FREEFORUM

Kurultai on the Aksay Plateau started last week and is still going. Usually it's a few days. Talk in Nurzhan is that the Naryn renewal is stuck and nobody in Talas will say why. Our winter power depends on this.
Anyone from the valleys who can tell us without breaking clan business?

I am at the camp below the ring of white yurts. Signal only on the ridge at night, so forgive the hour.

What I can say that everyone already says: the Kökjal elders of the Toktogul basin hold the kamchy over the Naryn renewal. Their families were moved when the reservoir was filled. They will not consent to more drawdown without compensation for the pastures under the water.

In the city you will think this is about money. It is about the graves under the water, and fathers who were told in the 1970s that the water was progress. Money is only the language we have now for that.

The inner assembly sits by sanjyra, Karakoyun at the tör, as always. Talks all day. At night the young men play ulak and the old men pretend not to watch.

Day eleven. The horses are bored. The elders are not.

In Bishkek the papers say the observers are waiting in Tash-Kömür. Polite question only: does the Kurultai know the observers are waiting?
(I only ask. Please, I do not want the partition argument again.)

They know. The observers wait. The elders did not hurry for the Kokand khan either.

Day fifteen. Most of the steppe herders in the outer camp went home, the cattle do not care about the Naryn. Our elders stay in the ring until the end, out of respect. Also because if they leave early, the mountain clans will tell the story for twenty years.

It is done. Nineteen days, the longest anyone here remembers.

Three elders from outside the reservoir lands, Biybolot Moldosh uulu leading, proposed that a fixed share of our side's Toktogul money go every year to a fund for the basin families, run by the Kökjal elders themselves. The Kökjal lifted the whip and stood aside. Nobody shouted. At the end an old woman sang a koshok for the drowned villages and the whole ring was quiet. I am not ashamed to say I wept.

Now it goes down to Tash-Kömür, to the commission and the observers, where people in shoes will take credit for it.

Thank you. In Nurzhan we will be warm this winter because of graves most of us never heard of. I will remember that every time the heating comes on.

Herald: Naryn schedule formally renewed to 2027 at Tash-Kömür. "The Kyrgyz delegation filed its customary written reservation."

Customary. Like the Kurultai. Everybody has their customs.