News agency to tackle cross-border information flow in Fergana Valley

A regional bureau, AKIpress-FERGANA, of the Kyrgyz AKIpress news agency has opened in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh aimed at improving the flow of cross-border information in Central Asia's Fergana Valley, home to some 10 million people. Eugene Gopkalo, the executive director of the agency, told IRIN that the bureau would cover seven provinces of the three countries - Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan - that share the valley. "The representative bureau has been created to meet the growing needs of the local and international communities for timely and impartial information on the situation in the most densely populated region of Central Asia," Gopkalo said at the opening ceremony on Saturday. News and analytical material about the Fergana Valley will be published in four languages: Russian, Kyrgyz, Uzbek and English. To ensure this, the agency is working with a number of contributors from the three former Soviet republics. The project is supported by the Eurasia Foundation and the Democratic Commission of the US Embassy in Kyrgyzstan. "We want to promote the expansion of information space for the population of the [Fergana] region and Central Asia [as a whole]," Shakirat Toktosunova, head of the Eurasia Foundation's office in Kyrgyzstan, told IRIN. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, neighbouring provinces in the valley located in different countries lacked information about each other, a worrying trend. "Quite often a lack of information generates harmful rumours, forms inadequate public opinion and causes mutual suspicion," Antonina Zakharova, an interethnic relations expert, told IRIN. "There are many problems in the region, including land and water disputes, galloping unemployment and cross-border ecological threats. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of impartial information. Poor awareness amongst the people creates the ground for various incidents on the border and the growth of conflict trends," Zakharova added. Svetlana Gafarova, head of Gender Policy in Mass Media NGO and a well-known journalist, told IRIN that although the leaders of the Central Asian countries had repeatedly emphasised the need to create a common information space under the new conditions, there had been very little progress in that regard. Some local residents endorsed that opinion. "My daughter lives in the neighbouring Uzbek city of Andijan, 50 km from Osh, and I do not know how life is like there. We have not received newspapers from that country for 10 years just as they have not got our press," Maksuda Khaitalieva, a retired teacher from Osh, told IRIN. "When my daughter occasionally comes to see us, she buys packs of newspapers and magazines. She says that they are in great demand there. People do want impartial information," Maksuda maintained. Grandmother Maksuda dreams of the day when obstacles to the distribution of newspapers published in the neighbouring republics of Central Asia will be removed. "Not everybody has a computer with access to the Internet as people here are very poor. We would like to have inexpensive newspapers," she said. A few years ago the Swiss-based CIMERA NGO and Eurasia Foundation started providing support to the local media to establish information exchange with colleagues from neighbouring countries. Most of the independent mass media outlets in the valley implement their cross-border information exchange projects using grants from international organisations. "AKIpress-FERGANA hopes to do so without external financial support in the near future and to be based in the Fergana valley for a long time," Gopkalo told IRIN. "We aim to provide people with reliable and unbiased information." "Any gap is terrible, but the information one is doubly so," Maksuda said.