Gas riot in Kazakhstan: Payback for the status of a raw materials colony of the West
The whole of Kazakhstan is engulfed in the largest protests since 2016 this evening. The first demonstrations broke out in the city of Zhanaozen, Mangistau region. The reason is a sharp increase in gas prices.
The reason for the explosion of discontent was the government’s decision to send liquefied gas for cars “for free floating” - to sell it on the stock exchange on spots. As a result, the monopolists won, who speculatively raised the price on the very first day. Fuel prices have risen from 60 to 120 tenge (up to 20 rubles) per liter. This led to the fact that the next day, Sunday, January 2, residents and workers of local oil companies who use gas-powered cars began to hold spontaneous rallies in Zhanaozen and block roads.
They were immediately supported by residents and workers of all regional centers of the region, and by the evening a rally had unfolded in the regional center of Aktau, where the police unsuccessfully tried at first to push the crowd out of the main city square, Yntymak. As a result, all the central streets there were blocked, and people flatly refused to leave.
As a result, two centers of protests emerged - Zhanaozen and Aktau, where participants decided to hold an open-ended rally until their demand was fully implemented - reducing the price of gas to 50 tenge per liter (9 rubles). At the same time, the protesters put forward another demand - a 100 percent increase in wages.
Subsequently, at night, and then in the morning and during the day on January 3, labor collectives began to join the protesters and made statements of support for the protesters. There, tents and yurts began to be erected in the squares, and the local population organized hot meals and began collecting funds. Actually, this is not something new, since during the summer and autumn residents also showed solidarity with the strikers by bringing food and water to the workers’ tents.
Therefore, we can call the current protests a continuation of the mass strikes of last year against the optimization policies imposed by Western management, where many auxiliary and service enterprises were separated from the main production.
At the same time, the position of the local authorities was more than vague, since officials immediately said that the akimat of the Mangystau region cannot interfere in market pricing, since gas was transferred to exchange spots, and there is no way to control their growth. As a result, when the regional akim in Zhanaozen called for dispersal, the crowd simply booed him, and then declared that they would stand until the end.
The authorities also tried to shift responsibility for rising prices to local gas stations. Thus, the Minister of Energy of the Republic of Kazakhstan Magzum Mirzagaliev said the following:
“Having analyzed the wholesale trading data for January, we observe that the retail price was at the level of 120 thousand tenge per ton, which, in our opinion, is higher than expected. This gives us reason to assume possible price speculation among gas stations.”
True, this did not reassure anyone, and the protests continued with renewed vigor. Everyone was also even more excited by the news that on the afternoon of January 3, several military transport planes with special forces from Almaty arrived at Aktau airport to disperse the protests, and special equipment, trucks and buses belonging to the Ministry of Defense began to concentrate towards the regional center. As a result, the protest expanded even further, and residents and workers in the regional center blocked all approaches to the air harbor, blocking the airport.
This reaction should also have been expected, since everyone still has fresh memories of the execution of strike participants in Zhanaozen in December 2011. And therefore, this was perceived painfully and already at night and in the morning, in response to such actions of the authorities, a general strike of oil workers began in the Mangistau region, and workers at the Tengiz field in the neighboring Atyrau region also stopped production.
It was Tengizchevroil oil workers with 75% of American capital that went on strike. In particular, Chevron has 50%, ExxonMobil - 25%, and the Kazakh company KazMunayGas only 20%. And there, just before the new year, 40 thousand workers were laid off at once, who, in fact, were thrown into the street. Obviously, this will also be expected for other oil workers in the near future, which spurs a general social protest. As a result, the second mass rally with a scuffle with the police took place in Atyrau, where workers in overalls from local fields also arrived.
Moreover, on the night of January 4, a rally began in Uralsk, and during the day, rallies and rallies took place in Aktobe, Kyzyl-Orda, Taraz, Turkestan, Shymkent, Almaty, Karaganda, Almaty region, Kostanay and other cities. In Almaty and Shymkent, motorists even blocked roads. That is, the protest spread to a significant part of the country literally within XNUMX hours.
And when the authorities announced at a rally in Aktau that especially for the Mangistau region the government reduced the price of liquefied gas to 50 tenge per liter, this did not reassure anyone, as the participants demanded the arrival of the country's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to the region. We can say that this belated concession no longer affected anything, since the movement went beyond its limits.
In this story, there is no need to concentrate only on the issue of increasing prices for gas and fuels and lubricants, since it only became the trigger and the reason for such protests. What is happening is a protest against the entire neoliberal socio-economic policy of the government for decades.
In addition, everyone understands perfectly well that the deposits in the Mangistau region are fading, and by 2030 they will be exhausted. Thus, reductions at enterprises in a region of complete unemployment, where there is no other industry destroyed in the 90s, are simply inevitable. Therefore, the problem of the protesters, in fact, has not been resolved, and the management of mining companies refuses to reconsider the results of optimization imposed by Western management.
As a result, there was a coming together of protests by workers, the unemployed and the local population, or, simply put, a social explosion, as a reaction to the raw material economic model built in the country over 30 years, focused on the export of raw materials to the EU and US markets. It must be taken into account that two-thirds of the extractive industry is in the hands of transnational corporations and primarily Western capital, and 70% of the oil produced goes to the European market.
That is, two thirds of the extracted raw materials simply do not belong to Kazakhstan, which is evident from the enslaving contracts for subsoil use, as well as from production sharing agreements. Western companies simply did not pay natural rent and left the scorched desert. Accordingly the demands of oil workers since 2008 have been reduced to the nationalization of the mining industry, since it is foreign employers who are perceived as the main threat and problem for the country.
Therefore, current events must be viewed as a social explosion and a grassroots movement that has spontaneously grown and embraced almost the entire country. But at the same time, they cannot be considered as some kind of preparation for the Maidan and conspiracies of Western countries, since, on the contrary, the current government and ruling elite in Nur-Sultan are thoroughly pro-Western, carrying out the last stage of privatization in the interests of the same American and European companies.
On the contrary, the current social explosion was the result of this course and policy towards building a dependent economy. And in the country there are no forces or legal liberal opposition capable of initiating or leading a protest.
The last opposition party, the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, was liquidated by the courts back in 2015. All independent trade unions in the country have been liquidated, and the political field has been thoroughly cleared.
As a result, the authorities were left alone with angry crowds without any intermediaries in the form of trade unions and parties. "“Language patrols” in the Kazakh-speaking region are clearly not suitable for this, nor are the puppet pro-Western groups created by the authorities such as the pan-Turksite party of Nurzhan Altaev and the Democratic Party of Zhanbolat Mamai. On the contrary, we now see attempts by various bloggers and Nazis to redirect the protest to national and linguistic channels, and to blame neighboring countries for the protests.
Of course, there is a danger of chaos spreading or attempts by pro-Western oligarchs and nationalists to ride popular protests. And here a reasonable question arises: in the event of an interethnic massacre, will the CSTO member states be able to respond to this and protect the Russian-speaking population and ethnic Russians? A topic that still requires discussion and reflection.
As a result, Nur-Sultan is now reaping the fruits of its many years of “multi-vector policy” in the interests of Western investors, who can now merge both the ruling family and the current elite as a whole. Instead of deepening integration within the EAEU and creating joint industrial projects, all these years were spent building castles in the air and exporting capital. And whether Nazarbayev and his nukers will be able to maintain the situation against this background is a very big question.
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