Kyrgyzstan Puts Cost of June's Ethnic Riots at $71 Million

Filed 9 July 2010 — Bishkek

Kyrgyzstan's emergencies ministry has put the material damage from June's violence in the southern cities of Osh and Jalalabad at roughly $71 million — about 3.265 billion som — while stressing that the figure is preliminary and will move. It is the first number the interim authorities have attached to a fortnight that emptied whole districts and left the south of the country under emergency rule.

The clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbek residents began on 11 June and ran for several days: pogroms, arson, looting, and the deliberate burning of homes and businesses street by street. Official figures record close to three hundred dead. Officials themselves acknowledge the real toll may be an order of magnitude higher. Around 2,500 buildings were destroyed and tens of thousands of people fled, many across the border, many more into fields and neighbouring villages.

What $71 million does and does not measure

A damage estimate of this kind counts structures. It records the market value of what was burned: houses, shopfronts, workshops, vehicles, stock. It does not count the trade that will not happen next year because the bazaar that organised it no longer exists, or the harvest lost by families who spent the season displaced, or the cost of policing a city where neighbours no longer trust one another.

For an economy of Kyrgyzstan's size the headline figure is substantial but not catastrophic. The structural damage is different in kind. Osh is the commercial hinge of the Fergana Valley, and the valley's economy is built on cross-border trade that depends on personal networks operating across exactly the ethnic line that June destroyed.

The relief operation

The ministry set out its aid tally alongside the damage estimate: more than 2,000 tonnes of humanitarian assistance flown in and delivered since 13 June, with a further thousand tonnes moved overland. Emergency rule remained in force in parts of the Osh and Jalalabad regions.

Air delivery on that scale, that quickly, is a reasonable performance for a small state two months into a change of government. The harder problem is the second phase — rebuilding houses before winter in a mountainous country where construction season is short, and doing it without the allocation itself becoming a new grievance if one community's street is rebuilt before another's.

Politics underneath the numbers

The violence did not occur in a vacuum. Kyrgyzstan had been unstable since April, when protests forced out the president and installed an interim administration. A power vacuum, an armed and unaccountable periphery, and long-standing disputes over land and commerce in the south combined into something that neither the interim government nor its neighbours were positioned to stop quickly.

The interim leadership retained meaningful public support through the crisis, and a constitutional referendum held at the end of June passed decisively — a fact easily lost in the reporting of the violence, but the reason the transition did not collapse entirely.

What to watch next

Three indicators will show whether the number published today marks the end of the emergency or the start of a longer decline: the pace of housing reconstruction before the first snow; whether displaced Uzbek families return to Osh in numbers or resettle elsewhere permanently; and whether an independent inquiry into the June events is permitted to publish findings that assign responsibility. Field monitoring in the region is carried out by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, humanitarian coordination is reported by UN OCHA, and the political background is analysed in the Central Asia files of the International Crisis Group.