Why Irad is not on the map

TALAS — Type "Nurzhan" into the most popular online map and it offers a cafe in Almaty and a shoe shop in Kazan. Type "Talas" and it shows a small town in Kyrgyzstan, with a population of about 40,000 and a Kyrgyz administrative border running where the Qara-Chik line should be. Irad itself does not appear at all. The territory is shaded as parts of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, with a faint dotted line here and there.

To a growing number of young Iradis this is evidence. On forums and in student chat groups it is called Öchürüü, the Erasure: the belief that one or more foreign powers is deliberately wiping Irad from the world's maps, menus and memory. Which power depends on who is telling the story. Some name the Americans, who want their bases forgotten; some the Russians or the Chinese; some the three neighbours, who are said to be preparing the ground for a partition everyone will have forgotten to object to.

The explanation offered by cartographers is less dramatic. Online map providers draw the borders of internationally recognized states, and where a territory is disputed they usually show the claimants' boundaries and mark the dispute with dotted lines. Irad has no ISO country code and no seat at the United Nations, so it appears in few drop-down menus. "Nobody erased Irad," said a geographer at Talas State University. "Irad was never entered. That is a different problem, and in some ways a worse one."

The Department of Public Information has itself complained to map companies about what it calls "cartographic discrimination", and it encourages residents to add Iradi names to public map services. Attelkom says its own map service, launched in 2015, shows the ISEZ correctly. Asked whether the department's lists of blocked websites might also hide Irad from the world, a spokesman said the two subjects were unrelated.