A post for those who happened to be somewhere in the former Soviet Union in December 2006 - and for those who are easily moved by the Ghost of Pop Hits Past…

If there is one name more often on Kyrgyz lips than the names of former and current presidents Akayev and Bakiyev, it has to be this one - Columbia Pictures. And as with the presidents, we’re not talking compliments. So how did the US film company that gave us Spice World and The Terminator become the whipping boy of Kyrgyzstan?

The hip-hopping girls and boys of Band’Eros have caught on far beyond the borders of their native Russia, and are currently storming the charts in the new republics of the former Soviet Union. In the Russian-language equivalent of American street slang, their hit single ”Columbia Pictures doesn’t present” is asking Eastern youth to pay less attention to the constructed realities of Western blockbusters. ‘I don’t care about Hollywood and Beverly Hills/I’m perfecting Russian flow and Russian skills/Besides, you already know what America is all about’.

Most urban Kyrgyz speak the language of their former masters fluently, and are just as well acquainted with Hollywood as the Russians are. And yes - they are most definitely into Band’Eros.

Sure, the song is maddeningly catchy, and maybe that’s all there is to it. But on a walk around the wintry streets of Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek it’s becoming increasingly hard not to draw the obvious parallel, as teenage girls and police men alike seem to know all the words to this tune blasting out from every street corner kiosk. ‘We’re supposed to be watching the dreams of strangers, but tell me why I don’t believe in them?’

A song about the short-comings of Western media becoming a monster hit in one of the world’s most under-represented regions? As night falls and even the homeless break into spontaneous a capella, it’s very hard to shake the feeling that it’s not coincidental.

Bishkek is thirteen time-zones from Hollywood, and economically and culturally the two cities are light-years apart. That should come as no surprise - and nobody understands better than Kyrgyz youth themselves why Western reality seems so impossibly different from their own, or at times even completely irrelevant.

But what is remarkable is that this never kept the Kyrgyz from being reasonably well informed about what the world seems like on our side of the global hill. Yet our far superior access to every kind of media still has us remaining shamelessly unaware of how the world appears to them. And that is no fault of Hollywood’s. The responsibility does not fall on any one Western film studio – it falls on our journalists. Because far more important than what Columbia Pictures doesn’t show, is what isn’t shown by CNN.

Newspapers and television channels today are naturally focusing on the Middle-East, as they perhaps should while the wires about Baghdad car bombings keep ticking in. But unbeknownst to the common subscriber, the world’s major news agencies such as the Associated Press and Reuters are constantly bringing reports from Central Asia as well. Regime shifts, insurgencies, earthquakes, political killings, even massacres. Each one of these events land on every news desk in the world, each and every day. How many of them are turned into articles, or even a last page notice? It hardly merits counting.

One might suspect that the demand for hotter topics is not the only reason why Western journalists fail to present developments in Central Asia. This is not a region it’s easy to wrap one’s head around, and with deadlines to meet you can’t blame someone for not wanting to start Monday morning taking on something they feel they don’t fully understand. The editor is probably no exception.

Only he forgets that avoiding a topic is poor journalism too.

Once a favourite of the West, Kyrgyzstan today seems bogged down by a weariness of sorts as their once hopeful goal of creating the ‘Switzerland of Central Asia’ seems endlessly impossible to attain. Revolution and civil unrest has washed over this good-natured island of democracy, threatening to outright sink it. The promised revenues from tourism and international business relations again fail to appear, and the Kyrgyz are tracing the latest UN rankings in disbelief. No sense of pride can argue with the facts, and demonstrations won’t have this republic moved to a different category. The cold, hard numbers tell them that theirs is a Third World country.

And in the rest of Central Asia? Following the recent death of Turkmenistan’s dictator-for-life Saparmurat Nyazov, world powers are scurrying behind the scenes for access to the country’s vast gas resources. In Kazakhstan, harsh repression of civil society continues, as the country’s leadership paradoxically set their eyes on the OSCE chairmanship. Central Asia’s poorest region, Tajikistan, is barely getting back on its feet after the devastating civil war of the 90’s, while Uzbek president Islam Karimov has all adversaries fleeing for their lives in the wake of the Andijan massacres.

Nothing to write about? Guess not.

Interestingly, it’s Hollywood rather than the news media that have done more to increase Western awareness of Central Asia this past year. Among the innumerable Western stupidities revealed by Sacha Baron Cohen’s film about Kazakh journalist Borat, one of them is embedded in its basic foundations: the very name Kazakhstan makes us laugh. Far from being able to place it on a map, our vague perception of a Kazakhstan in the uttermost post-Soviet backwaters has us writing it off as so irrelevant as to be almost less real than our own countries.

But Cohen has always chosen his laughing-stock with care, and Borat is no exception. Cohen knows that once the laughter settles around the film’s massive media attention, Kazakhstan and its neighbours will have irreversibly emerged from the obscurity the West has constructed around them. Just as you’re likely to shut up about not knowing the capital of China, the time will come when only a fool would reveal not knowing the basics about the world’s seventh largest country. In short, the Central Asian states become as real as any other place on the planet, while clearing the fog of obscurity their brutal dictators are hiding behind.

Until recently, it was hard to even imagine a Turkmenistan without Turkmenbashi. It’s here now. Presidential elections are set for February 11th – where the road leads for the Turkmen after that is anybody’s guess. It’s a long time since Uzbek president Islam Karimov started having his opponents committed to mental hospitals – evidence shows that he’s already taken to boiling them to death. Uzbekistan without Karimov might be just as hard to imagine as the Caspian shores without Nyazov, but we’ve been reminded of what we ought to know perfectly well already – even dictators don’t live forever. And when the lid is finally taken off the Uzbek pressure heater, anything could happen. The worst-case scenarios for Central Asia are nothing short of terrifying.

Hoping that The Daily Mirror will suddenly embark on broad coverage of Central Asia is perhaps a bit like thinking the next issue of Smash Hits will feature a goodie-bag filled with Tom Waits-collectables. But our newspapers do have a responsibility to readers who trust that dutiful reading of the foreign news section will keep them reasonably updated on important developments in the world. Today, this is not true.

Unfortunately - if the media won’t come to Central Asia, there’s a very real danger that Central Asia instead will come to them. Developments here have warranted attention for a long time, and there might come a time when editors and their staff wish they started preparations sooner. Tragically, disaster is always what it takes to get the attention of the media, and with it – of the world community. However timely it might seem for the television crews, it might be far too late for the people living here when the cameras finally descend on Central Asia.

If nothing else, news channels might start by considering a phrase of Band’Eros’ for the jingle they eventually will have to record:

‘Don’t forget the popcorn, ‘cause even Columbia Pictures won’t be showing this kind of hardcore’.