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| Video @ http://www.rferl.org/media/video/almaty-kazakhstan-protests-arrests/27749024.html |
Detentions took place in multiple cities across Kazakhstan, with the majority of protesters detained in Almaty, the largest city, and Astana, the capital. Observers, including those who tried to visit police stations, estimate that more than 300 people were detained in Almaty, and more than 200 in Astana. Dozens of others were rounded up in other cities, including Uralsk, Atyrau, and Pavlodar, according to media reports.
Local media reported police officers had surrounded Republic Square in Almaty and the square near Baiterek monument in Astana before the May 21 protests. Activists interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that when they arrived at protest sites, authorities had already cordoned off the squares, preventing protesters from gathering. Reports on Facebook began to emerge early on May 21 that police had begun to detain activists ahead of the protests.
Remarkable footage filmed by RFE/RL in Almaty captures the grimly farcical events in the city. One young woman was roughly dragged away with her arms in a lock as she belted out Kazakhstan’s national anthem. People in a crowd fleeing police, many of them masked, played cat and mouse with the police as they tried to join those in the swelling numbers of people in detention. If the government continues to bungle its way through one of its most serious political crises since independence in the same fashion, the fear factor is likely to dissipate altogether.
Kazakhstan’s already problematic international image has been badly dented by a frenzied day of arrests, which by some estimates ranged into the many hundreds.
Media in Kazakhstan regularly report on the opposition figures, independent journalists, bloggers, and civil activists who are taken into custody and put on trial. Even if people do not agree with what these perceived government opponents are espousing, they can still see the process and the government's attempts to silence these people. No one knows the injustices of Kazakhstan's system better than the people living there.
Media also report on the members of Nazarbaev's family and the president's close friends regularly making their way onto lists of the world's richest people. When you're getting poorer this becomes a much bigger issue.
Why is Kazakhstan so spooked? There are many facets to attempting to explain both the protests and the govrnment’s hamfisted response to them. I cannot pretend to offer a comprehensive explanation, but a start is this: the state is wholly unfamiliar (and uncomfortable) with dissent. It has pursued a narrative of national unity that misinterprets dissension on policy points as disloyalty. It is also enamored of the structure of democracy–or perhaps just the international image of having one–but doesn’t understand the messy reality that it entails.
The framework within which Kazakhstan understands the relation between the state and its people does not allow much, if any, space for dissent. This is without a doubt inherited from the Soviet Union, but sustained since because of Kazakhstan’s prosperity–relative to Soviet times as well as to its regional neighbors.
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