14 January 2022 The Guardian Weekly47
A
lmaty, the commercial capital of
Kazakhstan , is the kind of mirage
that oil-rich nations so often
produce. It has all the trappings
of comfort and consumer excess:
swanky shopping malls, luxury car
dealerships, high-end hotels.
This is the image of prosperity that
the country’s rulers enjoy projecting. For decades, Kazakhs
have been encouraged to take out expensive loans to buy
fl ats, cars and even holidays they can barely aff ord.
Beyond the limits of Almaty and the capital city, Nur-
Sultan , however, the illusion begins to look threadbare.
And the causes behind the protests that have gripped the
central Asian nation come into focus. Average monthly
salaries are less than $600. Police, doctors, teachers
and all kinds of government workers supplement their
meagre pay with bribes.
In the distant west of this vast country there is the
arid Mangystau province, where most of Kazakhstan’s
oil reserves lie. It’s where the unrest that broke out at the
start of the year has its roots.
The government is all about bringing in free-market
rules and fi nally burying the vestiges of the command
economy that prevailed when Kazakhstan was a Soviet
republic. It was in that spirit that it gradually phased out
subsidies for liquid petroleum gas , the fuel that many in
western Kazakhstan use in their cars. On New Year’s Day,
motorists awoke to fi nd it would cost twice as much as
the day before to fi ll their tanks. Demonstrations ensued.This sort of high-handedness smarts particularly
acutely in the west of the country. Why, they wonder,
when their regions contribute so much to the
country’s wealth, is there so little investment in basic
infrastructure? Why do foreign oil workers earn so much
more than Kazakhs? Why doesn’t the government listen
to the complaints of the people until they demonstrate?
Kazakhstan’s government has chosen to wreck its
feedback mechanism. It has p ut considerable funds into
media outlets – even those not belonging to the state –
to convey news about the government’s policies with
a cheery gloss. Th ose outlets trying to produce critical
coverage face harassment and legal action.Some issues are absolutely off -limits. In October, one
news outlet, Hola.kz , reported stories made possible by
the Pandora papers leak relating to the former president,
Nursultan Nazarbayev. The website was immediately
blocked. Legislation adopted in 2010 made any coverage
of Nazarbayev and his family deemed defamatory an
off ence worthy of imprisonment.
One symptom of this malaise is that w hen protest s
begin, they quickly broaden in scope. The residents
of the western oil town of Zhanaozen came out on 2
January to demand lower fuel prices. Two days later,
by the time people in Almaty, around 2,000km away ,
had hit the streets, the slogans had
changed. Chants of “shal ket!” –
Kazakh for “old man go!”, a reference
to Nazarbayev – have become
a mainstay in anti-government
meetings. The exuberance quickly
turned sour. Riot police swooped in with tear gas and
stun grenades to disperse the columns of peaceful
demonstrators that marched to Almaty’s Republic
Square. The message was clear: mass shows of dissent
are not acceptable.
And so a more violent contingent has now stepped
into the breach. Last week it was diffi cult to know what
exactly was going on in the country after the government
turned off the internet and telephones weren’t working.
Eyewitnesses in Almaty talked of sustained exchanges
of gunfi re right in the centre of the city. Authorities claim
some gunmen tried to seize a television tower. According
to the government this week, 164 people were killed.
The authorities earlier described what was unfolding in
Almaty as a sophisticated, well-prepared assault against
Kazakhstan by an armed terrorist gang numbering in the
thousands. “We’re dealing here with armed and trained
bandits, both local and foreign,” the president, Kassym-
Jomart Tokayev , declared on TV. “We must destroy them. ”
It is a mystery so far who these people are supposed to be.
Tokayev has ominously now turned to raging against
the media and civil society. It was the “so-called
free media” and outside actors who had abetted and
instigated the unrest, he claimed.
The remarks portend more crackdowns and denials
about the reality of hardship in Kazakhstan. The
old illusion of free-market abundance and popular
contentment has been spoiled, so the government will
now have to work twice as hard to make the next one
more convincing •Inequality is driving
protests against an
authoritarian system
Peter Leonard
Peter Leonard
is Central
Asia editor at
EurasianetKAZAKHSTAN
PAVEL MIKHEYEV/
REUTERS/GUARDIAN
DESIGN