Having read Joyce's posting about Kenyan women-soldiers and empowerment, I have decided to write about Kyrgyz women, whose empowerment and political visibility took completely a different turn. Kyrgyzstan does not appear in the top rankings on gender equality. Traditionally, women are kept away from high politics and decision-making. However, the last two “Revolutions” in Kyrgyzstan have shown that women can become a real force through creating special groups of women-provocateurs or “special-purpose women units” (SPWU). First introduced during the “Tulip Revolution” of 2005, the SPWU returned to the political “scene” five years later during the second Revolution of 2010. Nowadays, women and politics took completely unexpected turn in Kyrgyzstan; the women have become a weapon of repression in the hands of local politicians and businessmen.

The SPWU is a group of twenty to thirty strong vociferous women from rural areas, and is hired by politicians to rip the rallies and meetings of their political opponents. The SPWU can suddenly appear at the places of public meetings, protests and start screaming, beating the opponents in order to cause panic and public disorder.

Some believe that the secret of the women’s groups “efficiency” lies in the assumption that the police won’t shoot at women, indeed, among the 86 killed on April 7, 2010 during the second Revolution there are no women in the list, and women charge for their “services” less than men. Besides, women add more drama to the photos and videos, a very effective move in the age of television and Internet.

It is also supposed that the women’s groups are created by taking into account local Asian and Islamic mentality, where the men involved in protest actions, or the police will not beat the women who are at the age of their mothers. However, some politicians in Kyrgyzstan seem to have understood it differently, and have widely used “services” of such women as an effective tool to suppress their opponents.

Indeed, the law-enforcement agencies treat women more leniently than men, and therefore it is often possible to see the women aged fifty to sixty in the SPWU, and of course, local traditions demand for respectful and polite attitude towards them, comparing to other participants in the protests. For example, the ex-president of Kyrgyzstan escaped from the capital to his home town, and surrounded his house by local elderly and some young pregnant women to protect himself from the police. Local politicians use these women when they want to dispute the results of parliamentary/presidential elections, or court trials about corruption. It was the day of presidential elections in Kyrgyzstan yesterday (October 30), and before the elections day one of nominees warned of "people's outrage" if he wouldn't be elected as the president. Now, you can imagine about which kind of "outrage" he was talking about.

It is evident that the members of SPWU are women from marginalized population who are in need of additional income, because participation in such actions are well paid; according to some unofficial data, depending on the size of the “services” each woman is daily paid from five hundred to five thousand KGS (from ten to one hundred dollars). Before, the active women in Kyrgyzstan were defined as entrepreneurs, migrants, the unemployed, human-right activists, but now they are depicted as the SPWU.