Little noticed by the international community, Kazakhstan has become a model case for the global double trend of rising authoritarianism and shrinking civic space. While state pressure has grown continuously since the mid-1990s, the crackdown on civil society has intensified over the last year amid mounting economic hardship.
Like other post-Soviet regimes, the Kazakh leadership uses a myriad combination of tools to squeeze civil society. Legal and practical forms of repression are compounded by increasing restrictions to independent funding, gradually suffocating independent thinking and activism in Kazakh society. The west should open its eyes to the shrinking space in Kazakhstan and do more to support independent civil society as a counter-weight to the increasing state monopolisation of power. [...]
According to estimates by the human rights NGO International Legal Initiative Public Foundation, more than 1,000 people were arrested in the biggest city, Almaty, with hundreds more in the capital Astana and many more across the rest of the country. Citizens were protesting not only the new changes to the Land Code, which would allow the sale of land to foreigners, but deep-rooted social and economic problems – unemployment, lack of housing, lack of quality education and poor access to healthcare and medicines. Underlying all these issues is a growing distrust of state power and fear among the population that Kazakhstan’s independence could be lost to systemic corruption. [...]
One symptom of consistent state monopolisation in all spheres is the continual absence of a free market economy. Today, 80% of Kazakhstan’s economy is under state control in various forms (state-owned enterprises, quasi-public sector holdings, joint-stock companies, private companies reliant on the public sector for tenders and contracts etc.). At the same time, corruption has become systemic and is threatening the national interests of the country. The crisis that hit the Kazakh economy with the fall in oil prices has intensified protest moods in a society where 28%, or 2.5m people, are either self-employed or lack stable jobs and incomes. [...]
Beyond organisational restrictions, in the criminal sphere, leaders of public associations are treated on a par with leaders of criminal groups under Kazakh laws intended to address terrorism and extremism. The minimum term of punishment under such law is 10 years imprisonment. Crimes deemed to be “extremist” in nature extends to vague activity such as “the incitement of social discord”. In the absence of a clear definition, the premise of “social discord” allows the judicial system to punish public figures and activists merely for criticising the authorities.
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