Relatives of Kyrgyz citizens, who are in refugee camps in Syria and Iraq, want to meet with the President and are ready to organize an indefinite rally to return their relatives to the homeland.
Women contacted the Institute of the Ombudsman of the Kyrgyz Republic, whose daughters and grandchildren are in refugee camps in Syria and Iraq. The applicants asked the Ombudsman Tokon Mamytov to help arrange a meeting with the President and the Prime Minister. Explaining their feelings and despair, some of the applicants expressed their willingness to go to a rally to the government’s house and not to stop it not only until receiving comprehensive information from the government, but until return of their relatives to Kyrgyzstan.
The Ombudsman of the Kyrgyz Republic, Tokon Mamytov, told ACCA that appeals from relatives of Kyrgyz citizens, who were stuck in Iraq and Syria, were received last year too.
“There were most likely consultations. At this stage, I don’t see the need for the participation of the President of Kyrgyzstan, the Government or the Parliament in this matter. The interaction of relatives with a working group specially created to solve the issue of the return of our citizens from Iraq and Syria is enough,” said Ombudsman Tokon Mamytov in an interview with ACCA.
According to him, representatives of the interdepartmental working group will begin working with this group of people in the near future.
In addition, they asked for assistance in obtaining information from the relevant state bodies and directly from the special working group of the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic established to resolve issues and return women and children from these refugee camps over the past year to resolve issue on their return.
It should be noted that a special interdepartmental working group was created in January 2019, after appeals to the competent authorities, including the State Committee for National Security from Kyrgyz female citizens with the request to rescue them from Syria.
In June 2019, the MFA of Kyrgyzstan announced that, together with the authorities of Iraq, the identification of Kyrgyz citizens, who were in this country, was completed, and the issue of their return to their homeland was being worked out. Similar work has been done in Syria.
At the beginning of September last year, the government of the Republic announced that by the end of the month, 78 young Kyrgyz citizens would be returned to their homeland from Iraq.
To solve this problem, the Cabinet of ministers created an interdepartmental working group, which included representatives of the Office of State National Security, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the State Registration Service. The head of this structure was the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic. It was announced that the process of returning Kyrgyz children from Iraq was under the personal control of the Prime Minister of the Kyrgyz Republic, Muhammedkaly Abylgaziev.
However, the authorities did not fulfill their promise until the end of the year.
In December 2019, relatives and friends of Kyrgyz citizens, who left for Syria and Iraq, again appealed to the President Sooronbai Jeenbekov to return their children and grandchildren who are in camps and prisons in foreign land.
Note, according to the State Committee for National Security, about 800 Kyrgyz citizens joined the militants of Syria and Iraq. Of these, about 200 were killed. These are the official figures for 2013-2015. According to unofficial data, up to 400 Kyrgyz women can be in the combat zones. Some of them are with children.
“In 2018, a Russian newspaper published an article about those who were in prison in Syria and Iraq. The names of two Kyrgyz women were indicated there. I found their relatives and it turned out that one woman has four children, the second one has five,” says human rights activist Aziza Abdirasulova. “It all started with that. Then they learned that an 18-year-old female compatriot was sitting in prison in Iraq. Relatives of people, who went there, began to contact me. When their number reached 39, I turned to the President. Now I have applications from 121 families.”
Human rights activists are divided into five categories of Kyrgyz citizens who have left for war zones. The first group includes those who truly followed the ideas of the Islamic State extremists. In the second, there are women, who went there by the will of their husbands. In the third, there are migrants from Turkey and Russia, who went to war zones in order to earn money. The fourth category includes adolescents who are victims of fraud. In the fifth group, there are those who went to the battlefield with the goal of returning their relatives, but ended up in captivity.
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have already carried out special operations to return children and women from camps of Syria and Iraq. The Kyrgyz government is only preparing for such operation. Officials have not yet commented on the progress of the work, citing secrecy.
It is possible that the delay is caused by the fact that negotiations with Iraq are still not completed, and also the list of children to be evacuated is not yet fully specified. Recently, the Apparatus of the Ombudsman of the Kyrgyz Republic posted a message in the republican media stating that “currently the working group is engaged in (including) updating and compiling a list of citizens (women) of Kyrgyzstan and their children born in Iraq and Syria, with the aim of resolving the issue of their return to their homeland”.
Note that according to UNICEF in Kyrgyzstan, there are approximately 150 women and 350 children from the Kyrgyz Republic in the Syrian Arab Republic. It is unlikely that it will be possible to return them all in the near future, since many territories of the SAR are not controlled by the authorities, and this significantly complicates the negotiations on the evacuation of citizens.
The reason for the delay in the humanitarian operation to return the young citizens of the Kyrgyz Republic may be more prosaic; even the first stage of the process requires funds that no one provided for in the budget for the current year. The budget was planned last year, when no one seriously thought about the need to help the Kyrgyz citizens, who were held hostage by the situation. That is, it is still completely incomprehensible how much money the government is ready to spend on the return of Kyrgyz children from Iraq, and where is it going to get these funds?
As for the placement of children, in an interview with sputnik.kg, the Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Development, Aliza Soltonbekova, said that the evacuees will be temporarily placed in boarding schools.
After that, the young Kyrgyz citizens will be handed to their relatives. At the same time, the state doesn’t plan to financially support families that have adopted children from Iraq.
“Guardianship can be issued only to those families that are able to financially support a child, and there will be no privileges. We studied the experience of Tajikistan in this matter. They organized the rest of the returned children in camps and sanatoriums, and other Tajik children said, “I work on cotton and have never been to the camp, but his parents left for Syria and now he is resting.” Privileges can cause discontent, so at home, relatives will take care of the children,” the publication quotes Soltonbekova.
It is even more difficult to estimate the cost of primary rehabilitation measures.
It should be noted that no official data was published on how much the return of Kyrgyz children from Iraq would cost. In early August, it was reported that a draft government decree on the allocation of funds necessary for the implementation of the program was under negotiation. However, as the CABAR.asia was told in the Ministry of Finance, the Agency has not yet received such a document. So the financial side of the issue of evacuating our young compatriots remains a mystery to the general public.
On the other hand, the reason that the government has not yet carried out a humanitarian operation may be the lack of readiness of the state authorities responsible for security. Many people, including experts, consider people evacuated from the war zones as a potential threat to Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia at large.
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