FROM NOVYY UZEN TO ZHANAOZEN

The mass unrest in the central square of the capital of the Kazakh SSR, Alma-Ata, on 16 December 1986 is considered the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. At that time, local youths suddenly staged a rally in protest against the castling between the long-time first secretary of the local Central Committee, Dinmukhamed Kunayev, and Moscow's puppet, Gennadiy Kolbin - a man alien to the republic. The central leadership responded to this with an armoured fist. According to official statistics, as a result of those events, 174 people were killed, thousands were injured and 8,500 were detained by security forces.

After a quarter of a century - on 16 December 2011 - blood was shed in Kazakhstan again. Mass riots took place in the city of Zhanaozen in western Kazakhstan, where former employees of the Ozenmunaygaz company have been on strike since June 2011. During Independence Day celebrations, angry people destroyed the stage and decorations installed for the upcoming New Year holidays on the square and set fire to administrative buildings and the Ozenmunaygaz office. The riots, which involved up to five thousand people, continued the next day. The events in Zhanaozen also provoked a wave of demonstrations and unrest in several other cities of Kazakhstan. Thus, the protesters blocked a passenger train at the Shepte railway station and dismantled rails at some railway crossings. In addition, demonstrations were staged in Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city, and in the capital of Mangistau Region in solidarity with the Zhanaozen strikers. Special forces and armoured vehicles were sent into Zhanaozen from Aktau, military helicopters flew over the city, and a state of emergency and curfew were declared. According to official data, 16 people were killed and several hundred were hospitalized as a result of the riots and the suppression of protests. Mobile communications and the Internet were turned off in the city.

The opposition accuses the government of excessive aggression in the process of suppressing the protests and of shooting civilians who could have been pacified with other means such as water cannons that are very effective in frosty weather. Oil workers also characterize the events as a provocation by the authorities, who refused to accept the strikers' conditions and provoked riots.

It is possible to agree with those who accuse the Kazakh authorities of using inappropriately harsh measures to suppress the protests, but the theory that the events were provoked by the authorities seems to be unfounded. The authorities would not have benefited from unrest on the anniversary day, when Kazakhstan was in the centre of world attention because of the festive events, and given that the country is to hold parliamentary elections on 15 January next year, the theory of the authorities' provocation is not credible at all.

The true causes of what is happening can be identified by tracing recent trends in the domestic and foreign policy of Astana.

Foreign policy trends

Kazakhstan has the largest reserves of chrome ores and lead, second largest reserves of oil, silver, copper, manganese, zinc, nickel and phosphorus raw material, and third largest reserves of gas, coal, gold and tin among the CIS countries. Kazakhstan also has 1.6 million tons of proven uranium reserves, the second largest in the world.

In his time, emphasizing the geopolitical importance of Kazakhstan and calling it a "soft underbelly of Eurasia", the prominent American political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski noted that Kazakhstan "allows you to control Central Asia and simultaneously opens the way to Russia, China, and across the Caspian Sea - to the Caucasus. The future of the Eurasian Union is directly linked to the fate of Kazakhstan."

Kazakhstan was the initiator of the Eurasian Union in the early 1990s. Then, Nazarbayev's project to create a new integration project between the former members of the Soviet Union did not receive adequate support from both Russia and other regional states. However, it was precisely in Kazakhstan that the heads of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan signed a treaty on the establishment of the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC) on 10 October 2000. And in November last year, the presidents of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan signed in the Kremlin documents on the establishment of the Single Economic Area. Dmitriy Medvedev, Aleksandr Lukashenko and Nursultan Nazarbayev signed the Declaration on Eurasian Economic Integration, the Treaty on the Eurasian Economic Commission and the Schedule of the Work of the Eurasian Economic Commission.

The common economic area began its work on 1 January 2012, and by 2015, the parties intend to enter a new phase of unification - the creation of a Eurasian Union. All these events occurred after the famous "manifesto" of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, with which he actually revived this idea of integration. Last year, the president of Kazakhstan repeatedly noted the active participation of Astana in the preparation of a more cohesive process of creating a Eurasian Economic Union, which Western political circles call a "project to restore the Soviet Union".

In addition, Kazakhstan is actively participating in another regional alliance - the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. As part of this alliance, as well as by the scale of bilateral relations, China is the leading economic partner of Kazakhstan. It is mainly China that gets energy from the western deposits of Kazakhstan. In this context, it is very remarkable that the strikes in Kazakhstan began only at enterprises with Chinese investments, although oil workers of these companies are paid no less than others. It is worth noting that in addition to energy resources, the western region of Kazakhstan is also of strategic geographical importance. It seems no accident that the Western media covered the event in Zhanaozen almost in the same style as the first days of the riots in the Libyan city of Benghazi. By the way, Benghazi, like Zhanaozen, is a port city and the capital of a province with huge oil reserves.

According to the Russian political scientist Yuriy Solozobov, "the attack is on oil-producing provinces nears ports and along the coastline. It is of benefit to separate them from the distant centre and declare them some micro-separatist states. This option was realized in Libya and was called 'Benghazi'. A similar scenario is being discussed in respect of Kazakhstan - to separate the oil-rich western Kazakhstan and install a puppet regime there. The idea of creating a kind of "Tengiz-Chevronistan" - the name of the largest deposit - has roamed the West for a long time - almost since the moment Kazakhstan gained its independence."

However, according to many analysts, it would be wrong to view the events in Kazakhstan only in the context of foreign influence.

Internal political trends

As a venerable politician with great experience, Nazarbayev has been in power in Kazakhstan since 1989. Naturally, during this time he made not only friends and allies, gaining the title of "national leader" ("Elbasy" in Kazakh), but also opponents and enemies. One of them is the former minister of energy, industry and trade (April 1998 - October 1999), former chairman of the BTA bank, fugitive oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov. Arrested in 2002, Ablyazov was released after a presidential pardon. However, after Ablyazov fled the country and settled in Britain in 2009, new criminal proceedings were instituted against him. He is charged with misappropriating $ 10 billion. In 2010, the Tver Court of Moscow issued an arrest warrant for Mukhtar Ablyazov, and on 27 January 2011, the Prosecutor-General's Office of Kazakhstan sent a petition to the UK for his extradition. It seems that in London, the case on the theft of bank funds is not developing in favour of Ablyazov, and he urgently had to pose as a political ?migr? and martyr. He is linked to protests in front of the embassies of Kazakhstan in Russia, Poland and Britain, but after the events in Zhanaozen, in other European countries as well. Considering that Ablyazov still owns such Kazakh media resources as Respublika newspaper and the K+ channel, you can imagine the magnitude of his influence on Kazakh society.

Another no less influential opponent of the Kazakh authorities is Rahat Aliyev, former son-in-law of President Nazarbayev. He is a graduate of the FBI Academy, a former major-general and deputy chairman of the National Security Committee of Kazakhstan. From 2002 to 2007, he headed the country's diplomatic corps in European countries, and from the summer of 2005, he served as first deputy foreign minister and special representative of Kazakhstan on cooperation with the OSCE. In late May 2007, Aliyev was accused of kidnapping and murdering the chairman of Nurbank, of which he was a shareholder. Before the trial began, he was able to move to Austria as a political ?migr?. Having rejected all the accusations against him, Aliyev himself acted as a prosecutor for the "powers that be", saying that the reason for the fierce hatred for him and the Kazakh security forces' efforts to discredit him is his intention to run for president of Kazakhstan.

Rahat Aliyev, the author of "Godfather-in-law", a book banned in Kazakhstan, is suspected more than others of organizing the riots in the west. At the same time, they emphasize his past, which is largely associated with the secret services, and describe him as a person well-versed in the intricacies and vulnerabilities of Kazakh society in general and the western region of the republic in particular. And there are a lot of intricacies here. 

Zhanaozen is the traditional territory of the young zhuz (a historical union of Kazakhs) - the Aday clan. The Adays are known for their militancy and aggressiveness. The ardent temper of the Adays last made itself felt in mid-1989. At that time, mass unrest broke out in Zhanaozen (then Novyy Uzen) between the local Kazakh population and incomers from the North Caucasus. By some accounts, to save the latter from extermination, the Soviet special forces had to evacuate 25,000 people from the city. It was then in Novyy Uzen that Nursultan Nazarbayev was first elected leader of Kazakhstan. At first glance, it looks like an ominous warning to the current authorities, "Against the backdrop of raging Novyy Uzen, you came. Against the backdrop of raging Zhanaozen, you must go!". But as you know, one of the major powers of the president in Kazakhstan is to be an arbiter in inter-clan disputes and conflicts. And so far, Nazarbayev has managed to extinguish all conflicts without bloodshed. Nursultan Nazarbayev's authority as the supreme leader and guarantor of stability is based on this ability.

In addition to the indigenous Kazakhs - Adays, the region, and particularly the city of Zhanaozen, is populated by a great number of "oralmans" (ethnic repatriated Kazakhs resettled to Kazakhstan from neighbouring countries after independence). Hinting at their involvement in the riots, Presidential Adviser for Political Affairs Yermukhamet Yertysbayev stated that "the main organizers in Zhanaozen were people who recently acquired Kazakh citizenship - they have come from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and have not yet integrated completely into Kazakh mentality".

Further, while not denying the possibility that the unrest was financed by Ablyazov and radical Islamists, he drew special attention to criminal gangs.

It must be remembered that many experts do not exclude a theory about criminal showdowns, for the state oil company in Zhanaozen was headed by local informal bosses connected with the criminal world. And recently, the company was placed under the direct control of the head office of the national company in Astana.

Listing the factors that may be relevant to the 16 December events, we should not forget that the Islamic terrorist underworld, whose existence was previously unknown, has unexpectedly raised its head in the country. Explosions and gunfire can be heard in the country from time to time. On 31 October, a bomb exploded in the courtyard of the regional administration (akimat) in Atyrau Region in western Kazakhstan. And on 12 November, a Maksat Kariyev organized an act of terror in the city of Taraz, during which seven people were killed and three were injured. The same Kariyev used a grenade thrower and an assault rifle to fire at the building of the city committee of national security, and when an attempt was made to arrest him, he blew himself up.

Both cases are linked to the organization "Soldiers of the Caliphate" ("Jund al-Khalifat"), whose existence was not known until recently. In their statement, the explosion was called "a warning to the authorities of Kazakhstan in connection with the adoption of a new religion law" prohibiting prayers in state institutions.

All these facts may have individually and together influence the December events in Kazakhstan. But whatever the reason, there are really serious tensions in society, which will occupy the minds of those in power for a long time. Therefore, representatives of the Kazakh authorities have already expressed the need to concentrate a large part of industrial and innovation programme on depressed areas, in particular Zhanaozen, and to address infrastructural and economic problems of the city. In addition, measures will certainly be taken to address the problems of oil workers and employees of other industries.