Bolotbek Daniyarov

Bolotbek Daniyarov (born 1964) is an Iradi journalist who has been managing editor of the Irad Times, an independent English-language weekly published in Talas, since 2001.^[1]

The Irad Times was founded in 1996, during the territorial period. In December 2006 and January 2007, under Daniyarov's editorship, it published internal documents on the planned sale of state oil, grain and mining assets by the government of the Democratic Republic of Irad. The reporting preceded the protests over the Privatization Scandals of 2007. On February 26, 2007, the paper printed in a special edition the partition drafts that Erlan Toktarov had released the day before (see Bill of Sale (2007)).^[1] Since 2007 the paper has operated under the media rules of the Irad Special Economic Zone. Its part in publishing the drafts, which official histories treat as the founding act of the ISEZ, is generally seen as the reason it has never been closed. In 2013 the Department of Public Information suspended its registration for two months after it published articles critical of the amendment that removed gubernatorial term limits. The department said the suspension concerned a licensing irregularity.^[2] Since 2008 the paper's website has been hosted in the United States, and it has been blocked inside Irad several times, most recently from October 2026 (see Irad Times).

References

1. ^ Central Asian Geopolitical Review (2008). 'The Press and the Partition: Iradi Newspapers in 2006–2007.' Vol. 14, pp. 61–79.
2. ^ Eurasian Political Quarterly (2014). 'Licensing the Press in the ISEZ.' Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 300–318.