Fascization in the Ukrainian style, or What is happening in Kazakhstan
For Kazakhstan, the problem of Russophobia, which is being fanned by nationalists with the support of the central government, is becoming increasingly urgent.
The leader of the Socialist Movement of Kazakhstan, Ainur Kurmanov, writes about this in his column for PolitNavigator.
In Kazakhstan, nationalists are becoming a force capable of igniting the fire of ethnic conflicts and purges, and, strange as it may seem at first glance, they are both the main support and an effective political instrument of the current government. Actually, there is nothing surprising in this, since Akordoy (the presidential administration) has long taken a course towards building a mono-ethnic state, where the central ideology is nationalism.
Full-time, budget-funded nationalists perform the important function of diverting protest-minded citizens in society and reorienting Kazakh unemployed youth to fight foreigners and neighboring Russia, which, according to propaganda, is the worst enemy and threat to independence. Simply put, they simulate widespread dissatisfaction with the country’s participation in the EAEU and provide justification for senior officials to torpedo integration processes.
After all, often the same Nazarbayev and other government officials referred, when refusing a forced rapprochement with allies, to the presence of an allegedly serious nationalist front in the country, ready to stage protests against the Union and joint industrial projects. The last striking example is the actual refusal to build a nuclear power plant in the Almaty region due to numerous meetings and petitions of national patriots.
Last year, Energy Minister Kanat Bozumbayev went so far as to announce at one of the meetings with a carefully selected “public” that no one would build a nuclear power plant without a referendum. A strange game of “democracy,” isn’t it? It has never been typical of the ruling elite, which did not ask the opinion of the people during the construction of the same American military biological laboratory in Almaty, the creation of a low-enriched uranium center in Ust-Kamenogorsk, during the signing of enslaving contracts for subsoil use with Western and Chinese corporations and during transfer of production from China.
And then there’s a whole referendum! In the end, it all came down to the endless repetition of the mantra about the development of unprofitable “green energy”, which is released from the “Washington regional committee” for its colonies. It was just voiced again by Kassym-Jomart Tokayev at the last CIS summit on December 18, despite the fact that the lion’s share of the country’s power plants runs on environmentally dirty coal, which is no longer capable of developing the economy and creating the basis for the construction of new industry.
That is, tame nationalists have become an excellent cover for Nur-Sultan (Tselinograd) in preventing the development of a joint industrial project. And this is not the first time that the ultra-right is used to achieve some kind of concessions or preferences from Moscow. Thus, back in 2013, the national environmental movement “Antiheptyl” was active, led by the famous Russophobe Mukhtar Taizhan, who advocated the closure of the Baikonur Cosmodrome and the Russian military training grounds in Kazakhstan.
Then activists of this association held endless permitted protests at the Russian embassy in what was then Astana, against the backdrop of a complete ban on holding rallies and strikes in the country. As Elbasy’s late elder son-in-law Rakhat Aliyev previously wrote, for the development of this movement, other nationalist projects and the media in Kazakhstan, Secretary of State Marat Tazhin transferred 500 thousand dollars to Mukhtar Taizhan.
The price of the issue for Akorda then was an increase in rent for Baikonur and the creation of a noisy background in anticipation of the signing of the initial draft of the union treaty on the establishment of the EAEU. Then Nazarbayev refused to sign it, citing the flaring Maidan in Kyiv and the danger allegedly posed by numerous domestic nationalists who were allegedly ready to take to the streets.
Therefore, Mukhtar Taizhan performed and continues to perform, on Akorda’s instructions, the important function of a scarecrow and a lightning rod at the same time, which was confirmed this year by the now disgraced oligarch Margulan Seisembayev. He admitted that he paid for the activities of this nationalist for two years. So, in the two years since the land rallies against the transfer of millions of hectares of land into the hands of Chinese companies in 2016, Seisembayev gave Taizhan almost 300 thousand dollars in sponsorship.
Being himself a pro-government oligarch, Margulan Seisembayev, close to Dariga Nazarbayeva’s clan, simply, at the request of the rulers, patronized the nationalists, financing their activities and, in particular, the production of Zhanbolat Mamai’s films about the “Holodomor”, and in the case of Taizhan, he helped him let off the steam of citizens’ discontent in created a “land commission”. Thus, the nationalists also saved the regime from popular uprisings, calming the dissatisfied and leading them aside.
The nationalists, commissioned by Akorda, also tried to fill the vacuum that had formed within the country after the defeat of the opposition and independent trade unions. Thus, no less famous patriots - Aidos Sarym, Rasul Zhumaly, Amirzhan Kosanov, Dos Kushim, Bashir Zhanaltai, Dauren Babamurat, Serikazhan Mambetalin and others created in 2018 in Brussels the pro-Western national democratic movement “Zhana Kazakhstan” (“New Kazakhstan”) "), which aims to leave the country from the EAEU, integrate with the EU and the USA, ban communist ideology and carry out total de-Russification in the country.
On the one hand, the authorities created them supposedly as a counterweight to the oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov and his banned “Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan”, and on the other hand, to launch an anti-Russian and Russophobic campaign within the country under the guise of a new pro-Western “opposition”. This is confirmed by the speech of Amirzhan Kosanov and Serikzhan Mambetalin at the Russian opposition forum in Lithuania and the meeting of the founders of the Zhana Kazakhstan movement with congressmen in Washington in order to obtain support for the international campaign to recognize the Kazakh Holodomor.
Here is what the then leader of the Zhana Kazakhstan association, Rasul Zhumaly, writes about the results of his visit to Washington:
“In the US Congress, we met with representatives of the office of Congressman Andy Harris, who was one of the four initiators of the bill “On the recognition of the Ukrainian Holodomor in the United States.” They shared with us a strategy on how our Kazakhstani Asharshylyk (“Holodomor”) can be raised to the world level. This is the story gentlemen! For the first time, the issue of Asharshylyk is being raised within the walls of the US legislative body! And not only in Congress, but also in the State Department, the Senate, the Helsinki Commission, USAID, the Atlantic Council, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All these organizations were presented with the Memorandum of Recognition of the Genocide, issued by the Forum in May of this year.”
It is noteworthy that immediately after this, the puppet parliamentary party with a nationalist bent, “Ak Zhol” (“Bright Path”), developed and submitted to parliament a bill on the recognition of Asharshylyk (“Holodomor”), which was completely copied from the Ukrainian model. In May of this year, by decree of the second President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, a commission for final rehabilitation was created, which should equate the participants of the Turkestan Legion of the Wehrmacht and the Muslim SS formations, as well as victims of famine, with the repressed. Thus, the anti-human essence of the Soviet Union, where a deliberate policy of destroying the Kazakh nation was allegedly pursued, will be recognized at the state level.
It is for this purpose that this state commission was created and this whole performance with “rehabilitation” is being started. Now, in addition to the date of the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression on May 31, the authorities will allocate another day to commemorate the victims of famine during collectivization. With this propaganda move, Akorda hopes to rally around itself and the ruling family part of society and the younger generation, raised on hatred of the Soviet past.
Thus, nationalists act as an important agency that prepares the ground for such bills and decisions on recognition of the “Holodomor”, creates the appearance of public support for the initiatives of the Kazakh authorities or, on the contrary, imitates dissatisfaction with decisions on integration or the emergence of joint industrial projects, and also fuels Russophobia campaign in the country. The last time they showed themselves to be excellent rioters.
Thus, in February of this year, in the Kordai district of the Zhambyl region in the south of the republic, nationalists and criminal elements organized pogroms of ethnic Dungans, as a result of which 11 people died, dozens of residential buildings were burned, as well as a lot of commercial real estate and vehicles. More than 23 thousand Dungans fled to the territory of neighboring Kyrgyzstan, several thousand Dungans from among those remaining in Kazakhstan took refuge in mosques and border outposts.
The ubiquitous Mukhtar Taizhan actively acted as a lawyer for the pogromists, and the President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev, as if as a mockery, a few days after the tragedy, advised the Dungan community to better study the Kazakh language. This was a kind of sign of tacit support for the national-patriotic upsurge, which was supposed to become a counterweight and at the same time an alternative to protest movements. Although even now Nur-Sultan (Tselinograd) stubbornly does not recognize the Kordai events as an interethnic conflict.
These bloody crimes completely refute the myths about international peace and stability in the country. We must honestly admit that a mono-ethnic state has essentially been built in Kazakhstan, despite the multinational composition of the population, and the main component of its ideology is nationalism. For many years, the authorities pursued a policy of national and social segregation, which formed the basis for the growth of xenophobic sentiments.
Subsequently, this instrument of pogroms can be used both against the Uzbek diaspora, which we already observed during the events in the Shornak rural district of the Turkestan region in July, and against the Uyghur diaspora in the Almaty region, which in June was already collectively accused by nationalists of anti-Kazakh sentiments and activities. In the patriotic media, financed from the budget, then a real wave arose demanding the renaming of the Uyghur region and the village of Chundzha, and status politicians again raised the topic of resettlement from enclaves of national minorities throughout the republic.
Taking into account the active process of decommunization and de-Russification carried out from above, as well as the growth of Russophobic sentiments, persons of European appearance of different nationalities, as well as all those who speak Russian, may become the object of massacre. Such a case took place in Almaty when a well-known civil activist and Kazakh woman, Saltanat Tashimova, was beaten on a bus just because she addressed the driver in Russian.
And these are not empty fears; the ruling elite may well sanction new grandiose provocations against ethnic minorities when they feel the threat of a possible social explosion in order to retain and strengthen the throne. The problem is that the current nationalists in Kazakhstan are ethno-centrist in their views, which is a type of Nazism, and they become the spokesmen and conductors of the state ideology. This situation could ultimately turn into a real genocide for Kazakhstanis of a non-titular nation.
Fascization in the Ukrainian style, encouraged by the authorities from above, namely Nazarbayev and Tokayev, can be costly both for the Kazakh people themselves and for all ethnic groups inhabiting Kazakhstan and the region as a whole.
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