What is unfolding in Kyrgyzstan “offers a worrisome example of democracy’s global retreat and the smothering of press freedom”, The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote on January 4 in an opinion piece.

The newspaper cautioned: “Central Asia has hardly been fertile ground for democracy in the three decades since the Soviet Union collapsed. For the most part, potentates and despots have ruled the region. The small, landlocked nation of Kyrgyzstan was an exception. Though it suffered endemic corruption and experienced waves of popular unrest, its citizens enjoyed an unusual degree of freedom to express themselves. Now Kyrgyzstan is spiraling downward in a suppression of journalists and civil society under President Sadyr Japarov, who rose to power in 2021 and is trying to consolidate his control.”

The latest victim, noted the Post, is online news and investigative outlet, Kloop, founded in 2007 by two friends, Rinat Tuhvatshin and Bektur Iskender.

“In contrast to the ideological journalism of the Soviet era, they set out to create a balanced and independent publication,” observed the US daily. “They trained young people ages 14 and older in journalism basics, hoping to spawn a new generation of reporters… Kloop became one of the most daring and penetrating news organizations in the region.”

Last August, Kloop revealed that a plan by Barcelona’s football club to open a training academy in southern Kyrgyzstan was backed by powerful Kyrgyz families, including sons of the head of the country’s state committee for national security. One month prior to that report, Kloop questioned the sale of “huge volumes of scarce electricity” to bitcoin mining firms that have sprung up in the country. “While Kyrgyzstan makes up for its electricity shortage with expensive supplies from abroad, its own electricity goes into private hands for pennies,” Kloop reported.

“The stories hit a nerve,” wrote The Washington Post, adding: “After the soccer exposé, the president complained, ‘The work of publications such as Kloop brings only harm, not benefit, to the Kyrgyz people.’ He added, ‘It won’t go on like this. I have a request for you: If you cannot work for the benefit of Kyrgyzstan, then at least do not harm.’”

On August 22, Bishkek City Prosecutor’s Office filed suit against Kloop, seeking to permanently close one of its three legal entities in Kyrgyzstan. The suit claimed that disseminating information was “beyond the scope” of Kloop’s nonprofit licence, but Kloop says there is no prohibition against doing so. The complaint also declared that Kloop’s news reporting “has a negative emotional and psychological impact on society, thereby generating emotions of fear, anxiety, despair, panic in a huge mass of people, constantly feeling the instability and uncertainty of the social situation, losing confidence in their strength and hopes for the future. Gradually their fate becomes spiritual depression, hopelessness, dreary expectation of life’s collapse, leading to the development of socially stressful mental disorders with aggressive-criminal behavior, sexual anomalies, chemical and nonchemical forms of addiction, suicidal mood and other disorders of social adaptation.”

The case is still pending.

In September, the Culture Ministry demanded that Kloop retract a story in which an opposition politician was quoted as saying he was tortured while in pretrial detention. The government denied the claim. The editors responded that the article contained nothing false and refused to delete it from their website. The ministry ordered the website blocked inside Kyrgyzstan for two months, but Kloop was ready—it had prepared unblockable mirror sites. They give users an exact reproduction of an original site.

In the 2023 World Press Freedom Index released by Reporters Without Borders, Kyrgyzstan sank to a ranking of 122nd out of 180 countries. The year before it merited the ranking of 72.

Journalism is not a threat to Kyrgyzstan or any other country,” concluded the Post. “Kloop and others like it must thrive if freedom, democracy and government accountability are to survive.”

The fate of Kloop can in some ways be regarded as the canary in the coal mine for the future of media and civil society freedoms in Kyrgyzstan.

After the move to liquidate the title became public, the international Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) urged Kyrgyz authorities to halt the process. It deemed the actions of the Japarov administration "an outrageous and deeply cynical attempt to stifle some of Kyrgyzstan’s most probing investigative journalism, including investigations of alleged corruption involving leading state officials."

In coverage last autumn of Kyrgyzstan focused on Japarov’s links to some big investment projects in the country, OCCRP cited Temur Umarov, a political analyst and fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

“This is a country,” said Umarov, “that’s authoritarian, but pretends to be democratic. The person who leads it can create an illusion. We have two ways to understand every situation. The first is the official one, the one they want to convince us of. And the second is the real one. In reality, I think that Japarov and those who surround him just want to create a good life for themselves.”

Umarov added: “Journalists will write that… all of this shouldn’t be happening, that Japarov can’t use his position to let the people around him, and especially his relatives, earn money from unknown places. But everyone understands that, while formally he can’t, in reality he can. No one will get in his way.”