Kyrghiz shaman in the news

[pynchonoid]

http://www.antiwar.com/spectator2/spec622.html
‘I made this revolution’
Julian Evans

In a white room in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a tattooed man
from Georgia is trembling violently. His eyes are
rolled back to the whites, his spine is arched, his
arms flail in front of him as if he is being
electrocuted. Behind him stands another man, Asiatic,
completely bald, with dark piercing eyes. He shouts,
almost raps, into the convulsing Georgian’s ears,
‘Drive out the filth! You are a strong man, charged
with energy! Help yourself out of this!’ He repeats
this over and over until the Georgian has a spasm and
collapses in a trance. He is put on to a stretcher,
carried out of the room and laid in a bed with high
metal sides.

The man with the dark piercing eyes is Jenishbek
Nazaraliev, the ‘miracle worker’ of Bishkek, who
claims to have cured more than 15,000 drug addicts
from all over the world in his medical centre, using
his unique hypnotic method. He also claims to have
caused the revolution which last month swept President
Askar Akayev and his family from power in Kyrgyzstan.
‘I screwed Akayev, and I made this revolution,’
the doctor told me proudly in Bishkek, a few days
after the fall of the government.

Roza Otunbayeva, one of the key strategists of the
Kyrgyz revolution and the new minister for foreign
affairs, tells me, ‘Nazaraliev made a crucial
contribution in the last few weeks.’ Ex-president
Askar Akayev also says Nazaraliev played a key role in
his toppling. In a recent interview with the Russian
media, Akayev made the unusual claim that some 1,000
of the protesters who occupied the White House — the
government building — on 24 March were addicts from
Nazaraliev’s centre, sent out, he seemed to think,
like some army of zombies to bring him down.

Nazaraliev set up his four-storey medical centre in
Bishkek in 1991; it is now famous throughout the
drug-ridden former Soviet Union. It relies on a
combination of traditional and innovative techniques
to treat addiction. The patient is given a dose of
atropine, a drug derived from deadly nightshade that
speeds up the heart rate and can cause hallucinations.
The patient is then put through various disorientating
measures until he begins to tremble and convulse. At
this point, when the patient is at his most
suggestive, Nazaraliev himself strides into the room.
He circles the patient, chanting rhythmically, urging
the patient to abandon his old bad habits and discover
his inner strength. The patient falls into a swoon,
and when he wakes up a few hours later, he feels like
a new person.

Nazaraliev’s critics, who include former President
Akayev, say this is pseudo-shamanism masquerading as
science. Nazaraliev himself is comfortable with the
shamanic connection. He sees himself as the latest in
the ancient Kyrgyz tradition of the ‘bakshi’ or
shamanic healer. His office seems to play on his
reputation as a magus. Strange symbols and slogans are
scrawled over the walls. A large poster of a swami
with staring eyes hangs next to the desk, which is
littered with Buddhas, Hindu gods and psychedelic
paintings.

Nazaraliev stands in the middle of the room, beaming.
He seems to like giving interviews — he is probably
the biggest celebrity in Kyrgyzstan and sees himself
as something of a national trendsetter. In addition to
his medical centre, he owns two radio stations, a
sushi restaurant and an overpriced steak house. He has
also written a book on the global drugs trade called
Fatal Poppies. He likes handing out copies of the
book. I’m given one as soon as I arrive; President
Putin was presented with no fewer than 500 copies when
Nazaraliev visited Russia a few years ago.

Nazaraliev is not shy about publicising his powers.
‘Just my touch is worth one month in a clinic,’ he
says. I ask him if his centre is a personality cult.
‘Yes, it is!’ he beams. ‘All people gather here
to my name. The main factor in the cure is the
personality of the teacher.’ He pauses and reflects.
‘I am not like Hitler or Napoleon, who aggressively
created their own cults. Nazaraliev just seems to be
quite an interesting person for patients and their
relatives.’ So interesting that patients are
prepared to pay $4,500 for the 30-day treatment, which
includes only a few critical minutes in the presence
of the master himself. ‘The key to creating a myth
is inaccessibility,’ he tells me.

Many patients and their families are so pleased with
the success of the treatment that they donate large
gifts to the master — a sports car, even a flat in
Moscow. Others make donations to Nazaraliev’s latest
project to build four temples on the slope of
Tashtar-Ata mountain.

The doctor abruptly entered the political arena in
February, on the week of the country’s parliamentary
elections, in which President Akayev controversially
put forward two of his children as parliamentary
candidates, while disqualifying leading members of the
opposition from running.

[...]

Nazaraliev describes his political technique as a
shamanic battle of wills: to banish an evil sorcerer
who has cast his spell over the community. He says,
‘The main idea was to destroy the personality of
Akayev. The Kyrgyz have an irrational fear of those in
power. But he is effeminate, he’s a plaything of his
family. He’s never had an opinion of his own.’
Through his attacks, he says, he aroused the Kyrgyz
people from their servile passivity. ‘I made this
chemistry. The people of Bishkek would never have
risen without Nazaraliev, because they are all
comfortable egotists. I broke their complacency, I
shocked them until they woke up.’ [...]


http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"


		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Plan great trips with Yahoo! Travel: Now over 17,000 guides!
http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide