On August 30th, a day before Kyrgyzstan marks its Independence Day, a suicide bomber rammed the gates of the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, killing himself and wounding at least three other people. Various sources reported that the suspect installed an explosive device in his Mitsubishi Delica car, which he smashed into the gates of the Embassy, detonating it close to the residence of the Chinese Ambassador in the center of the Chinese compound in Bishkek. Several commercial and residential buildings in the vicinity were also damaged. Security services found fragments of the suspect’s car along with parts of his body as far as 300 metres away from the explosion site. The area is currently cordoned off by security services.
Spokeswoman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry Hua Chunying told reporters at a regular press conference that China is deeply shocked by this blast and strongly condemns the violence. Hua Chunying emphasized that Beijing has already contacted Kyrgyz authorities and urged them to thoroughly investigate the case, and persecute those responsible. Vice Prime Minister of the Kyrgyz Republic, Zhenish Razakov, was quick to label the blast an act of terror, although no terrorist organizations have claimed responsibility for the attack yet.
In general, this blast comes as an unpleasant and unexpected surprise both for Kyrgyzstan and China. Kyrgyzstan is a small, landlocked, mountainous country in Central Asia with a population of approximately 6 million people. In its short stint of being independent, Kyrgyzstan has already experienced two revolutions, ousted two presidents and survived an interethnic conflict. It is the second-poorest country in the region, with one-third of the population living below the poverty line. In 2010, Kyrgyzstan became nominally the only parliamentary republic in the Central Asian region, as the republic began to slowly recover from a deep political and economic crisis, although impediments to its development remained, including widespread corruption, deep ethnic tensions, low foreign investment and geopolitical constraints.
Nonetheless, despite all those challenges, there is little evidence to confirm that Kyrgyzstan is the place of a high terrorist threat. For instance, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) ranked Kyrgyzstan as having ‘an underlying threat from terrorism’ for the British citizens, which means ‘a low level of known terrorist activity,’ while Belgium, France and Germany received (perhaps rather counterintuitively) a ‘high threat of terror’ marker by FCO. Indeed, the Global Terrorism Database shows that from 1996 to 2015 there were no terrorist attacks on the Kyrgyz soil claimed by known violent extremist organisations. The only event happened in 2000, when the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan took hostages in the south of Kyrgyzstan, but then eventually released them all.
In a similar vein, attacks on Chinese missions abroad are a rare phenomenon. In fact, contemporary China is associated with terrorism mainly through the incidents of violence committed in its restive Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the largest administrative division of China and the home to approximately ten million Uighurs. In the 1990s, Xinjiang experienced a surge in national sentiments among the Uighurs, which was quickly suppressed by Beijing. Hereafter, Xinjiang lurched from crisis to crisis as Islamic militants attempted to destabilise situation within the country, while Beijing continued to enforce its hard-line security policy of supressing extremist activity.
In any case, it is highly likely that Uighur separatist groups will be blamed for the attack in Kyrgyzstan. For a long time now, Chinese leadership have feared that Uighur separatists would use Central Asia and Afghanistan as their foothold to destabilise Xinjiang, although to date, Chinese fears have not materialized. These separatist groups have neither a unifying agenda nor a central movement. While most radical of them want to establish a separate state of Uighurstan or Eastern Turkistan, other groups want to remain with China on preferential terms. Accordingly, at this stage it will be premature to immediately associate the blast at the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek with the larger context of ethnic separatism in China or Islamic radicalism in Central Asia, although this event has certainly marred festive mood of some of the local citizens and Chinese diplomats on the eve of the Independence Day celebrations in Kyrgyzstan.
