Kyrgyzstan

In June 2010, violence raged in Southern Kyrgyzstan’s Fergana Valley when ethnic Kyrgyz targeted ethnic Uzbeks in a spate of killings and destructions of homes. Nearly 500 were killed and thousands of houses, entire neighbourhoods, were reduced to rubble in days. One of our team was attached at the time to Freedom House, a human rights and democracy watchdog organization headquartered in Washington, DC. The U.S. Department of States contracted Freedom House to design and implement a communications program to promote inter-ethnic healing in Kyrgyzstan in the run-up to parliamentary elections scheduled for that fall. Using quantitative and qualitative research methods, our team members fielded polls and deployed to Osh and Jalalabad to conduct focus groups probing attitudes about the violence and a possible way forward. Based on the results of these, he designed a public awareness campaign that encouraged political actors to embrace themes of peace, justice and inter-ethnic accord. These included television PSAs shot on location and a social media campaign. That autumn’s election led to a coalition government that pledged to continue investigating the causes of the violence and guard against its re-occurrence. While the Fergana Valley has occasionally been fraught with tension, fortunately violence at the level seen in June 2010 has not recurred.