Thirty years on, the steppe remembers Kudaibergen

NURZHAN — On a low rise beside the railway approaches to Nurzhan, where a cairn of steppe stones marks the place Kudaibergen Duishön uulu fell, several hundred people gathered yesterday to mark thirty years since the battle of the Kobozev railhead. Riders came from the Boztorgoy camps, families came by bus from Talas, and Nurzhan schoolchildren from the school that bears his name brought flowers.

Kudaibergen is one of the few figures of the 1992 war honoured on both sides of the Qara-Chik line. Popular legend credits him with breaking the socialist counterattack at the railhead, and steppe bards sang koshok laments for him yesterday as they have every 28 July since. Military historians, and the documentary history published by Talas State University, give the decisive role to American air strikes, and the number of tanks destroyed by Iradi fighters has never been confirmed. Nobody at the cairn mentioned the dispute.

His brother Sabyrbek, the Boztorgoy biy, spoke for about ten minutes. "My brother did not ride for the steppe or for the city," he said. "He rode for the people behind him. Thirty years on, they are still behind him, and some of them are in this city."

Afterwards an old rider who fought in the battle sat on the cairn's lowest stones with his grandson. "The historians are right about the aeroplanes," he said. "But the aeroplanes did not have names."