Expert on violent protests: “In Kazakhstan there will be peace in the cemetery”

Monday, January 10, 2022

Expert on violent protests
“There will be peace in the cemetery in Kazakhstan”

After the violent suppression of the protests in Kazakhstan, the regime continues to expand its power. But instead of actual stability, President Kassym-Schomart Tokajev’s course only brings about deceptive calm, fears Beate Eschment from the Berlin Center for Eastern European and International Studies. In an interview with ntv.de, the Central Asia expert sums up: “This is how a state cannot exist in the long term”. Kazakhstan of the Nazarbayev era is definitely history. Nevertheless, the political outlook remains bleak.

ntv.de: From a distance it looks as if the protest movement in Kazakhstan is a homogeneous group. Who is involved in the demonstrations and what exactly is it about the demonstrators?

The demands that have been made have two things in common: They express immense economic dissatisfaction. And the population turned against corruption, wants to saw off the old elites, namely the still powerful first president of the country, Nursultan Nazarbayev. It has therefore been simmering all over Kazakhstan for a long time. Many of the people who took to the streets in several parts of the country are at the lower end of the social scale. They are dissatisfied and simply no longer know how to live. In Almaty, however, something else seems to be going on. The mass of devastating images that reach us in the west comes from Almaty.

What is different in Kazakhstan’s largest city?

In contrast to the mostly peaceful demonstrations in the rest of the country, there was great aggression there from the beginning. Also on the part of the demonstrators, some of whom were armed. So I don’t get the impression that it’s a coherent movement. I also rule out any hidden control of the protests “from above”. These days, however, it is discussed whether individual representatives of the previous elite families, who see their benefices dwindling, might not now use the protests to protect their interests. I wouldn’t want to rule that out entirely.

At the moment everything indicates that President Kassym-Shomart Tokayev is using the unrest to expand his power. He hardly enjoys it, however Sympathies in society. What options does he have to return the country to a governable state?

The problem is that there is no counter figure to Tokayev. Even if he were ready to resign, what would happen then? Although that is considered impossible anyway. At the moment it looks as if calm has largely been restored in Almaty, but also in other regions. But what will then prevail there is a cemetery calm. A state cannot exist in this way in the long term. And then there are the Russian troops that he brought into the country. He has not made any friends in the population with it. Not even among those who were on his side before. Tokayev will always be grateful to Putin. He has already questioned Kazakhstan’s statehood in the past. I do not believe that Putin is now starting to annex parts of Kazakhstan in the style of Ukraine. But the relationship between the two states has definitely changed with the action.

Are the unrest the great opportunity for Russia to massively expand its influence in Central Asia?

What I think is much more important is that the whole situation will have sparked great unrest on the Russian side. The Kremlin has always believed that Islamism, terror and instability come from Central Asia. Russia shares a long border with Kazakhstan – a country that was previously seen as a kind of buffer zone to far more unstable states such as Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The fact that this immediate neighbor is shaky certainly feeds a vague fear that is typical of Russia’s view of Central Asia.

Serious unrest broke out in Kyrgyzstan in 2020, and the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan in 2021. What do the unrest in Kazakhstan mean for the region?

I think Kazakhstan will return to some degree of stability. I am not assuming a Kyrgyz scenario. There are a number of elite groups in a permanent power struggle with one another. The situation is different in Kazakhstan. The elite is small and has so far been closely associated with the presidents. Newcomers, people with completely different political ideas, had a hard time. No other party or grouping could position itself really well under Nazarbayev or later Tokayev. As soon as someone expressed himself critically, parties were either banned or not allowed at all and politicians were driven into exile. The Kazakh regime systematically excludes any opposition. But of course the presidents of the other Central Asian states, which in most cases lead a much more rigid regime, will look to Kazakhstan with great nervousness.

So far, President Tokayev has been perceived more as an apparatchik, as an extended arm of ex-President Nazarbayev. A few days ago he opened fire on demonstrators, calling them “terrorists”. How does that fit together?

Tokayev is an experienced politician who has so far behaved completely inconspicuously. Not a great reformer, but not a tyrant either. Against this background, the current developments are all the more irritating. If someone had told me two weeks ago that Tokayev was bringing Russian troops into the country and issuing an order to shoot their own people, I would have asked myself whether the person was hallucinating. A clear assessment of the situation is almost impossible due to the fact that the Internet has been switched off for days. Even telephoning is practically impossible, Tokayev has set up an information blockade in no time at all.

There are also dozens of deaths and thousands of arrests. The balance of the unrest is already devastating. How can it go on?

That would be difficult to predict under normal circumstances, but the information blockade makes it even more difficult. In any case, events will be a major turning point, and Kazakhstan of the Nazarbayev era is finally history. I fear that the leadership of the country will try to criminalize the demonstrations and get back to everyday life as quickly as possible. And that it will not tackle any really radical political and economic reform projects. I am shocked and at the same time perplexed. When Nazarbayev resigned in 2019 and the transfer of power to Tokayev was downright orchestrated, many in Kazakhstan were hoping for a reform process. But minimal changes have taken place under the new president. It quickly became clear that he was just a puppet whose strings Nazarbayev was pulling. That’s why the demonstrators yelled “Dude, get away!”. Now the “old man” seems to be gone and the question of future perspectives arises. But at the moment they don’t know in Kazakhstan how things will go next.

With Beate Eschment spoke to Aljoscha Prange