Kyrgyzstan: Days Before Parliament Vote, Authorities Round Up Last Of Opposition


Kadyrbek Atambayev, former president Almazbek Atambayev’s son seen here in a mugshot released by Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, was one of the 10 people arrested during the recent roundup. (Photo: mvd.gov.kg)

November 25, 2025 
Eurasianet
By Alexander Thompson

(Eurasianet) — The raids began before dawn on November 22. Masked special forces troops broke through the doors across Kyrgyzstan, dragging off leading opposition figures from the Social Democrats, a former first lady, and an anti-corruption activist.

The State Committee for National Security arrested 10 individuals for allegedly calling for mass disorder and plotting to violently overthrow the government. They also brought in an eclectic collection of others for hours-long interrogations; among the detainees were former President Almazbek Atambayev’s wife, a candidate in the last presidential election and a prominent journalist’s ex-wife.

“All of this is theatre of the absurd, not justice,” Kadyrbek Atambayev, Almazbek Atambayev’s son and one of the arrested Social Democrats leaders, wrote in a jailhouse letter dated November 23.

The raids may have come as a surprise to their targets, but with a week left before the November 30 parliamentary elections, the timing seems calculated.

An announcement that a coup attempt has been uncovered and foiled in the weeks before an election has practically become a tradition in President Sadyr Japarov’s Kyrgyzstan. Similar scenarios played out prior to the 2021 parliamentary elections and last year’s local elections.

Though the outlines of the latest alleged plot are vague, the message is clear. Authorities want to ensure anyone who might try to foment a protest over the results of the upcoming election is either behind bars or well spooked before the balloting begins.

Japarov basically spelled it out at the end of a lengthy Facebook post November 9.

“There will be no coups,” he wrote, referencing the street protests and unrest that have toppled three Kyrgyz presidents during Kyrgyzstan’s post-Soviet history, and in 2020 brought him to power. “From now on, you’ll only see coups in your dreams.”

The November 22 security sweep kneecapped the already much diminished Social Democrats, a left-leaning successor to the Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan that largely served as the personal vehicle of Almazbek Atambayev, a former president.

Authorities arrested Temirlan Sultanbekov, the outspoken 29-year-old party chairman; Kadyrbek Atambayev, the former president’s 32-year-old son; Ermek Ermatov, a party member; and Damir Musakeev, the elder Atambayev’s former bodyguard.

Two ex-MPs, Shailoobek Atazov and Kubanychbek Kadyrov, were also arrested. Kadyrov was an Almazbek Atambayev ally-turned-foe previously arrested when Atambayev was president and again under Japarov after having clashed with both. Atazov is a politician from Osh who was kicked out of parliament in 2024 over his links to an organized crime boss.

Another individual identified in local media as one of the 10 arrested is Urmat Baryktabasov, a businessman who was a prominent opposition figure between 2005 and 2011. However, he hasn’t been active in public life for more than a decade.

The group supposedly planned to organize protests around the country after Sunday’s elections allegedly with the intent to create mass disorder and seize government buildings, according to a Ministry of the Interior statement.

As evidence to substantiate the arrests, security forces put out a video purportedly of Sultanbekov, the Social Democrats chair, talking with an unidentified “citizen” in a dining room. In the undated video, Sultanbekov said he believed regime change would come within three years but hoped it would be sooner.

Eurasianet could not authenticate the video.

“The investigators say I predicted regime change. Have they lost their minds? What’s illegal about that?” Sultanbekov said in a message posted by his mother on Facebook November 24.

Authorities also released photos of automatic weapons, bullets and stacks of US dollars they said they found in the suspects’ homes.

“All that didn’t come out of our house. Where they got that, I don’t know,” Sultanbekov’s mother said in a November 23 video. “Authorities said it themselves that before the elections dirty games would start, and that’s exactly how it turned out.”

Sultanbekov and the younger Atambayev were among the few politicians active in Kyrgyzstan willing to publicly criticize the president and his administration. Since Japarov, along with powerful security services chief Kamchybek Tashiev, came to power in 2020, Kyrgyzstan’s ranking has plunged in annual surveys published by democracy and anti-corruption watchdog groups.

In a video posted on Instagram the day before his detention, Sultanbekov called for limits on Chinese workers and criticized Japarov’s stance on the perennial hot-button issue. Meanwhile, Kadyrbek Atambayev recently requested the prosecutor’s office investigate the country’s cryptocurrency mining firms, a Japarov pet project.

In a closed-door hearing November 23, all the alleged plotters were ordered to remain in custody until January 17, independent outlet Tandyr Media reported.

State security services representatives questioned nearly a dozen others for hours without counsel before releasing them. Atambayev’s wife, the former first lady, Raisa Atambayeva, was detained for over eight hours, family members told reporters.

Security officers also questioned Adakhan Madumarov, the veteran leader of the conservative, nationalist Butun Kyrgyzstan opposition party and a fierce Japarov critic. Madumarov garnered 7 percent of the vote in the 2021 presidential election, enough to place second to Japarov. He was arrested and booted from parliament after vehemently opposing the Uzbekistan border deal.

Others’ connections to the political opposition appear thin.

“I have nothing to do with this. [Atambayev’s] son I don’t know at all,” former anti-corruption prosecutor Syimyk Japykeev, who hasn’t been politically active for years, told journalists as he arrived at the security committee’s headquarters for questioning.

Exiled journalist Dmitry Lozhnikov’s ex-wife was also taken in for questioning. “Why is she there???,” Lozhnikov wrote on social media. “I don’t do coups. I don’t do calls [to disorder]. I do journalism.”

The Social Democrats managed to put up just a single candidate in the upcoming parliamentary elections. Sultanbekov was arrested before the local elections last fall and convicted of vote buying, which he denied. Almazbek Atambayev, who lives in exile, was sentenced in absentia to 11 years in prison in June on charges his lawyers dismissed as politically motivated.

Atambayev himself was not afraid of employing sharp-elbow political tactics when he ran the country from 2011 to 2017. During his tenure, nearly a dozen opponents, including a prominent party leader, were jailed in the run-up to constitutional changes in 2017. That same year, Japarov received a lengthy prison sentence after being convicted in a plot to kidnap a regional governor. Yet, under the Atambayev administration, civil society, the political opposition and the press remained comparatively free compared to the present day.

Alexander Thompson is a journalist based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, reporting on current events across Central Asia. He previously worked for American newspapers, including the Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier and The Boston Globe.


Eurasianet

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