KZBlog

Another old one—ignore the word recently and pray that the links still work! What slowed me down posting this one was finding sources for a lot of my claims here but I think by now they are old news and don’t need referencing, right?

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Esther Dyson of the National Endowment for Democracy
recently was in Kazakhstan and published an account of her trip on Release 1.com.

There are many interesting observations here from an intelligent and experienced observer, who is not immersed in the region:

For example, they visit the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute (chaired by Madeline Albright and Senator John McCain respectively. Both are branches of the NED, set up to promote democracy in the region. About the type of training in political activism these institutes provide—criticized by many political leaders and observers of the region as ‘illegitimate interfering with politics’ or ‘secretly supporting opposition,’ Ms. Dyson says:

To be candid, this notion had left me a little uneasy until now. How can you non-partisanly train people in partisanship? But after meeting the players – Josh Bergin of the IRI and Mary Cummins and Sameera Ali of the NDI – and hearing them describe their work, I felt a lot better about the whole thing. They are indeed mostly going around teaching people how to run a mail-merge program, how to craft a clear message, how to measure public opinion, and so forth. There are certainly ways you could mis-apply the learning, but in this world where 1490 of 1500 newspapers are government-owned or aligned, teaching people the nuts and bolts of bottom-up communications seems pretty one-sidedly good.

Yet, as it happens, the activities of NDI and IRI have been in suspension in Kazakhstan since last spring, courtesy of the Kazakh government. This issue was raised in DC during Nazarbayev’s visit, we hear, but there has been little news since. This report Governo-Kazakh, does little to clarify things.

She also gives a description of the Polyton Club, run by Masanov who recently passed away. In this particular session, a number of bloggers and website admins were there and the question rose about how much access people have to these Internet sources;

This community is active and engaged among themselves, but they don’t reach much of the broader public. A typical home/small business Internet account at 512k – but hardly affordable by a typical home – costs $300/month, so Internet users number about half a million of Kazakhstan’s 15 million people (3 percent). Censorship is active, but it’s not like in China …In Kazakhstan, sites are simply blocked. There’s certainly a correlation between political edginess and blocking, but it’s not precise or predictable.

The government is promoting programs for computer literacy and for access everywhere—including 400 new Internet cafes (reportedly the PM gave the order that they not be ugly little holes in wall with crap computers, but actually be nicely decorated with excellent technical facilities) and the Ministry of Information, Tourism and Sport, has already announced, in no uncertain terms, its readiness to deal with criminal or slanderous websites. And a new law is already under way in Parliament. One assumes then that the government is prepared to ensure that broader Internet access does not inherently mean broader access to opposition or critical websites. Ms. Dyson suggested a campaign for lower internet prices and she paraphrases Masanov’s response:
Don’t be naive. This isn’t just about money; it’s about control. They don’t want us to have access.

She also got a chance to talk to opposition politician, Galymzhan Zhakiyanov and the Eurasia Foundation as well as Green Salvation and it’s worth reading her experiences and impressions.

Most interesting was her visit to the Shanirak region of Almaty, where there were recently riots between police and residents—some of whom apparently had their legal registrations but the officials claimed they were out of date. Another large population were oralmen, repatriated Kazakhs from other countries, and not given enough material support to establish proper homes. And some people were both oralmen and possessors of suddenly outdated documents. The whole area is supposed to developed for commercial uses and people were kicked off the land, without compensation. It turned out to be quite ugly with a young officer killed, and raising embarrassing questions about social development in Kazakhstan and how responsive the akims are to the people of their cities.

She writes:

As we stood out in the sunshine, we could see destroyed houses, amidst standing houses that also looked fairly decrepit. There were outhouses, and one shack with a plastic bucket atop, which passed for a shower. Various people came up and joined the conversation: they could all remember the time in July when city authorities, along with security police and bulldozers, showed up to raze the buildings. The villagers protested, standing in front of their homes. The most voluble of the women told us how she had doused herself and her children with gasoline, and threatened to strike a match. The forces stood down, but not without wrecking part of her house. More alterations ensued, and some rocks were thrown. The police claimed that the settlers had stockpiled rocks as weapons; the settlers said they were just construction materials lying around. At the end of the day, one of the policemen had been burned to death in a gasoline fire. The police attributed it to the settlers; the settlers attributed it to a provocateur.

Hopefully Ms. Dyson will continue to write similar pieces so we can get more of her perspective and her adventures.