New Eastern Europe - November-December 2017

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“It is quite unbelievable to even picture such a situation but I won’t be surprised

if some local young men show support to such little green men,” Anatoliy, a retiree

strolling through the city’s main pedestrian street in a recent autumn afternoon,

suggests. “But we are living in peace in Kazakhstan, so I simply cannot see such a

scenario unfold.”

Another city resident in his mid-thirties, who refused to give his name, said he

did not see any conditions for such a situation to develop because “we have too

many police and other security forces in the country. People do not even discuss

the situation and talk about it because it is so unrealistic.”

No room for separatism

Kazakh authorities closely monitor the media and the internet and harshly pun-

ish what is deemed an incitement of interethnic or social strife. In December 2016,

a court in the North Kazakhstan region sentenced a local resident to five and a half

years in prison for online posts calling for separating the northern Kazakh regions

and incorporating them into Russia. Kazakhstan also

has a history of local separatist incidents. In 1999, for

instance, Kazakh security forces thwarted an attempt

by a Russian citizen, named Viktor Kazimirchuk, and

21 of his accomplices (both Kazakh and Russian citi-

zens) to seize power in the East Kazakhstan region and

establish a breakaway Russian republic. The members

of the group received lengthy prison terms but since

their conviction was in 2000, they have long been re-

leased.

“Hypothetically speaking, there may be such peo-

ple [supporting armed men in green uniforms] but

for this to happen there should be a certain situation like the one that emerged in

Ukraine, when the previous government collapsed and a new government started

discriminating against ethnic Russians. In reality, there are no conditions for this

situation to emerge in Kazakhstan”, Chebotarev, an expert in Almaty, explained.

Yaroslav Razumov, an Almaty-based journalist, believes that the Crimean sce-

nario could not be repeated in Kazakhstan because of different historical, social

and political links between Crimea and eastern Ukrainian regions with Russia

and Kazakhstan’s northern regions with Russia. Yet, he admits that the Ukrainian

events have revived old phobias in Kazakhstan. “The calm and ideology-free analy-

sis shows, and I am fully convinced, that the Crimean scenario cannot be staged in

Kazakh authorities

closely monitor

social media and

harshly punish

what they deem

to be incitement

of interethnic or

social strife.

Opinion & Analysis The crawling threat of the Crimea scenario, Naubet Bisenov