ACT Alliance

Maharam Tilavaldieva (left) with the political hoarding featuring her image.
ACT/Martin Schuster

In the small town of Aravan, 20km from Kyrgyzstan’s second city, Osh, political posters between lively streets and bazaars stand as legacy to Sunday’s elections that created the first parliamentary democracy in Central Asia.

One poster seems to dominate in this town. The poster of the winning political party Ata-Zhurt shows two men and a woman. The men are Kyrgyz, the women is Uzbek.

Ata-Zhurt won the election in Aravan where most people are Uzbek. Yet Ata-Zhurt has the reputation of being supported mainly by Kyrgyz. This, only two months after clashes between Uzbek and Kyrgyz in the city of Osh.

The woman is Maharam Tilavaldieva, 51 years, a local authority in Aravan and director of the ACT Alliance associate, Mehr-Shavkat, an organisation which works on issues as divergent as disaster risk reduction and climate change, migrant families with HIV and local community development.

“I was approached by other parties to run for them, but I decided to team up with the Kyrgyz businessman in my town who helped us to keep the situation calm, when tensions where rising also in Aravan in June,” says Maharam. “I hope, together we can work towards peace between Kyrgyz and Uzbek in Aravan.”

People in Kyrgyzstan who supported the revolution in April are surprised Ata-Zhurt polled so well. It was, after all, the party which gave many adherents of ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiev a new political home. “The reason might be that people do not want to support the parties which were allowed the June clashes to happen,” Maharam explains.

In Bishkek and Osh, Butun Kyrgyzstan party members this week held demonstrations and demanded both a recount and the firing of Central Election Committee members when their party failed by a slim margin to qualify for parliament. However, people in Aravan were generally satisfied with the process and the results of these elections. “These elections were a lot fairer than what we saw in these last years,” says Maharam. “The only point, which created a lot of trouble were old voting lists. A young woman I know, for example, left the town five years ago, but she was still on the list.”

In Aravan, this is not a reason to demonstrate. People here are now busy with harvesting. “The harvest in Aravan is good. Businessmen from Russia and Kazakhstan are not afraid to come to our region. They pay up to 39 Som (84 cents) per kilo. Last year, a kilo brought not more than 25 Som (54 cents),” says Eraliev Minabarjan, head of the agricultural department of Mehr-Shavkat.

Soon, they will be harvesting rice, the second harvest this year. The first harvest was potatoes – an abundant crop of fresh vegetables - which they sold to ACT Alliance as humanitarian aid for a low, but fair, price. “Otherwise, we would have left them in the ground because we were not able to sell them.” Selling the potatoes freed up the fields for the farmers to plant rice.

“On 18 October, the university starts again in Osh. Our students from Aravan, who were trapped in Osh when the violence started, are still afraid to go back. So Monday will be our next big step towards normalisation. I hope they will go back and take up their studies in Osh.”

ACT Alliance is represented in Central Asia through its members ChristianAid, DanChurchAid and ICCO and Kerk in Actie. One of the ICCO and Kerk in Actie flagship programmes aims to stimulate growth by purchasing nutritious food from local growers for distribution as humanitarian aid.