The detention on arrival in Bishkek of Omurbek Tekebaev, a veteran politician and leader of the Ata-Meken party, immediately set off political friction in Kyrgyzstan.
Modest protests started the same day and continued on February 27, when a court ordered Tekebaev held for two months while he is investigated on charges of fraud and corruption. The demonstrations continue.
There's been bad blood between Tekebaev and his former political ally, Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambaev, for months now, and something like this was almost bound to happen.
Tekebaev, who was in politics before Kyrgyzstan declared independence from the Soviet Union, is no stranger to controversy. His Ata-Meken party was the second political party to be registered in the newly sovereign republic in late 1991. (Erkin Kyrgyzstan was the first.) Over the past 25 years, Tekebaev has variously been an ally or an opponent of many of Kyrgyzstan's most senior political figures.
He has been a speaker of parliament, a presidential candidate, and an outspoken critic of Kyrgyz presidents. (Once, as speaker of parliament, he called then-President Kurmanbek Bakiev a "disgrace" and invited him to take advantage of the first available tree to hang himself.)
Tekebaev is from the Akmak Bazar-Korgon district in Kyrgyzstan’s southern Jalal-Abat Province, where some of his supporters attempted to block the main highway between Osh and Bishkek on February 27, to protest Tekebaev’s detention.
Tekebaev was a high-school teacher in the village of Akman in the 1980s when he launched his political career by becoming a local activist. In 1990, he became a people’s deputy in the Supreme Soviet of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic, and in 1991 he became a member of the Supreme Soviet Council and sat on the Committee for Judicial Affairs.
Tekebaev was elected to parliament in 1995 and later that year attempted to run for president, only to have his registration rejected.
WATCH: Kyrgyz Protesters Demand Opposition Leader's Release
He was reelected to parliament in 2000 and became deputy speaker of the lower house of parliament. He successfully registered as a presidential candidate later that year and placed second to incumbent Askar Akaev.
He was reelected to parliament in 2005 and named speaker four days after unrest chased Akaev into exile, and shortly thereafter proposed transforming the country’s political system to a parliamentary form of government.
By early 2006, Tekebaev had become an opponent of Akaev's successor. Less than a year into his presidential term, Bakiev refused to attend a February 2006 session of Kyrgyzstan’s Security Council while Tekebaev was present, forcing the latter to leave the room.
Tekebaev quickly resigned, but even that proved contentious as parliament refused to accept the resignation. Tekebaev left the post by the end of February 2006 but remained in parliament and became one of Bakiev’s leading opponents.
In September 2006 came the so-called matryoshka affair. Customs agents in Warsaw, acting on a tip from Bishkek, searched a Russian nesting doll in Tekebaev's possession and found 595 grams of heroin inside. A subsequent investigation linked the president's brother and first deputy chief of the security service, Janysh Bakiev, to the incident, although he rejected suggestions that he had any part in planting heroin in Tekebaev’s luggage. Janysh Bakiev was dismissed from his position but not charged. (National Security Service chief Busurmankul Taabaldiev resigned amid the scandal.) Janysh Bakiev would later file suit against Kyrgyzstan’s parliament for suggesting he was involved in the whole business.
By then, Tekebaev found himself at the center of another scandal when then-Prime Minister Feliks Kulov, who had defended Tekebaev during the heroin incident, cited an audio recording handed over by an "unknown person" of a purported conversation among opposition leaders -- including Tekebaev -- and NGO representatives plotting to overthrow the government.
Tekebaev acknowledged it was his voice in the recording but said it was heavily edited. He threatened to sue Kulov and the chief of the National Security Service.
After a constitutional referendum in October 2007 that approved adding 15 seats to the previously 75-seat parliament, President Bakiev called snap parliamentary elections. Tekebaev failed to win a seat, and the subsequent period until parliamentary elections in October 2010 marks the only time in independent Kyrgyzstan’s history that Tekebaev has not been in parliament.
Tekebaev continued to help lead opposition to Bakiev until the latter’s downfall in April 2010, after which Tekebaev emerged as a deputy chairman of the interim government led by Roza Otunbaeva and was named chairman of the Constitutional Council charged with rewriting Kyrgyzstan’s constitution. Tekebaev helped draft the constitution, approved in a national referendum in June 2010, which officially transformed Kyrgyzstan from a presidential to a parliamentary form of government.
Meanwhile, Tekebaev’s Ata-Meken party looked ready to win a plurality in parliamentary elections in October 2010, but Tekebaev’s perceived pro-Western posturing seems to have bothered the Kremlin. In what many regarded as an example of soft power emanating from Moscow, Russian television programs -- widely viewed in Kyrgyzstan -- aired footage that portrayed Tekebaev in an unfavorable light, and an unknown person, or persons, posted video online of Tekebaev in an intimate meeting with a woman who was not his wife.
Ata-Meken placed fifth with 18 seats in the 120-member parliament in 2010 -- last among parliamentary parties. Tekebaev was nominated to be speaker but failed to receive sufficient support.
Then, in 2015, Ata-Meken won 11 seats in parliament, again lowest among the parties that cleared the threshold for representation.
Tensions between Tekebaev and the current president, Atambaev, were noticeable in the run-up to the 2015 elections. Atambaev’s Social Democratic Party took the largest number of seats -- 38 -- an improvement over its second-place showing in 2010 behind Ata-Jurt.
Atambaev’s strong support for a referendum on constitutional amendments held in December was the last straw for Tekebaev. The Ata-Meken leader publicly criticized the idea, as did other former leaders of the interim government that took over after Bakiev was ousted in 2010.
Atambaev used his August 31 Independence Day address to attack Tekebaev and others, including ex-President Otunbaeva, who was in attendance and walked out in the middle of Atambaev’s speech.
Since then, Tekebaev and some of his supporters have publicly called for investigations into how Atambaev acquired property on which to build a residence outside Bishkek and into how Atambaev, a successful businessman before his presidential term, earned his fortune. Atambaev and some of his supporters have countered with calls for probes into Tekebaev’s business activities and the sources of his wealth.
Something had to happen, and it just did. And some in Kyrgyzstan see this as Atambaev’s revenge, with a presidential election scheduled for the autumn.
By itself, this latest episode with Tekebaev is unlikely to spark the sort of protests seen in 2005 or 2010. But it does add to a list of problems that includes unemployment, poverty, government corruption, a controversial deal with Canada's Centerra to work Kyrgyzstan’s Kumtor gold deposit, and dozens more issues that Kyrgyzstan’s political opposition has always been able to play upon to challenge the president.
