Kamchybek Tashiev was once one of the most powerful men in Kyrgyzstan and played a crucial role in helping the country's president, Sadyr Japarov, rise to power. Now he's facing charges of plotting a coup in a stalled trial that some analysts liken to a political purge.Tashiev was dramatically sacked from his role as head of Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee for National Security (SCNS) on February 10 while undergoing medical treatment in Germany.When he returned to Kyrgyzstan in March, he was taken straight from the airport for a five-hour interrogation about an alleged coup. After he was formally charged on May 1, the case against him and other alleged conspirators was suspended -- but not abandoned -- on procedural grounds three weeks later.
"Dismissal alone would leave Tashiev politically alive...a coup charge transforms Tashiev from a dismissed partner into an existential threat to the state. It legitimizes purging his network, frightening his supporters, and closing the case to public scrutiny,” Aksana Ismailbekova, a senior research fellow at the Berlin-based Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient institute, told RFE/RL.Her assessment was echoed by Temur Umarov of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, who told RFE/RL that Japarov’s objective was not simply to remove a rival from office, but to permanently erase him.“Japarov doesn't want to leave this story halfway and wants to completely destroy any potential for Tashiev to come back to politics without killing him,” Umarov said.Friends Turned EnemiesJaparov's rise was one of the most abrupt political turnarounds in modern Central Asia: from a prison cell to the presidency in less than two weeks, propelled by mass protests and the collapse of the existing political order.The trigger came on October 5, 2020, when disputed parliamentary elections sparked nationwide demonstrations. That night, protesters stormed the prison where Japarov was serving an 11-1/2-year sentence for kidnapping a regional official.
