Kazakhstan President Kassim-Jomart Tokayev said on Friday that he had given the order to “shoot to kill without warning” any protester protesting his government, as a way of trying to end the crisis that engulfed the former Soviet republic. this week.
Since Sunday (2), acts against the increase in the price of a fuel used in the country, LPG (liquefied petroleum gas), spiraled into a national revolt. According to the government, 26 activists, which it called “terrorist bandits”, were killed, in addition to 18 police officers.
The number of wounded is uncertain, but it is likely to exceed 1,000. On Wednesday (5), the day when the broth came to a head with attacks on public buildings and invasions in the country’s main cities, including the largest, Almati, the government shut down the internet and mobile telephony infrastructure.
Thus, reports of violence are very sparse and confusing. On this Thursday-Friday night, the Russian agency Tass reported shootings in Almati, for example, but apparently there are no more scenes of uncontrolled crowds in the street across the country.
“Terrorists continue to destroy property and use weapons against civilians. I have given the order to security forces to shoot to kill without warning,” Tokayev said in a statement on state television.
He insisted that he would listen to “peaceful demands”, noting that he ordered fuel prices to be frozen for six months, but that he would not negotiate with terrorists. “We are dealing with armed and trained bandits, locally and abroad. They have to be destroyed, and they will be soon,” he said.
Tokaev thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for responding to his request for help and organizing the first military mission of the CSO (Collective Security Treaty Organization), a military alliance of ex-Soviet countries created in 1999 by Moscow that had never had greater practical value.
About 2,500 troops, mostly Russians but also from countries such as Belarus and Armenia, are due to land between Friday and Saturday in Kazakhstan to support the government – the first troops began to be deployed on Thursday, a day after Tokayev’s request.
They should directly help protect the energy infrastructure of the country, a relevant producer of oil and gas, where there is a large share of American companies. The country is also the biggest exporter of uranium in the world, and the interruption of the internet has harmed the bitcoin market, as Kazakhstan concentrates 18% of so-called virtual currency mining.
For Putin, who begins this Friday to face a diplomatic battle over sending 100,000 troops to Ukrainian borders to force Kiev to negotiate a solution to the civil war in the east of the country and try to prevent its neighbor from joining NATO (military club western), the crisis brought both risk and opportunity.
Risk because the situation could spiral out of control, wearing down Moscow and dividing its attention at the key moment of the European crisis. But it is an opportunity because a quick fix will consolidate yet another ally under its firm influence, as in the Belarus crisis of 2020, and a position of strength vis-a-vis the West.
Both hypotheses fuel conspiracy theories about the nature of the protests, which in their origin recall the acts of 2013 in Brazil. The lack of information makes it difficult to understand this, but there are signs that there may be the division cited by Tokayev among protesters.
As reported on Friday by Radio Azattiq, an arm of western Radio Liberdade, in the city of Aktobe, activists for improving the economy protected the local train station against gunmen on Thursday night.
The autocrat Tokayev spoke of 20,000 “bandits” acting in concert in the country, and it’s not impossible that someone tried to hijack the spontaneous protests that started when the government released the price of LPG. Who was it and for what purpose is the question.
For the dissident leader Mukhtar Abliazov, there is no doubt about the version that the Kremlin is behind the crisis. He said Putin, who had already rescued the Kyrgyz government from a crisis last year, wanted to “recreate a kind of Soviet Union” in Central Asia, in an interview with Reuters in Paris.
In the opposite line, political scientist Sergei Markov, a former adviser to Putin in the 2000s, published on his social networks that the Russian president wins because he was provoked by those who wanted to take their energy from the Ukrainian question.
From a domestic point of view, Tokayev seems to have consolidated his position for now. Successor of long-lived dictator Nursultan Nazarbaiev, who at 81 years old lives as the “father of the nation” and had great power until now, the president removed his predecessor from the country’s powerful Security Council.
For Abliazov, this was a stage game, as the protesters also complained about the former dictator’s influence. A statue of him was even torn down in the city of Taldikorgan, in the style of dissolution of the Soviet Union (1922-1991).
.
