Archive · 2010 · From the print edition of Tuesday 19 January 2010, Vol. 17, No. 5,276
Across IradA year on, Kara-Köl remembers its conscripts
Four State Defense Corps conscripts were killed on the dam road a year ago today. Their families laid flowers at the roadside this morning. In the basin, people remember the winter differently.
KARA-KÖL — Families of the four State Defense Corps conscripts killed on the road below the Toktogul dam on 19 January last year gathered at the roadside this morning with officers of their battalion to lay flowers and listen to a priest read the names. The four were killed, with two El-Choro riders, in an exchange of fire on the dam road during the Toktogul crisis.
In the ISEZ the four are remembered as the "Kara-Köl conscripts", and the battalion's advance up State Route 1 is presented in the official histories as the step that secured the cities' power supply. A colonel told the gathering that the young men had "kept the lights on in Talas and Nurzhan".
In the basin, where the town and villages were cut off for most of last winter, people remember it differently. Elders of the Kökjal clan, who pressed both sides for a settlement, call it "the winter the clans were made to sell the dam". A shopkeeper in Kara-Köl said he had sold his last sack of flour in February. "Both sides had guns," he said. "We had snow."
The protocol agreed at the Kurultai last August gave the ISEZ the dam and the basin floor, and the clans the high pastures and a share of the dam's revenue. A year after the shooting, both sides' posts on the dam road are gone.