Dispatch from the Chüy Valley Since ethnic violence in 2020, Dungans on the Kyrgyz-Kazakh border have straddled two different worlds — Meduza

Story by Sam Breazeale for The Beet. Edited by Eilish Hart.

The Chüy Valley spans the border between the Chüy area in northern Kyrgyzstan and Jambyl area in southern Kazakhstan. For the reason that late 1800s, it has been residence to tens of hundreds of Dungans, a predominantly Muslim individuals hailing from China whose language resembles some Mandarin dialects however is written in Cyrillic script. The Dungans first arrived in Central Asia within the bloody aftermath of an unsuccessful revolt, and so they managed to protect their language and tradition below Imperial Russian and Soviet rule. In line with RFE/RL, there are roughly 120,000 Dungans scattered throughout the previous USSR in the present day. For these dwelling within the Chüy Valley, a haunting anniversary is developing: in February 2020, ethnic violence between Dungans and Kazakhs within the Jambyl area claimed 11 lives and led hundreds of individuals to hunt refuge with relations throughout the border in Kyrgyzstan. A lot of those that fled quickly returned residence, however a deep-seated sense of insecurity stays, almost three years on. In a dispatch for The Beet, Meduza in English’s senior information editor Sam Breazeale stories on how life has modified for the Chüy Valley’s Dungans because the 2020 clashes. 

A few of the names on this story have been modified or omitted for security causes.

It’s an hour-long drive east from the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek to the city of Tokmok — a journey that features about 5 minutes in Kazakhstan, because of the manner the border-marking Chu River winds below the highway and again. From the small Tokmok bus station, I take a puttering taxi to the close by College No. 10, the place college students are taking part in basketball on a dusty courtroom behind a mosque — the “Uzbek” one, I’m later advised.

Once I sit down behind a fifth-grade classroom, I discover Russian- and Kyrgyz-language indicators on the partitions, however nothing in Dungan, aside from six phrases written on the blackboard. The instructor, Gulnara, passes out copies of Leo Tolstoy’s youngsters’s story The Plum Stone, printed in each Russian and Dungan, to every of the 20 college students. After the category reads the fable collectively in every language, Gulnara needs them to debate whether or not the protagonist is a “good boy” or a “unhealthy boy.” However first she has to show them the phrases written on the board, which appeared within the story however don’t exist within the dialect spoken by a lot of the college students’ households.

“It’s very tough for me, as a result of our textbooks are written in Gansu dialect,” she tells me after the lesson. In contrast to most Kyrgyzstani Dungans, the households of the scholars at College No. 10 converse the language’s Shaanxi dialect. “The Gansu dialect is spoken in Tokmok, too, but it surely’s extra frequent [in the area around] College No. 6.”

The ancestors of Central Asia’s Dungan inhabitants emigrated from China’s Gansu and Shaanxi provinces to flee persecution and massacres precipitated by Muslim revolts below the Qing dynasty within the late nineteenth century; the dialect a household speaks depends upon which a part of China their ancestors fled.

Descended from the Hui individuals, Dungans are united, amongst different issues, by their Muslim religion and well-preserved tradition. Their language, alternatively, has began to vanish, based on Gulnara.

“We all know the conversational phrases, the on a regular basis phrases, the home goods,” she explains, “however we’re dropping our language. One phrase at a time, we’ve added Russian. […] My objective is to verify [the students] don’t lose the phrases they do know. So far as making them into students of Dungan tradition, I don’t even dream of that.”

For researcher Rahima Ismayeva, an precise scholar of Dungan tradition, preserving the little Dungan that younger individuals do know isn’t sufficient. “Instagram, Fb, Odnoklassniki, TikTok. I’m in all places. As a result of TikTok is what younger individuals like proper now,” she tells me at a restaurant in Bishkek. Ismayeva’s accounts on these platforms are a successor to the Dungan-language publication Sulian Huizu Bao (“Soviet Dungan Newspaper”), which first appeared below the Kyrgyz-language title Sabattuu Bol (“Be Literate”) in 1930.

She leans throughout the desk to point out me a number of the clips on the newspaper’s TikTok account: some reveal the “secrets and techniques of Dungan delicacies,” whereas others present scenes from the lives of Dungans dwelling in Russia or the US. Below a video about Dungan grammar, Ismayeva scrolls via the feedback and reads her favorites out loud. One says, “I’m Kyrgyz. Dungans have been my mates since [my] schoolyard days. Hello, brothers!”

A couple of minutes later, Ismayeva pulls her cellphone out once more, this time to point out me her daughter’s wedding ceremony footage. “Our oldest married a Russian man,” she says. “That’s not precisely welcomed within the Dungan group. […] We bought a whole lot of judgment for it. However we put up with it, as a result of it’s her life. And in the long run, individuals accepted it.”

After scrolling for some time, she finds one of many photographs: a younger lady in a brightly patterned costume with flowers in her intricately braided hair. “That is my youngest daughter. A Chinese language princess.”

‘Everybody nonetheless has that worry’

In early February 2020, after two unrelated confrontations between Dungans and Kazakhs within the Qordai district in southeastern Kazakhstan, calls to “stand as much as the Dungans” and different xenophobic rhetoric started spreading quickly on-line. On the night of February 7, about 30 Kazakhs instigated a brawl with roughly the identical variety of Dungans, based on the human rights group ADC Memorial.

Inside hours, tons of of Kazakhs from different cities and villages arrived on the scene, together with varied native authorities and group members. By the next morning, Kazakhs had shot at, burned, and looted quite a few Dungan properties and companies. Eyewitnesses claimed that law enforcement officials watched passively and even ran from the attackers because the violence unfold to different villages close by. A complete of 11 individuals had been killed and 168 properties broken, with the village of Masanchi affected worst of all, based on the Kazakh authorities.

Gulnara, an worker on the Tokmok Central Library, remembers that night time effectively: like dozens of different households in Kyrgyzstan, she provided her residence to as many Kazakhstani Dungan refugees as she may accommodate. “We had seven individuals dwelling with us,” she tells me. “Whereas my in-laws had virtually 40 individuals dwelling with them; their relations, lots of them young children.”

This text is from The Beet, a weekly e-mail dispatch from Meduza masking Central and Jap Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Need to maintain studying? Join under to get the complete story in your inbox.