Sometimes things happen to you when you really don’t expect them.
Well, to be honest this was definitely not the case. I've been warned so many times about bad behavior of local police officers that when they stopped me I was already expecting something more than a standard passport control.
But let's start from the very beginning.
On April 20 I went out for dinner with a group of friends. We had a pleasant dinner in a “dirty-but-cheap-and-tasty” class Chinese Restaurant not far from my place. After dinner, me and a Spanish researcher – by the way, he’s writing a paper on political instability, which is the unofficial name for The Kyrgyz Republic – decided to come back home walking.
Half way to our home, while we were walking in a dark street, a car without any official sign on it rushed on the footpath right behind us and two police officers jumped out from it yelling us to stop. The two officers (wearing uniform, handcuffs and holster) asked us who we were, and if we had drugs or arms with us. We answer that no, we didn’t have anything like that with us and we were told to show our documents.
According to standard UN procedure, to avoid exactly this kind of situation all staff is required not to have the passport while walking around but just the accreditation card provided by the local Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This is of course to avoid two main dangers: first of all law enforcement agencies don’t speak English at all, and this can originate some problem as they could not be able to check your data. Secondly (and most likely), they could think that seizing your passport is a good (and relatively safe) way to extort some money.
After having passed our documents to the third policeman who was still sitting in the car, the taller officer standing asked us something we didn’t really catch at very beginning. Then he moved to the backdoor of the car, opened it and repeated the same question. Roman (the Spanish guy) stepped back and refused firmly.
The officer was asking us to empty out our pockets and put all content on the back seat of their car.
After this request I had the first series of choices in front of me:
- Call the DSS (Security Dept) on their mobile and let them talk with officers as to let the latter know that our Security Advisers were aware of their behavior;
- Try to solve the situation without involving anyone else, try to calm down the officers and obey to their orders without allowing them to do whatever they want, eventually calling DSS in case of deteriorating situation.
After some bargaining we agreed to obey only if we were allowed to put the content on the bonnet of the car, and only one at a time.
To be honest, here we committed the first ingenuous mistake. As I was looking very carefully to what was happening to my friends, the third officer decided it was time to intervene, exit the car and started affably asking me useless questions.
Notwithstanding this, Roman won the day taking some big risk. When the taller was checking his belongings without any specific official utility, the second officer – a short, pudgy idiot – started aggressively grabbing random stuff asking obvious questions. Roman had very few som, but also a 50 euro banknote.
When the pudgy saw it, tried to stretch out his hand to catch them asking -what are those? Roman, who was standing right in between the short idiot and his target angrily rejected him with force and raged at him that they had to touch his belongings only one at a time. At that moment, I seriously thought we were close to end up the evening in the Police Dept.
Fortunately the situation slowed down and they finally decided Roman’s belongings were not so interesting, at the end of the day.
It was my turn.
The procedure was exactly the same: I was controlling the tall officer’s actions while the pudgy one was trying to catch everything to divert me from paying attention to his colleague and the “nice” one was diverting Roman from controlling us.
But in my case, something went the wrong way. Respect to Roman, I had more som and – even worse – my bank card. The pudgy idiot tried in vain to distract me from watching carefully his colleague, until he got to grab my bank card. At that point I had to pay attention to the damned asshole and the tall one managed to hide one of the three 500 som banknote I had with me.
I immediately regained control over my bank card, but it was too late: the game was over and it was not me the winner. They suddenly lost any interest in my belongings and said I was free to put them back into my pockets. As I took the banknotes I immediately saw one was missing, but there was nothing to do. Accusing them of theft after the fact would have only made my situation worse; I decided that 40 euro were not worthy a night in a Kyrgyz Police Dept, I swallowed my pride and put my stuff back into my pockets.
The hardest part was to stand the three assholes saying “you can go, ok? Everything is ok, right?” without yelling at them that no, it was not all right, that their mothers were to be charged for crime against humanity for giving birth to such a bunch of stupid assholes.
Annex
Lesson learned:
- ALWAYS ask them to show their ID BEFORE doing anything by your side;
- ALWAYS write down their names and post as to put them off and to eventually be able, later on, to sue them through DSS Advisers;
- ALWAYS impede them to search you (we didn’t allow them to do it, but we were confirmed only later on that they are actually forbidden to do that);
- ALWAYS demand them to provide a well-grounded reason for their request to empty out your pockets.
- ALWAYS know by heart the quick code for calling DSS Advisers without having to look for their number on the phonebook.
