Then she won the IWMF’s Courage in Journalism Award.
“The award helped me get back to my work – actually, back to my life,” said Sydykova. The award also convinced her that she should not leave journalism, because what she was doing was important for the democracy movement in Kyrgyzstan. Sydykova founded her weekly newspaper in 1992, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, with high hopes for her country’s independence and transition to democracy. She quickly became disillusioned.
Winning the Courage Award helped Sydykova regain a sense of purpose. It also went a long way toward convincing skeptics about the importance of her work. “The award inspired me, my family and many readers,” she said. “They could see that I was put in jail not because I’d done something wrong but because I had written the truth.”
The award also put the Kyrgyz authorities on notice that the international media was watching the state of the free press in Kyrgyzstan. Sydykova received a grant for Res Publica in the amount of $24,000 from Time Warner, which was promised to her by the company’s chairman and CEO Richard Parsons at the Courage ceremony in New York.
When she returned to Kyrgyzstan in October 2000, Sydykova found still more roadblocks in her way. She ultimately paid $25,000 — a huge sum equal to about two years’ operating expenses for the newspaper — in fines to resolve libel suits she said were politically motivated. She raised the money to pay the fines by auctioning off the newspaper’s computers and furniture. She also put the $2,000 she won with the Courage Award toward this cause. The paper began publishing again, which was one of her goals.
In January 2002, Sydykova joined with seven other independently owned media houses to protest continued political pressure from the state-owned publishing monopoly, Uchkun, which would find one excuse or another to block printing of their publications if the government disliked their articles. The resulting furor prompted the U.S. and European governments to underwrite start-up operations for the country’s first private printing company, which was launched in November 2003. Today, the press publishes nearly 50 titles, including Res Publica, and is close to the break-even point financially.
“This is the fruit of all our efforts to resist pressure,” Sydykova said. “In the previous printing house, the KGB agent was there, reading copy.”
Sydykova continues to cover corruption and to keep pressure on her country’s authoritarian government. This spring, she wrote a series of four articles looking into the sharp increase in what she calls “mandated murders” of business owners. She said that criminal gangs “are looking for very rich business people, then try to extort money from them. If they don’t receive money [from the business owners], they kill them.” The Interior Ministry has made minimal headway in solving the murders, she said, and her investigation found that “while it is very difficult to tell for certain, we concluded that these murders are connected with the coming together of the top brass of the Interior Ministry, the government and the criminal groups.
In April 2004, soon after the articles were printed, thugs beat up her 21-year-old son, Chingiz. This was Chingiz Sydykov’s second beating; he had been beaten by police militia in 1997, soon after his mother was released from jail. Sydykova said these were “absolutely” acts of vengeance for her critical articles. “This is a new form of psychological pressure on me that the government and authorities are trying to devise.”
Kyrgyzstan has changed dramatically since the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States. U.S. troops used Kyrgyzstan as a base for launching attacks at Taliban-dominated Afghanistan and to pursue al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
“This is where I’m critical of the American government,” said Sydykova. “After the Kyrgyz government became part of the Afghan coalition, immediately the American government became less critical of the anti-democratic action by our government. I think there was some kind of agreement that if the Kyrgyz government allowed U.S. bases on our territory, the Americans agreed not to be critical of the opponents of democracy.”
Res Publica’s circulation is 5,000 copies a week. It has national distribution and its own website. Though the newspaper doesn’t reach most rural people, Sydykova said they can hear her on the radio, where she is a frequent commentator. She is also a correspondent for Prague-based Radio Free Europe, which broadcasts programs into the country in both Kyrgyz and Russian. Since winning the Courage Award, she has also become something of a one-stop source about the country for many foreign journalists.
Sydykova is apprehensive about pressures against the independent media and new political activists. She is also worried about the rise in murders in Kyrgyzstan and the threat this could pose for the unfolding political process.
“I think the situation may even get worse with the upcoming elections. The situation goes from bad to worse. It can become chaotic,” she said. Defending her newspaper from political attacks is one challenge, but she says even more fearsome is that “all kinds of political initiative can be strangled.”
She knows her paper will play a role in this drama. “We will try our hardest to help to have a transparent, fair, honest election,” she said, “so we can have a change of guard and get rid of the authoritarian government which we now have.”