Last year's violence in
the town of Janaozen has created a significantly
more oppressive environment in Kazakhstan,
according to human rights defenders and analysts
interviewed by IWPR.
The activists were
attending a conference in Almaty on December 13,
three days before the first anniversary of the
bloodshed. On December 16, 2011, police shot dead
at 16 people in a crowd of
demonstrators in the western
town of Janaozen, at the end of months of
unresolved industrial action by oil workers.
The event came just over a week after
lawyer Asel Nurgazieva, who had helped Janaozen
residents bring legal claims of police abuse, was
given 12 days in jail. Officially, the charges
were of disorderly behavior and resisting arrest,
though Nurgazieva's detention looked like a way of
taking her out of circulation around the
anniversary.
In the course of this year,
local residents and prominent figures including
Alga party leaders have been given long jail terms
as the Kazakh authorities attempt to rewrite
Janaozen as a foreign-inspired plot, rather than a
labor dispute brutally put down by their security
forces.
At the Almaty event, journalist
and political commentator Sergei Duvanov told IWPR
that the prosecutions have sent a strong warning
message, designed to instill fear in anyone who
might be considering protesting. They have also
put an end to opportunities for dialogue between
opposition and government. As for the courts as
instruments of the state, Duvanov said, "Whereas
previously they could pretend to be independent
... now there's no attempt at concealment."
Duvanov also noted that laws on national
security and religious freedom passed last year
made it easier to accuse regime critics as
"instigators of strife". "It's very worrying," he
said.
Yevgeny Zhovtis, head of the
Kazakhstan Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of
Law, said events last year showed how weak civil
society was. "There are several thousand
non-government organizations that provide services
and run social projects, but it's far from being
civil society," he said.
Zhovtos recalled
that over several months, hundreds of oil-industry
workers occupied Janaozen's central square to
stand up for their rights. "But apart from some
politicians, public figures, journalists and
rights activists, no one took any interest in
them. It was only when shots were fired that the
public was shaken up," he said.
Zhovtis
said one of the fundamental problems that led to
the industrial dispute - one of several across the
oil-rich west of Kazakhstan last year - was the
absence of strong independent trade unions. He
said the authorities wrongly assumed that they
could safely crush grassroots activism and instead
promote regime-friendly, tame trade unions. "But
when a situation becomes tense and conflict
arises, these trade unions are unable to speak for
the workers and act on their behalf," he said.
Labor activist Pavel Shumkin said that
since Janaozen, the authorities had not learned
the lesson that they needed to engage with genuine
trade unions. While he conceded that in recent
labor disputes, the authorities had made some
attempt at conciliation, he said this was
essentially reactive, and the first instinct was
still to pressure activists into submission.
"Resorting to authoritarian methods won't
resolve problems," he said, "That is when things
could easily slide towards an 'Arab Spring'
scenario."
Despite, or perhaps partly
because of, the government cranking up the
pressure on its vocal critics and opponents, the
general public in Kazakhstan seemed to have lapsed
into torpor after the initial shockwaves caused by
Janaozen.
"We have to admit that the
public in Kazakhstan doesn't perceive it as a
national tragedy," Duvanov said. People seem
unable to draw analogies with their own situation,
or realize that they could potentially suffer the
same fate.
Duvanov said the tendentious
coverage in pro-government media had even led some
people to view the protesters as "if not
terrorists, then at least extremists".
Sergei Khudyakov, from the Institute Local
Self-Governance Development in the northern city
of Petropavlovsk, agreed that people living
outside western Kazakhstan tended to distance
themselves from events there. While many were
concerned by the bloodshed, Khudyakov said others
took the view that "it happened to them over
there, not to us here".
Alexandra
Kazakova is IWPR's country director in
Kazakhstan. Saule Mukhametrakhimova is IWPR
Central Asia editor.
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