Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 4 – In the wake of
Putin’s Crimean Anschluss, according to some Kazakhstan news sources, the
government of that country plans to shift 300,000 ethnic Kazakhs to the still
predominantly ethnic Russian northern portions of Kazakhstan to block any
Moscow effort to undermine that country’s territorial integrity.
Kazakh officials have denied the
specifics of these reports, including the motivation and the numbers; but in fact, according to Aleksandr
Shustov, Astana has been resettling ethnic Kazakhs in the northern part of
Kazakhstan since the 1990s and clearly wants to change the ethnic balance in
the north (stoletie.ru/zarubejie/kazahi_perejedut_na_sever_629.htm).
Shustov, who writes regularly for
the Russian nationalist portal, says that the recent reports – he provides
citations to several between March 20 and March 28 of this year – follow a
discussion in the Kazakhstan parliament last October about the need to resettle
more ethnic Kazakhs in the north.
The initiator of that debate was
Svetlana Dzhalmagambetov, who, Shustov says, was worried “not by the threat of
separatism” but by the budgetary problems of the northern regions and the
capital’s allocation of funds to them. Unless more Kazakhs were sent north, she
said, whole villages will cease to exist.
Moreover, Shustov continues, “one
should remember that the policy of resettling Kazakhs into the northern regions
of Kazakhstan began immediately after the disintegration of the USSR.” In 1989,
ethnic Russian formed majorities in most of the northern oblasts of that
republic, while ethnic Kazakhs predominated in the south and west.
In response to this
pattern, the Kazakhstan government has pursued three major policies: It has
moved the capital from Almaaty in the south to Astana in the center, it has
redrawn the borders of the oblasts in order to combine ethnic Russian ones with
ethnic Kazakh ones, and it has promoted the resettlement of Kazakhs returning
from abroad in the north.
According to official estimates, some four to
five million ethnic Kazakhs lived outside of Kazakhstan in the 1990s, 1.3
million in China, 870,000 in Uzbekistan, 660,000 in the Russian Federation, and
157,000 in Mongolia. Beginning with legislation passed in 1992, the Kazakhstan
authorities encouraged them to return.
Between
1991 and 2011, approximately 860,000 of them did so, most from Uzbekistan (60.5
percent), with lesser numbers from other places. Then, in April 2012, Astana stopped the
repatriation program, apparently concerned about the skills, values, and
adaptability of those who had returned.
The
Kazakhstan government’s program of changing the ethnic composition of the
northern regions of that country has worked. By the beginning of 2010, Russians
exceeded ethnic Kazakhs only in the North-Kazakhstan oblast where the former
formed 48.2 percent of the population.
At
the same time, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev has expressed concern
about the outflow of ethnic Russian specialists and according to some reports
even asked his Russian counterpart to slow down the program of repatriating
ethnic Russians from Kazakhstan, Shustov says.
Consequently,
the Stoletie.ru commentator says, it is probable that the stories about the
resettlement of 300,000 ethnic Kazakhs to the northern parts of Kazakkhstan are
a trial balloon designed to “test the reaction” of society and presumably of
Moscow as well.
“But,”
Shustov concludes, “even if these plans are never realized, with the passage of
time, the Russian question in the north of the republic will be solved by
itself. The birthrate among Kazakhs is higher than that among ethnic Russians
who also continue to emigrate to Russia.”
And
“under these conditions, the ethno-demographic balance in the northern regions
will gradually be changed in favor of the Kazakhs, while the ethnic Russians
there, as has already happened in Kazakhstan as a whole, will become an ethnic
minority.”
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