This is a translation of the article that appeared in the Russian version of our blog. The post was submitted by Alieva. She narrates on the recent confusion that was caused by Kyrgyz officials who tend to really misbehave abroad.

Kurmanbek Bakiev last week expressed his dissatisfaction with the work of the members of the government and, in particular, with their indecent behavior during official visits abroad.

This information leaked from the closed-door meeting of the government. Even though journalists were not invited the massive confusion became public. The scandal was sparked by the fact that almost half of the government officials chose to travel to Shanghai for the meeting of the Shanghai Organization for Cooperation. Some did that for work, others, apparently,-for fun. During the event in Shanghai Kyrgyz White House seemed to be completely deserted: no single minister, no representatives of the presidential administration, no press service stuff.

The president got warned on the situation of late and didn’t not have a choice but to handle it afterwards. President’s press service did it best to keep the scandal unpublished but the information agency 24KG featured some details of the scandalous government meeting.

According to the information of 24 KG Kurmanbek Bakiev addressed his subordinates’ misdeeds in the following manner:

“The parliament already considered the results of your work completely insufficient. Though, I chose to keep you all at your present positions. I really thought you hadn’t had enough time to deal with all challenges descending on us.I though it’d be necessary to give you more time to get your work done. Now I think I was mistaken.”

Surprisingly enough it took a certain amount of time for the president to realize that the misdeeds of his cabinet already went through the roof. To be more precise, it took time and a number of official visits abroad. It turned out, that interactions with foreign delegations and businessmen became somewhat revelatory for the Kyrgyz president. Let us be straight here- the president was shocked by the behavior of his cabinet abroad.

One example. According to a number of sources that got particularly eloquent after the outburst of Kyrgyz president’s dissatisfaction, during the latest Shanghai visit one of the Kyrgyz ministers (with no names being specified so far) got completely drunk and at some point started being really politically incorrect with some of the members of the Chineese official delegation.

It’s worth emphasizing that concerns over the professional behavior of Kyrgyz officials abroad have already been in place for a while. Almost a year ago Usen Sidikov (a former head of the presidential administration) was appointed to be in charge on coaching Kyrgyz ministers on the code of the professional diplomatic conduct abroad. It was planned that the Ministry of Foreign Affaires should have trained every Kyrgyz official on holding the tongue and behaving well when crossing borders of any state. The procedure though seemed to be never fully implemented. Kyrgyz politicians were let of the leash and the situation turned out to be really uncontrollable.

Now Kurmanbek Bakiev is determined to get his subordinates back on track. The president already announced that all travel reimbursements for the government officials were to be cut tremendously. Previously there were 5 million soms allocated for these purposes. The money has apparently been spent rather loosely and uncontrollably.
According to Kurmanbek Bakiev, this will no longer be the case.

During the government meeting Bakiev also called upon the Prime Minister Felix Kulov and asked him to apply a dictatorial approach when dealing with ministers. The president also warned against granting any holiday leafs to the ministerial cabinet before upcoming December.
Now it remains to be seen whether these complex measures will really contribute the increase in the efficiency of the work of state “servants”.