Kazakh Officials have Been Ignoring Ethnic Component of Protests since 1986, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 21 – No protest is purely ethnic. Rather people come into the streets where ethnic identities intersect with economic or political problems. Thus, it is often a mistake to describe demonstrations as “ethnic” when in fact many other factors are involved, factors that may be at least as important as ethnicity.

            Many observers forget this and treat as ethnic any protest where ethnicity is involved, thus ignoring the factors with which these actions are inevitably combined. But there is an equal and opposite error and that is to highlight only the other factors and ignore ethnicity as a driving force.

            Russian officials do this constantly, blaming protests that obviously have an ethnic dimension on everyday communal conflicts. But the Russian authorities are not the only ones who are guilty of this practice. Among the others on the post-Soviet space who also make that mistake are the rulers of Kazakhstan.

            Since the December 1986 clashes in Alma-Ata and other Kazakhstan cities, Kazakh officials have regularly downplayed the ethnic dimension often to the point that experts are now saying that the government there is “closing its eyes to inter-ethnic conflicts” and thus allowing them to fester and become more serious.

            Journalist Daniyar Sadvakassov says that this problem is an increasingly one that threatens to undermine political stability there. If the powers won’t acknowledge the ethnic dimension, the experts with whom he talked say, the authorities can’t take the steps to limit the impact of ethnicity on conflicts (cabar.asia/ru/eksperty-v-kazahstane-zakryvayut-glaza-na-mezhetnicheskie-konflikty).

            Kazakh analyst Adil Tormanov makes a similar point in a survey of conflicts involving ethnicity in Kazakhstan over the last 35 years in an article or the Moscow Internet journal, Voyenno-Politicheskaya Analytika (vpoanalytics.com/2021/12/21/ot-zheltoksana-k-zhanaozenu-k-anatomii-massovyh-besporyadkov-v-kazahstane/).

            In his survey of this problem, Tormanov calls attention to an important article about how this pattern emerged. See A.P. Myakashev, “The Events in Almaty in December 1986: the First National Elite Ultimatum to the Center” (in Russian), Izvestiya Saratovskogo universiteta, Seria Istoriya, 18: 4 (2018): 432-439; full text at cyberleninka.ru/article/n/sobytiya-v-alma-ate-v-dekabre-1986-g-pervyy-ultimatum-natsionalnyh-elit-tsentru/viewer).