It’s classified. Please help yourself.

One of our Spanish friends is a researcher from a European Research Center; his PhD work focuses on political instability in region under influence of former Soviet Union. After some months of travel and interviews in a couple of former USSR countries he finally reached Kyrgyzstan, where he was expected to conclude his pilgrimage.

Last week we met Alejandra, Lecturer of Spanish Language at Kyrgyz National University and common friend, who told us that his laptop and backup disk has been stolen couple of days before.


Apparently he gave everything to his translator for having all documents in English, but someone enter the translator’s car and steal both translator’s and our friend’s laptops. Plus backup copy.

I actually will restrain from underlining the mysterious and fascinating nature of “backup file”, meaning a copy that should always stay separated from the original file to constitute some kind of guarantee. I will only tell you what the result of all this was: Five months of money, time, work, lost in few minutes.

Yesterday I met this Spanish friend again. I was on my way back home, tortured by a Giulio’s style headache and he was going to Metro Pub to meet Alejandra, when we saw each other. I tell you Bishkek is kind of a small city, if it wasn’t clear from my previous posts.

He updated me on the (nonexistent) news about his data; then he told me about the afternoon he spent at police department to denounce theft.

According to his story – that fits at best Franziska’s “Fish bowl” theories on expats – the experience of denouncing the theft was worth much more than interviewing scores of parliamentarians. When he entered the police office with his translator – he said – there were only two policemen in the room. One of them was sleeping on the desk, the other was messing up with tons of paper.

Doing what the majority of all of us would do in such situation, they headed to the (pretending to be) awake one, and told him they wanted to denounce a theft. After a few minutes of unsatisfactory Q&As related to some details of the event, the officer publicly decided this case was not sexy enough to deserve his full time commitment. He then left leaving our friend and his translator responsible for writing on HIS computer what had happened.

If this is not absurd enough, try to add to this scene some nomadic police officers showing out from time to time just to ignore the poor Spanish guy, walk around him, cough up and spit into the trash bin right behind him and then disappear again. This is possibly due to the fact that it’s considered not respectful towards the institution to spit directly on the floor – as almost every kyrgyz is used to do every 5 meters on the street - , that’s why they take the burden of dodging my friend just to target the trash bin.

To make a long story short, my friend and his interpreter were left in front of the computer of the police officer - who went somewhere to use his skills for saving the world - , to write down undisturbed the denounce.

There would be no problem at all with that if “undisturbed” didn’t actually also mean “uncontrolled”.

For more than 20 minutes they had free access to all classified files from the police department. In a while Bishkek had no more secrets for them. Also pictures were not protected, and my friend was allowed to access some of them showing corpses and victims. He was particularly shocked by a poor guy who had his head literally blown up for a close execution with handgun, and the picture of a unfortunate girl who was killed and abused.

I had hard time believing my friend; if his situation wouldn’t have been that desperate, I would have had hard time believing he actually didn’t largely use his fantasy to add folklorist details to his “expat's natural paranoid view on the World”.

This kind of Horror Picture Show was gently offered by Kyrgyz National Militia; they don’t even pretend to take seriously your filing, but at least they offer you a 20 minutes ride on a real police computer.

Much better than the old fashioned “tour on police car”.