#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #FRANCE #KAZAKHSTAN #RUSSIAN #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) France, UCL - Solidarity with the Kazakh people in the face of the murderous repression (ca, de, it, fr, pt)[machine translation]

 In the grip of strikes and massive demonstrations, Kazakhstan is experiencing the

greatest socio-political upheaval in its recent history. Difficult to see very
clearly, especially since the Internet has been blocked for several days and
prevents any information from filtering. At the last news, the dictatorship had
appealed to Russian troops and surrounding countries to quell the revolt. The
Union Communiste Libertaire is worried about the bloody repression in progress
and relays the aspirations for social justice and the rejection of autocracy that
the populations of Kazakhstan show overwhelmingly.
Kazakhstan has been an independent state from the USSR since 1991 while remaining
a member of the CSTO, an international security organization bringing together 6
former Soviet states around Russia. The country also has a special relationship
with the European Union (its largest trading partner), the US (2 th investor in
the country), but also with China, seeking to secure its New Silk Roads. Far from
being negligible in international trade, it is one of the main exporters of
uranium, wheat and hydrocarbons.

Already in 2011, Kazakhstan knows a wave of revolts, in particular by strikes in
the oil and gas industry massively repressed in blood.

Rising prices, the spark that sets gas cylinders on fire
On the night of December 31, 2021 to the 1 st January 2022, the price of LPG has
doubled. Indeed, the government had decided shortly before to liberalize the
energy sector, until then a state monopoly. However, LPG is the main fuel in
Kazakhstan, particularly in the west of the country. And it is from there that
the dispute starts on Sunday evening 2. More precisely, in Janaozen, an
emblematic city if there is one, since it is here that 15 strikers of an oil
exploitation of the city were massacred in 2011. In just a few days, the protest
spreads to the largest cities. and in particular Almaty, the historical and
economic capital. While the previous days, the gatherings were as confidential as
usual, a crowd of several thousand people seized Tuesday January 4 of the street
in Almaty, occupying many public buildings,

The movement surprises everyone and the bourgeoisie takes fright: at the first
strike announcements, some bosses drop increases of more than 10% even before the
start of the movement. Same reaction on the political side: President
Kassym-Jomart Tokaïev announces the resignation of the government and appoints a
new temporary Prime Minister. He freezes the prices of hydrocarbons for 6 months,
then dismisses the head of security and abolishes the life post tailored to the
former autocrat Nursultan Nazarbayev.

As the demonstrators seize Almaty airport, confront the police in front of the
Interior Ministry and set fire to the town hall, Tokayev proclaims a state of
emergency, authorizes his troops to be fired without warning and calls for
military intervention by the CSTO. On January 6, Russian, Belarusian and Armenian
troops (three member states of the CSTO), estimated at 3000 soldiers, arrived in
the country to "restore peace", facing opponents qualified as "terrorists. ". The
Internet is completely cut off and it is very difficult to gather reliable
information on what is happening there now. It seems that the protest in Almaty
has been crushed in the blood but the government continues to give pledges to the
population to appease the anger. All the testimonies collected, however, evoke
massively the detonations, between firearms and grenades. It seems that several
police stations in the west of the country rallied to the population, at least at
the start of the uprising.

Deeper anger
As in other countries, rising prices are a key trigger. But if the movement has
taken hold so quickly and so strongly, it is because the population perceives
beyond how the Nazabayev clan grabbed the oil and gas rent (and more broadly
extractivism as a whole). The liberalization of the economy and the anti-social
measures carried out for years have reinforced the feeling of injustice in the
face of the exponential enrichment of this nepotistic and authoritarian
bourgeoisie. And this anger first found expression in the west of the country
because this is where the most demanding professional sectors are located, the
best structured, and because the memory of struggles and repression remains
strong and enduring.

The bloody repression of this unprecedented protest movement is likely to leave
traces in this country which presented itself as a haven of peace in the middle
of an unstable region. The authoritarian and corrupt regime put in place at
independence by the Nazarbayev clan, personality cult, fierce repression and
widespread fraud may not have fallen at the start of 2022 but were forced to show
to the whole world their true face and have completed their discrediting among
the populations who inhabit this immense territory. The social and political
opposition must restructure there, avoiding the traps of repression and division.
And the popular classes must take their place there, to build a real social and
democratic alternative.

The Union Communiste Libertaire brings its support to the massive and courageous
revolt of the populations of Kazakhstan, in the face of murderous repression,
ultraliberal capitalism, authoritarianism and Russian imperialism. We will pay
attention to possible mobilizations of the diaspora on French territory and to
the repression that could violently fall on the opposition activists on the spot.
The peoples want the fall of the tyrants !

Libertarian Communist Union, January 9, 2022.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Le-Kazakhstan-demarre-l-annee-sur-les-chapeaux-de-roue
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