BISHKEK -- RFE/RL President and CEO Jamie Fly met with Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov during a visit to Bishkek as part of his efforts to advocate for RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service, known locally as Azattyk, which the Kyrgyz authorities have threatened to shut down.
Fly held a “productive conversation” with Japarov about Azattyk’s role in providing objective information to the Kyrgyz people, RFE/RL said in a news release on February 10.
Fly emphasized the historically significant role Azattyk plays in Kyrgyzstan as a leading independent media outlet in all his meetings in Bishkek, including with the U.S. ambassador, European ambassadors, and civil society representatives.
He noted that Azattyk has an established record holding public figures to account.
“Seventy years of reporting in Kyrgyz has shown us that the Kyrgyz people want access to independent information,” Fly said in the news release. “We urge the Kyrgyz government to halt all attacks on independent media and ensure that Kyrgyzstan retains its role as the region’s freest media market.”
Since October, Kyrgyz officials have taken punitive steps against Azattyk as part of a larger crackdown on free media in the country.
Azattyk’s website was blocked in October and its bank accounts frozen under national money-laundering laws after Azattyk refused to take down a video about deadly clashes along the disputed Kyrgyz-Tajik border, where fighting in September killed at least 94 people and wounded more than 100.
The Culture Ministry said the report violated Kyrgyz media law banning “propaganda of war, violence and cruelty, national, religious exclusion, and intolerance to other peoples and nations.”
Also in October, the National Television and Radio Corporation stopped transmitting Azattyk's radio shows, citing “a technical malfunction of the satellite receiver.”
A hearing that was to take place on February 9 on the government’s petition to shutter Azattyk was postponed until February 20. RFE/RL said it will continue to use all legal avenues to challenge the government’s unlawful actions to censor its reporting.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the Culture Ministry’s move to seek Radio Azattyk’s closure, saying the case poses “a major new obstacle to press freedom” which is “under growing pressure” in Kyrgyzstan.
