja, whereby each member of a community pays a contribution between £2.80 and £7 to each wedding and funeral, has become a means of social isolation. Those failing to pay, often the elderly, can end up being shunned.

Attempts to counteract the corrosive effects of migration are at a fledgling stage. The government last month added an extra 200 som (£2.80) to pensions to help offset a proposed tripling in electricity prices, and 400 per cent rise in electricity costs,” The Independent said.