People convicted of drug-related crimes in Kyrgyzstan usually spend years in prison.
The engagement video that sparked Japrov’s fury showed the young couple dressed in white flying to a mountainside location on one of only three Kyrgyz Emergencies Ministry helicopters that they had rented for £1500 ($3273) per hour.
After hopping out of the helicopter, they strolled down a wooden walkway hand-in-hand and kissed next to a giant white heart as friends clapped and cheered as fireworks exploded in the background.
The video went viral in Kyrgyzstan and infuriated Japarov, who has made a show of admonishing politicians for wasting money since he seized power in a coup nearly four years ago.
His 23-year-old niece, Lazzat Nurgozhoeva, who was Miss Kyrgyzstan 2020, has deleted the video from her Instagram channel but analysts said that Japarov needed to be seen to impose discipline, just as his role model Vladimir Putin had done in December when he punished Russian TV personalities and presenters for their decadent “nearly naked” Christmas party.
“Lots of people discussed the lavish marriage proposal that seemed to use state assets as a sign of high-level corruption,” said Erica Marat, a Central Asia expert and associate professor at the National Defence University in Washington. “The arrest of his niece’s fiancé is a move to quell domestic criticism.”
‘Deeply corrupt’
Edward Lemon, an associate professor at Texas A&M University, agreed. He said that Japarov wanted to present himself as a “man of the people”.
“In reality, his regime is deeply corrupt. They just prefer their kleptocratic activities to take place outside of the public eye,” he said.
Kyrgyzstan is one of the poorest countries in Asia, with an average monthly GDP of £930 per person. Cash sent back by Kyrgyz working in Russia is a major source of income, and when former UK PM David Cameron visited Bishkek in April as foreign secretary, he discussed organising a flow of migrant workers to Britain from Kyrgyzstan.
The West has been trying to woo Kyrgyzstan and the four other former Soviet Central Asian states since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but Japarov’s natural authoritarian bent has made this complicated.
This year Japarov has imposed a Kremlin-inspired “foreign agents” Bill that will give the government more power to interfere with NGOs by forcing those that receive funding from overseas to register with a special government body, and he regularly arrests critical journalists.
Some Western NGOs have already quit Kyrgyzstan, once held up by the US as a “beacon of democracy” in the region, complaining that it was now impossible for them to continue working under the new rules.
This includes George Soros’s Open Society Foundations which had given out grants in Kyrgyzstan worth roughly £100 million over 30 years.
