Yesterday the members of the committee responsible for devising 3 variants of the new Constitution of Kyrgyzstan met with civil society representatives and journalists. The group finally reported on the results of the work, emphasizing that during public consultations there were a number of disagreements about suggestions and interpretations.

As it turned out, during the whole period of work the committee has been receiving recommendations (more than three thousand of them, to be precise) plus 20 new constitutional projects written by the presidential administration, the prime minister and even by the vice minister Daniyar Usenov. Ironically, the latter supports the presidential form of governance in Kyrgyzstan though suggests that all power is granted to the State Secretary. It is not a big secret that the current State Secretary Adahan Madumarov is a dear friend of Daniyar Usenov. In this light Azimbek Beknazarov, chairing the Constitutional Committee emphasized in his recent interview:

“ I was wondering why Usenov ended up sending his project not directly to the Prime Minister Kulov, but to Adahan Madumarov. We are grateful to the State Secretary though he handed in Usenov’s Constitution to us. ”

The working group apparently was not inspired by the suggestions of Daniyar Usenov and chose not to use anything from his project for the new Constitution. In general there is a feeling that Beknazarov was still trying to push mainly his own positions to be included into constitutional projects. Thus Beknazarov who barely speaks Russian keeps insisting on eliminating the official status of the Russian language in the constitution. Propagating this selfish and shortsighted approach he states that the state language is endangered because Russian language has a status of an official one. In his opinion, every politician nowadays should be forced to speak Kyrgyz. This for Beknazarov is the best way to preserve the state language. Trying to back up his chauvinistic approach Beknazarov refers to the fact that recently Uzbeks living in Kyrgyzstan made an appeal about granting an official status to Uzbek language. Thus to avoid further confusions and to save himself a necessity to speak Russian from time to time Beknazarov suggests to get rid of Russian language. Just like that.

In terms of other innovations that Beknazarov’s constitutional project I can site the abolishing of the death penalty and eliminating immunity of the President and parliamentarians. Though, the so called “functional immunity” remains with MPs immune from the prosecution for any words uttered publicly, with judges immune from the prosecution for their decisions and with president immune from the prosecution for the decisions made while in office.

There were also lots of disagreements among the members of the group when it comes to the state construction and status in Kyrgyzstan. As one of innovators Topchubek Turgunaliev stated, members of the committee was not even able to agree on the status of Kyrgyzstan as a secular state and decided simply to skip any definitions in the constitutional project. Well, there was one brilliant idea actually- the most prominent intellectuals of the group suggested to qualify Kyrgyzstan as an “ecological” instead of “secular” state. With “ecology” in the broadest possible terms.

Today it is hard to predict what fate will touch already devised constitutional projects. They were already sent to the president but Kurmanbek Bakiev has not yet made his decision. There are several ways of legitimizing or deligitimizing everything that has been written so far. The projects can either go to the parliament or be discussed by the member of the constitutional Committee. There is also an option to hold a referendum even though there is hardly anything solid that can really be discussed so far. Some analysts also suggested that there is a possibility that Kurmanbek Bakiev can just send to the parliament the project aiming presidential republic as the possible form of governance in Kyrgyzstan. Though his in the parliament can reject this idea and than tensions will resume. It is also not clear when the new Constitution will possibly be adopted. Though immediately after it happens new presidential and parliamentary elections will be held. Though this scenario also doesn’t seem to be very appealing.