The protest was triggered in particular by the rise in hydrocarbon prices. Almaty airport, the country’s economic capital, closed
«Oyan Qazaqstan!», Wake up Kazakhstan. In the coldest capital in the world, where the waters of the Ishim freeze from October to May, in one of the most frozen post-Soviet regimes, where the old Communist leaders have still ruled for thirty years, ad Almaty e ad Astana the police tanks and the buildings of power burn in the night. Oyan Qazaqstan: this time Kazakhstan really woke up. AND the great fire of the revolt, the first since independence in 1991, lit on January 2 in the distant oil towns of Mangystau, it takes little to set fire to everything. There are deaths, no one knows how many (eight security officers, according to government sources). Hundreds of wounded, thousands of arrests, looting in the villas of the oligarchs, flames in town halls and at the presidential residence.
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“I’m not leaving!” He repeats on the Jabar 24 TV the chair-rafter Kassim-Jomart Tokayev, 68, a past as an ambassador of the USSR, one who speaks Russian to a 70% Turkish-speaking and Muslim people. Announce two weeks of state of emergency, the purge of the premier and of course the reforms: “The answer will be tough – he promises, suggesting a repression of a Belarusian type -. This situation is all the fault of foreign powers stirring up! ” The cause of the anger is above all him: on New Year’s Eve he liberalized the prices for lpg pumps and allowed them to double everywhere. In a country nine times the size of Italy and where everything travels by road. In an economy that is among the top ten world exporters of crude oil and has always been slowing down fuels.
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Tokayev immediately reversed, by lowering the tariffs, but it was soon realized that in the gas revolt there is much more burning. “Drive out the old man!”shouts the square. Because the target of popular anger is not just the black gold wells, but the cesspool of the deepest power: il vecchio Nursultan Nazarbayev, 81 years old, the “elbasy”, the Dear Leader of the Nation, the longest-lived of the old Soviet tools, theformer communist secretary who for 29 years was the absolute master of Kazakhstan and is still there, after putting his stooge Tokayev in power. They have already posted pictures of a statue of Nazarbayev being pulled down in Taldykorgan, ropes and Saddam-style applause, among people singing the national anthem.
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The eternal Nursultan has been discharged from the National Security Council. There are rumors of an attempted assault on the house of Dariga Nazarbayeva, the powerful daughter, whom dad has appointed president of a Senate entirely controlled by him. But the regime has disabled internet and mobile phones and it is already a lot if some news breaks the barrier of silence, in the kingdom of Nazarbayev: even Astana, the glittering capital of Norman Foster’s skyscrapers, a few years ago she was renamed Nursultan in blind obedience to the Dear Leader. The shock was not expected: among all the “stan” of Central Asia, equally governed with iron fist of Soviet veterans, Kazakhstan is the one where ethnic groups live best and an astonishing economic growth has been guaranteed.
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The 2014 oil crisis and the 90% drop in exports to China, due to Covid, for the first time in twenty years have led the country in recession. The Kazakh crisis, according to diplomatic sources, is also the first crisis caused by bitcoins: only in 2021, almost 90 thousand cryptocurrency companies they moved here from China, enticed by the low cost of energy. But by doing so, they explain, the cost of the monstrous amount of electricity needed by algorithms to “protect” bitcoins. Too many interests are juggling around this Central Asian giant. Which is the ninth largest country in the world, sits on huge uranium deposits, has larger crops than Russia and Ukraine, flirts with both Putin and Erdogan. “We will not admit interference,” the Kremlin said: Tokayev called for Russian military intervention. The alarm has sounded, someone is ready to turn it off.
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January 5, 2022 (change January 5, 2022 | 22:03)
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