North/South Divisions

I was walking home from IREX, past one of the campuses of the National University, when a girl stopped me and asked me if I spoke English. I hate that. I mean, I’ve come to expect that, because I know I totally look like a foreigner, but I hate it when my foreignness is pointed out to me.

Her knowledge of English was about as good as my knowledge of Kyrgyz, so we switched to Russian. She’s a student at the National University, working on a degree in tourism administration (a rapidly growing field in Kyrgyzstan). We chatted for a while and then I brought up my research. That got us talking about the country and she mentioned something that comes up in a lot of the literature on Kyrgyzstan: the north/south split. The Tien Shan mountains run straight through Kyrgyzstan. That geographic barrier has shaped a lot of the history of the region. Islam reached the southern part of the country several centuries before it got into the northern part. Russian influence spread a lot more easily into the northern part of the country than it did into the south.

A lot of people, Kyrgyz and Westerners alike, argue that the two regions are fundamentally different. The northern part of the country is more Russified and more secular. The southern part of the country is more Uzbekified (Uzbekistan lies on Kyrgyzstan’s southern border and Uzbeks make up about 13 percent of the total population of the country) and more religious. You see these assumptions all over the place. When someone wants to study fundamentalist forms of Islam, they go to the south. This girl had a lot of the same assumptions. She was from Issyk Kul, a northern province, and she attributed a whole bunch of bad things—corruption, cronyism, violence, ineffective governance—to the southerners who have been in control of the country since the outser President Askar Akayev a couple years ago. She seemed to feel that these people, and the divisions they represented, were the source of a lot of problems for Kyrgyzstan. I asked her why these divisions existed.She couldn’t seem to find the words for a second, then basically said that she didn’t like the southerner’s personality. She said they were always greedy, that they were mean and rude, that they would do anything as long as they got money for it.

Now, what she said, in my experience, has some truth to it. The south is not a very hospitable place to live. It is hot and dry, and the one fertile valley is split between three countries, making large parts of it hard to use due to border disputes. Crops fail a lot in the south. Life is hard there. People who live in an environment like that are more likely to hold onto their resources a little tighter. People in the north has, literally, an unending supply of water. The glaciers in the Tien Shan send so much water into Bishkek that they’ve had to devise a whole system of small canals and fountains to divert it. They’ve traditionally relied more on herds, which can be a bit more predictable than small-scale farming, and they receive a lot more foreign investment because the capital is in the north.

What struck me as interesting was the way this girl was ready to infer a lot of actions based on personality characteristics that she found distasteful. She didn’t like the way the southerners acted in their everyday behavior, so she was more ready to believe that she didn’t like the way the southern president ran the country, or the way the southern bureaucrats did their jobs, or the way the southern populations deal with conflict.

That’s actually very similar to what we see in the U.S. Midwesterners are more inclined to believe that New Englanders are all cappuccino-drinking liberals, even though the majority of New England is rural—I have met a whole lot of very conservative Yankees. Likewise, New Englanders are very ready to believe that Midwesterners are just knee-jerk fundamentalists who try to make their government agree with their church, even though that is just as much a mischaracterization.

My conversation made me think something that I had already been turning around in my head: the north/south split is bunk. I’ve already found plenty of evidence for fundamentalism in the north and secularism in the south. The split just looks like its real because the people have developed different ways of acting in their everyday lives. That makes it much easier to believe that they act different in the religious and political lives.