The New York Times - USA (2020-10-10)

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALSATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2020 Y A

MOSCOW — Four days after
vanishing during a wave of at-
tacks on government buildings by
opposition protesters, the presi-
dent of Kyrgyzstan declared a
state of emergency in the capital
of his Central Asian country on
Friday, ordering the military into
the city to halt unrest, confining
residents to their homes and ban-
ning public gatherings.
The beleaguered president,
Sooronbai Jeenbekov, announced
the measures in a decree issued
from an undisclosed location and
posted on his official website.
But it was unclear whether Mr.
Jeenbekov, who went into hiding
after violent protests over a dis-
puted parliamentary election on
Sunday, would be able to enforce
the state of emergency in the ab-
sence of a functioning govern-
ment.
Bowing to pressure from the
street, Mr. Jeenbekov earlier on
Friday formally dismissed the
prime minister, the head of the
armed forces and the country’s se-
curity chief.
The dismissed officials had al-
ready given up their posts and de-
crees announcing their departure
merely acknowledged a fait ac-
compli dictated by the president’s
foes.
In a separate statement early
on Friday, the president indicated
that he, too, could leave office,
saying that he was ready to resign
once a new cabinet was appointed
and “we are back on the path of
lawfulness.” His subsequent dec-
laration of a state of emergency,
however, suggested he might try
to hang on to power, but many wel-
comed the move as necessary to
prevent the turmoil from escalat-
ing into a wider conflict. He
named a deputy interior minister
as “commandant” of the capital,
responsible for enforcing the
emergency measures.

Mr. Jeenbekov, seeking to re-

assert his battered authority, re-

appeared later Friday to attend a

meeting in Bishkek with the mili-

tary leadership and is scheduled

to meet with members of Parlia-

ment on Saturday to try and ham-

mer out an agreement on a new

prime minister.

The prospects of an orderly

transfer of power have dimmed in

recent days, largely because the

opposition is deeply divided. Law-

makers, who have responsibility

for naming a prime minister, have

held rival meetings in a hotel and

cinema but have been unable to

agree on a new lawful govern-

ment that could fill the power vac-

uum.

On Friday, supporters of two ri-

val would-be new prime ministers

— both of whom were freed from

prison earlier in the week —

clashed violently in Bishkek. The

country’s former president, Al-

mazbek Atambayev, who was bro-

ken out of jail by protesters and

joined the opposition, said he had

been the victim of an assassina-

tion attempt.

The turmoil in Kyrgyzstan, a

former Soviet republic and the

only country in Central Asia with

a modicum of democracy, follows

two months of unrest in Belarus,

another former Soviet land, and

comes as a military conflict is un-

derway between two other former

republics, Armenia and Azerbai-

jan. The simultaneous crises have

blindsided the Kremlin and left

President Vladimir V. Putin of

Russia scrambling to reassert

some order in a zone of influence

that Moscow calls its “near

abroad” and views as vital to the

country’s stability.

Russia has military bases in

Kyrgyzstan and also in Armenia,

but has so far refrained from fa-

voring one side or another in what

are deeply entrenched local quar-

rels.

The head of Russia’s Federal Se-

curity Service, or F.S.B., the main

successor agency to the Soviet-

era K.G.B., spoke by telephone

earlier this week with the acting

head of the Kyrgyz security serv-

ice and offered help to curb the

chaos in Bishkek, the capital of

Kyrgyzstan. But that Kyrgyz offi-

cial, Omurbek Suvanaliyev, lost

his job on Thursday.

In a separate attempt to rein in

the turmoil in former Soviet lands,

Russia’s foreign ministry is host-

ing a meeting in Moscow on Fri-

day between the foreign ministers

of Armenia and Azerbaijan over a

possible truce in their fighting

over the disputed region of Nagor-

no-Karabakh.

Bishkek fell under mob rule this

week after protesters rampaged

through buildings housing the

Parliament and the presidential

administration and stormed de-

tention centers, freeing Mr. Atam-

bayev, two former prime min-

isters and other detainees.

The violence followed allega-

tions by the opposition of vote

buying and other irregularities in

parliamentary elections on Sun-

day that handed victory to pro-

government parties. Protesters

seized government buildings and

Mr. Jeenbekov went into hiding,

while insisting he was still run-

ning the country.

Mr. Jeenbekov is the second

president of a former Soviet re-

public now struggling to survive

after a disputed election. But un-

like the authoritarian president of

Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashen-

ko, Mr. Jeenbekov presides over a

country that, at least until Fri-

day’s state of emergency, which

imposed restrictions on media,

has had a vibrant free press and

many opposition parties.

Instead of bringing stability,

however, Kyrgyzstan’s relatively

democratic system has opened

the way to regular bouts of politi-

cal unrest in a country bedeviled

by clan rivalries and deep divi-

sions between north and south.

Two of Mr. Jeenbekov’s prede-

cessors were toppled in violent

revolutions and fled abroad to es-

cape arrest. His immediate prede-

cessor, Mr. Atambayev, who is

from the north, served out his

term but was thrown in jail after

leaving office, a fate that Mr. Jeen-

bekov, a southerner, now wants to

avoid.

But securing a deal that guaran-

tees his future freedom will be dif-

ficult as Mr. Atambayev, freed

from jail earlier this week by his

supporters, has been busy rally-

ing opposition to his successor

with demands that Mr. Jeenbekov

be prosecuted.

From Hiding, Kyrgyzstan’s Chief Fires Officials and Issues State of Emergency

A protest in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The country’s fractured opposition has been unable to put forth a plan for a new government.

IGOR KOVALENKO/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK

Ivan Nechepurenko contributed
reporting.

By ANDREW HIGGINS

MOSCOW — Azerbaijan and
Armenia opened talks on Friday
for a limited cease-fire, after al-
most two weeks of fierce fighting
over a disputed province, with the
goal of achieving at least a pause
long enough to collect bodies from
the battlefield and to exchange
prisoners.
But the prospects for a broader
peace deal appeared dim after the
president of Azerbaijan, Ilham
Aliyev, said in a televised speech
Friday that he was happy to have
talks but was making no conces-
sions.
“We are winning and will get
our territory back and ensure our
territorial integrity,” Mr. Aliyev
said. “Let them abandon our terri-
tory in peace.”
The conflict in and around Na-
gorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Arme-
nian enclave in Azerbaijan, flared
late last month and has threat-
ened to spiral into a wider war
drawing in Russia; Turkey, a
NATO member; and possibly
Iran.
“Ours is a tiny country, hardly
visible on the map, but it could be
the start of gigantic war,” Irina
Grigoryan, a teacher of Russian
literature who fled Nagorno-Kara-
bakh a week ago, said in a tele-
phone interview on Friday.
The Russian Foreign Ministry
is mediating the talks after Presi-
dent Vladimir V. Putin warned
this week that Russia could be
forced to uphold its mutual de-
fense pact with Armenia if the
fighting spread.
People fleeing the fighting on
Friday described the violence as
more ferocious than what took
place during the yearslong war
between Armenia and Azerbaijan
in the early 1990s that killed some
20,000 people and displaced about
a million, mostly Azerbaijanis.
Over the past two weeks, many
in Nagorno-Karabakh fled to
basements and shelters. Rafik
Arakelyan, 69, and his wife drove
their car into the woods and
stayed there for six days, ventur-
ing home only occasionally for
food.
“It’s very brutal now — more so
than then,” said Maria Ayrian, a
39-year-old knitting teacher who
was injured by shrapnel as a girl
during the earlier war. No drones,
she noted, were deployed in the
earlier conflict.
The fighting on the front line
this time has been so heavy that
soldiers have not been able to re-
trieve the bodies of their fallen
comrades.
“It feels like one day of this war
is approximately equal to three
months of the first Karabakh war,”
said Tatul Hakobyan, an Arme-
nian journalist who has covered
the region for more than 30 years
and spent much of the past two
weeks in Nagorno-Karabakh. “I
did not expect that there would be
such a full-scale war.”

Soldiers have been fighting in

trenches along the front over

small bits of territory, backed up

by far more destructive weaponry

than what they had available in

decades past. Russia sells weap-

ons to both countries, and Israel is

a major supplier of drones and

other sophisticated weapons to

Azerbaijan.

Armenia said on Friday that 376

of its soldiers had died in the fight-

ing. Azerbaijan has not disclosed

its losses. The United Nations esti-

mated that as of Thursday, 58 ci-

vilians had been killed, including

children, while apartment build-

ings, schools and other civilian

structures had been destroyed.

The International Committee of

the Red Cross said that it had

made an emergency delivery of

body bags to Nagorno-Karabakh

and was “looking at upgrading fo-

rensic capacities across the re-

gion.”

Ms. Grigoryan, the Russian lit-

erature teacher, had fled with five

grandchildren for the safety of Ye-

revan, the Armenian capital. Af-

terward, she said, an apartment

where some of the children lived

was bombed.

“Can’t they stop the war, at least

for a day or two?” she said. “Any

negotiation is better than war.”

While Russia has acted as an in-

fluential mediator in the conflict in

the past, its sway has waned

across the post-Soviet space, and

Friday’s talks represented the

Kremlin’s most concerted effort

yet to halt the fighting.

The conflict in Nagorno-Kara-

bakh has simmered for decades in

a remote mountain region of little

geostrategic importance, after a

war in the early 1990s ended in a

cease-fire but no wider settle-

ment. That changed when Turkey,

which has been flexing its mus-

cles regionally in recent months,

openly backed Azerbaijan, its eth-

nic Turkic ally, in an escalation

that began on Sept. 27.

Mr. Putin this week said that

Russia would honor its defense

agreement with Armenia if the

fighting spilled onto Armenian

territory, raising the prospect of

Russian intervention.

The fighting carried on Friday

even as the Azerbaijani, Arme-

nian and Russian foreign min-

isters opened the talks in Moscow.

The Nagorno-Karabakh De-

fense Ministry said that the two

armies exchanged artillery fire

across the front line overnight

Thursday and into Friday, and

that populated areas on its terri-

tory were hit.

Rocket artillery on Thursday

hit the roof of the Holy Savior Ca-

thedral, a cherished 19th-century

Armenian cathedral in the hilltop

town of Shusha, partially destroy-

ing it. The cathedral was also par-

tially destroyed in the Nagorno-

Karabakh war in the early 1990s

and subsequently restored.

Azerbaijani state news media

reported shelling in two districts

on Friday. The country’s prosecu-

tor general said that since the

fighting started last month, 31 ci-

vilians had been killed and 178

wounded by artillery fire.

The United Nations High Com-

missioner on Human Rights on

Friday called for the militaries to

halt the use of cluster munitions,

which scatter small bombs over a

wide area and are particularly le-

thal to civilians. The fighting also

risked spreading the coronavirus,

its statement noted.

But Nagorno-Karabakh resi-

dents who had fled the fighting

and crammed into hotels in the

Armenian city of Goris, just out-

side the enclave, on Friday said

they saw the coronavirus as a rel-

atively minor concern.

Reflecting the energy that has

gripped both Armenia and Azer-

baijan, volunteers staffed an aid

distribution center providing ap-

ples, jugs of sunflower oil, cartons

of wet wipes and bags of the Cau-

casian flatbread known as lavash

to soldiers and the displaced.

“We don’t want war,” said Sona

Arzumanyan, a 20-year-old

graphic designer who was over-

seeing the volunteers. “But if

there is war, we will serve until the

last drop of blood.”

Mr. Arakelyan, who hid from

the shelling for nearly a week in

the woods in his car, narrowly es-

caped when the vehicle caught

fire because of a mechanical issue.

Eventually, Armenian journalists

gave him and his wife a ride to

Goris.

On Friday, he was huddled in

front of the flat-screen television

in the crowded lobby restaurant of

his hotel, where he and other Na-

gorno-Karabakh residents had re-

ceived free room and board. He

had lost his left leg because of a

bullet wound in the final days of

the 1990s war.

Nearby, Ms. Ayrian, the knitting

teacher, and several female rela-

tives were making clothing for

Nagorno-Karabakh soldiers out of

rigid local wool. Their adult sons,

brothers and husbands had

stayed behind.

“We have been fighting for 30

years,” Mr. Arakelyan said. “But

there were never this many

wounded and dead.”

Armenia and Azerbaijan Open Peace Talks in Moscow

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

and ANTON TROIANOVSKI

Refugees in Goris, Armenia, on Friday, watching reports of the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict. Fight-

ing pushed the families out of Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan.

SERGEY PONOMAREV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Andrew E. Kramer reported from
Moscow, and Anton Troianovski
from Goris, Armenia.

ARMENIA

AZERBAIJAN

Caspian

Sea

NAGORNO-KARABAKH

IRAN

TURKEY

GEORGIA RUSSIA

50 MILES

Baku

AZER.

(NAKCHIVAN)

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The last Armenia-Azerbaijan

war killed 20,000 people.

NEW DELHI — Ever since it hit

the airwaves three years ago, Re-

public TV has been one of India’s

most-watched, most-talked-about

and most-contentious television

news channels.

Its lead anchor, Arnab

Goswami, has made a name for

himself shouting down opponents,

embracing right-wing causes and

aggressively backing up Prime

Minister Narendra Modi and his

right-leaning administration.

In turn, Republic TV’s ratings

have soared.

But this week, police officials in

Mumbai accused Republic TV and

two smaller channels of rigging

the ratings system by paying poor

people the equivalent of a few dol-

lars a month to tune into the sta-

tion and leave their televisions on.

In some cases, police officials

said, people being bribed to watch

the English-language channel did

not speak English and were an-

noyed to tie up their television

sets with programming that they

couldn’t even understand.

Those viewership levels are a

big factor in a station’s ad reve-

nue, therefore fueling its ability to

shape the public discourse.

Republic TV’s dominance has

emerged at a time when many In-

dian journalists say that their

freedoms have been eroded under

Mr. Modi’s government and that

he has tried to manipulate the

country’s news media, especially

the airwaves, like no other prime

minister in decades.

Mr. Goswami, a co-founder of

the channel, has strongly denied

the accusations of bribery, saying

that he was being targeted be-

cause of recent coverage that was

critical of the Mumbai police. He

seems to thrive on confrontation

and has used this moment to rally

his millions of viewers.

“Come to my house, come to my

office, if you have the guts,” he

taunted the police on Thursday

night. “Come and arrest me!” He

called Mumbai’s police chief,

Param Bir Singh, “a spineless

man” and “a pliable tool.”

The news that Republic TV had

fallen under investigation struck

like an earthquake among the

country’s media elite. Mr.

Goswami is one of India’s best-

known darlings on the political

right, and throughout Friday,

other news channels ran wall-to-

wall coverage of the investigation.

A free press has been crucial in

protecting India’s democracy

since the country’s independence

from Britain in 1947. But under Mr.

Modi, liberal media outlets have

been targeted by senior govern-

ment officials, who have berated

editors, cut off advertising and or-

dered tax investigations.

At the same time, right-leaning

media organizations like Republic

TV, which some refer to as the Fox

News of India, are often given

preferential treatment.

In Mumbai, the tables are some-

what turned. The state govern-

ment is controlled not by Mr.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party

but by an alliance of parties, in-

cluding the Indian National Con-

gress, that are rivals to Mr. Modi.

So even though Mr. Goswami is

a friend to the central govern-

ment, in Mumbai he plays the role

of the opposition, hammering offi-

cials and wearing down inter-

viewees in a barrage of invective.

Sevanti Ninan, a media col-

umnist in New Delhi, said if Re-

public TV did tamper with its rat-

ings, “it would show that their so-

called success is not a reflection of

the success of their journalism,”

she said.

There is also suspicion, espe-

cially in the Modi camp, that po-

lice are going after Mr. Goswami

because of his political views.

“Targeting of the media by

#Congress and its allies is against

all principles of democracy and is

unacceptable,” Mr. Modi’s broad-

cast minister, Prakash Javadekar,

wrote on Twitter.

Ms. Ninan said, “Seeing that the

investigation has barely begun,

the alacrity with which the Mum-

bai police called a news confer-

ence certainly raises questions,

especially given the way Republic

TV has been attacking the Mum-

bai police on their channel for the

past few months.”

To determine viewership in In-

dia, households are selected to

have meters monitor which chan-

nels they watch. These findings

are aggregated to gauge various

channels’ popularity, which can

make or break them: The more

viewers a channel can draw, the

more money it can demand for

ads.

The most recent ratings showed

Republic TV as the No. 1 English-

language news channel. Its Hindi

version attracted an even bigger

audience — about 40 times as

many viewers.

Police officials said a former

employee of a research company

hired by the Broadcast Audience

Research Council, India’s ratings

agency, admitted to having paid

households to keep their sets

tuned to Republic TV for a specific

period each day.

“We have interrogated such

customers who were approached

and manipulated,” Mr. Singh,

Mumbai’s police chief, said in a

news conference on Thursday.

“They admitted that they were

paid money to operate that partic-

ular channel.”

Police officials said they were

investigating “suspicious trends”

from two smaller channels, Fakt

Marathi and Box Cinema.

The charges under investiga-

tion include breach of trust, cheat-

ing and conspiracy. Police officials

said they had arrested four people

and were preparing to interrogate

executives of Republic TV.

Mr. Goswami’s position: Bring

it on.

“If you have the guts, Param Bir

Singh,” he said in his taunt di-

rected at the police chief on Thurs-

day, “face me in an interview.”

Popular Indian TV Station

Accused of Ratings Fraud

This article is by Jeffrey Gettle-

man, Hari Kumarand Shalini Venu-

gopal Bhagat.