On a hot Thursday one year ago, just over a week before I left Kyrgyzstan, I made a small piece of Peace Corps Kyrgyz Republic history: I became the first volunteer in nearly two decades to lead a project in Batken Oblast. It doesn’t sound like a big deal if you don’t know Peace Corps Kyrgyzstan very well, so let me start from the beginning with an overview of what Batken is and why it’s so cool.
Batken is the second-smallest (ahead of Talas) Oblast (region) in Kyrgyzstan. With about 380,000-480,000 people (it is estimated to have grown by 100,000 people from 2009-2015), it is one of the less populous provinces of the country, ahead of Naryn, Talas, and by some estimates, Issyk-Kul. Batken is notable in comparison to the other provinces in that it is surrounded on 3 sides by Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and that it only borders one other oblast, Osh. It also has a series of enclaves of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan entirely contained within it, unique in Central Asia.
Batken didn’t exist until October 1999, when it was broken off of Osh Oblast to make a new province. Many sources I’ve seen suggest that this was done as a part of addressing the activities of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is a radical organization that was dedicated to creating an Islamic state in Uzbekistan (today they are allied with ISIS).
Peace Corps hasn’t really ever had much history in Batken. Based on what I could learn from our longest-working staff members and local people, the Peace Corps has never had volunteers in Batken. According to some people, there may have been a few volunteers in eastern Batken back when it was still a part of Osh oblast, but I never could discern this to any level of certainty. And after 1999, there was definitely nobody, because the oblast was declared forbidden for all Americans by the embassy security.
So what exactly happened in 1999 that led to a new oblast and a travel ban?
The IMU that I mentioned earlier, operating from bases in Tajikistan in the chaos there following that country’s civil war, entered Kyrgyzstan and kidnapped several Japanese geologists and held them for ransom. In 2000, they did the same with a group of American mountaineers. During that period, 49 Kyrgyzstani soldiers were killed, and every so often tensions related to this crop up.
Apart from that, the enclave and exclave situation means that every so often, resource disputes occur, mostly at a small local level, over access to resources like water; in many areas of Batken, a canal will cross what is now an international border several times, leading to tensions over access to water.
Naturally, this made most embassies skittish, and unfortunately a generally poor level of understanding of the nuanced patchworks of peoples and cultures that live in the province and horror stories of visa checks on the old roads through the exclaves/enclaves meant that the travel ban, in my opinion, went on a lot longer than was really justified, particularly as the justifications occasionally took on an ethnonationalist bent from people who had never actually spent time in the region.
Today, though, new roads mean that there is no longer a need for several pages of multiple-entry visas, and new institutions mean that more and more organizations are finally allowing their staff to travel through Batken, which has long been known by backpackers and climbers as one of the most unique parts of all of Central Asia.
My Project
What was I actually doing there though? In my last few months in Kyrgyzstan, my friend Isabek invited me to run a few college counseling sessions for students at several private schools outside Bishkek. Having navigated the US college admissions process from prep school, and having just finished the graduate admissions process, I’m quite well versed in the process and strategies that many students from elite schools use to gain an advantage, so I felt really comfortable breaking down my strategies to them.
Well, this expanded to other schools elsewhere in Kyrgyzstan, and I was very quickly invited out to two schools a few hours from Osh. The snag was that they were in Batken oblast, which at the time was still completely off-limits. If you went and Peace Corps got any wind whatsoever, including from local gossip, you were immediately to be ad-sepped.
But luckily, after some petitioning and a pilot trip by our head of security, I finally got the clearance to go with one of our staff members accompanying me to do the trainings, each taking about three hours, in a single day, with the stipulation that I could not be in Batken after dark.
The restrictions still feel silly, but the clearance was there, and so I went and was able to share the information with a lot of very smart bright young people looking to continue their education.
As tends to happen, though, they taught me more than I taught them. I learned all about how Batken happens to supply a disproportionate amount of the migrant laborers that account for over a third of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP. And I learned that many of them don’t always follow visa regulations to the letter, both deliberately and unintentionally.
As a result, many countries now are very likely to deny a visa application, even a student visa application, simply because one’s passport says that one is from Batken. This was very upsetting for me to learn, as it is blatantly discriminatory on the part of countries like the US to reject someone solely because of where they come from. We have screening tools in place to make an educated judgement of whether someone will play by the rules, and any unjustified rejection is an embarrassment and insulting to the people of Kyrgyzstan.
Visiting Batken Logistics
Batken isn’t difficult to get to from Osh; minibuses leave regularly from Osh to Batken and points in between Osh and Batken. Once a day, there is a marshrutka to Isfara at the very far western tip of Batken province, but be sure to check your visa needs for that one, as I’m told the road after might be difficult. Getting from Khujand, Tajikistan to Batken is simple, just take a marsh or a taxi to the border, cross, and find another into the other city. “Granitsa Tajikistana” means “Tajik Border” in broken Russian, and should get you there.
You also have the option to fly from Bishkek to Batken a few times a week or to Isfara once a week on TezJet. Tickets can be purchased through various travel agencies in Kyrgyzstan.
So what are you waiting for? Add Batken to your list!