The first thing we know about the situation in Kazakhstan is that we do not know everything. That's because it's a closed society. To be sure, we've gotten a lot of information about the situation from Western and regional journalists, but they've been compelled to visit the scene on officially-organized trips where their movements are controlled. They can and do make efforts to get information around these blockades. But their visas in the country depend on their maintaining the government's good will, such as it is. So it's a tricky situation and not a new one for this region.
From the early days, a certain propaganda ruckus was kicked up around the issue of "the 70". In fact, no one was claiming there was a confirmed 70 dead and the number was never "swimming" all over the Russian media as claimed. From the beginning, Novaya gazeta, the independent Russian newspaper, was among the first to report it. They said that *they did not know* the full story and that the official death count was 10 (at that time) -- they faithfully reported the limited news with complete journalistic integrity saying only the 10 were confirmed officially, but *they also reported sources* that said there were more. These included a British socialist, an Kazakh TV journalist and an independent journalist in Kazakhstan related to the opposition -- and then in subsequent reports, various other workers and eyewitnesses.
So Novaya Gazeta was providing a fuller picture for its reader to make their own judgements by citing other sources outside the official list of 10, not claiming there was 70.
On Registan, we can find a lengthy piece called strangely "Critical Journalism and Janaozen" although it doesn't really discuss the difficulties of journalism in a closed society per se or define what is meant by "critical journalism". There's a curious double-speak quality to the piece that I suppose can be explained by its academic nature, but its entire purpose seems to be to exonerate Joshua Foust of charges of minimizing the tragedy of Zhanaozen, such as I've made, as well as others. That has the effect, intentional or not, of reducing the gravity of the Nazarbayev regime's complicity and ultimate responsibility for this event, and that's why it's troubling.
Mark Ames at The Exiled has only done a disservice to finding the truth of this story by mixing into the discussion of the facts of the Zhanaozen shootings a wild take-down of Joshua Foust. It's vicious and mean, and therefore ineffective, as it will only serve to make Foust feel more the martyr and make others rush to his defense. Ames also mixes in a typically lefty Marxist sort of analysis -- if an American oil company was even present in the country doing business at the time of police killings of this nature, then it must be "to blame" somehow. He offers his Marxism as an answer to Foust's glib realpolitik claim that Chevron had "nothing" to do with Zhanaozen.
OIL CAN WHAT?
Of course, it's more complicated than that. The "progressives" are always claiming that oil companies are responsible for human rights violations -- it's been a stock methodology of radical movements to try to pin egregious human rights abuses on oil companies as part of making more vivid their critique against corporations and capitalism and "neoliberal policies" in general. To be sure, there are actual cases where oil companies have been aptly condemned -- and even appear to have acknowledged responsibility for human rights abuses, like the story of Shell in the Niger Delta and the Ogoni people's struggle -- a situation about which we know 100 times more than we're likely ever to know about Kazakhstan.
In Kazakhstan, the question isn't just about the company's ownership or level of presence or "what did they know and when did they know it." It's also about whether they were part of the decision- making process or part of the physical security response. In this case, it appears Chevron was not, but we do not have enough information.
Yet the larger question in a country where the oil workers were said to be striking *because they didn't have pay equal to foreign workers* is what Chevron did know about *that* situation months ago, and what, if anything, it could have done to mitigate it. We may never know, and maybe there isn't a practical way to ask, but in a country where oil workers have been striking for months, we need to look at what the policies of foreign companies were in this regard and what relationship they had to that situation. We can take this rights-based approach without forging false connections of complicity that ultimately only undermine the cause of gaining accountability from the extractive industries.
What's more readily apparent, however, is the need first and foremost to look for accountability from the Nazarbayev regime. They are, after all, the powers that be. Kazakhstan is designated an authoritarian state because they control everything, or try to. Whether the tragedy of Zhanaozen turns out to be a story of cynical neglect and refusal to enable real justice, or a more sinister order to stifle unrest before it spread further, the Nazarbayev regime is at fault.
IGNORING THE CENTRAL CLAIM OF A BODY COUNT
The most curious thing about Michael Hancock-Parmer's exegesis of Ames is that he doesn't directly confront the reality of what Novaya Gazeta's Elena Kostyuchenko said and did: she found a credible source who said *she herself* allegedly counted the 64 dead bodies and was told of *another 23* who died on operating tables.
Note: by following both Ames' version of this and Michael Hancock-Parmer's quotation of Ames, I initially conflated the journalist and her source, too: they spoke of "Elena Kostyuchenko, who reported counting a total of 64 dead bodies in the main hospital morgue in Zhanaozen" -- although it was not the journalist herself but her source.
But that doesn't change my essential analysis of this story simply because the journalist trusted the source and the source sounds credible -- it doesn't fit in with the narrative H-P is trying to establish, so he discards them as mere social-media noise.
Hancock-Parmer sets up distrust of Ames' account and even his translation by finding discrepancies, but they don't seem relevant to this central point: the counting of bodies by this journalist's source. [Again, Ames conflated the two but as you can easily see in the original itself, although the story is so long you might miss the quotation marks within the long narrative, Kostyuchenko quotes a source, Kokel, who said she visited the morgue.]
The story wasn't that she heard there were 70, or somebody said "desyatki" (dozens) were killed; she interviewed a person who counted them and decided to trust that source.
So accordingly, we can either take her word and her first-hand report on faith, since she comes from a reputable independent newspaper with a long history of investigative journalism and even the assassination of four of its journalists. Or we can explain how her source might have made an error this big (67 not 16). I don't think the option is to say that she irresponsibly or unprofessionally "made stuff up" or practiced "social reporting" (sometimes people call this "community journalism" or "citizens' journalism" but that's not what it was -- she was reporting a credible source). We can't say that -- not when Elena faithfully reported initially that only 10 were confirmed, and other accounts existed and were being checked; not when she interviewed lots of people from the scene, and decided to publish this account of Kokel's.
I'm always open to finding out any truth like that in a setting where journalism is a weapon of all kinds of powerful forces from governments to oil companies. If someone can compellingly show that Elena was all wrong, and even deliberately falsifies the data, or that the witness Kokel or others are just making stuff up, please do so. Michael Hancock-Parmer does not do that. He never addresses the question of the authenticity of Kostyuchenko's source who claimed to have counted the dead.
Instead, he completely dismisses this highly-detailed account with this, after also calling into question the authenticity of Novaya Gazeta as an independent source:
He [Ames] misinforms his readers as to the nature of the Novaia Gazeta story – accidentally or willfully. The reporter does not claim to have seen anything herself and merely relates the anecdotes she collected after the fact. Elena Kostiuchenko, as far as I can tell, wrote a typical piece of social journalism, the kind for which the eXile itself used to be famous. She goes in, describes what she sees – she is very clearly separating personal experience from hearsay. She tries to define each source in turn. She acknowledges the lack of evidence for the claims of her informants. In short, I certainly don’t hold Elena Kostiuchenko responsible for Ames’ characterization of her article.
But Kostyuchenko is a journalist, an experienced one who has made her way into an area closed off to media where social media was turned off. Social journalism, really? She interviewed a witness who had ample details of the event which tracks with other eyewitness reports, and she reported it -- while acknowledging, as she did in her first reports, that there was lack of confirmation, she doesn't impugn this source the way Mark Hancock-Parmer does -- if she had, it wouldn't have been printed. Here's what she writes, which Hancock-Parmer leaves out of the account on Registan:
Korkel is one of the few people who managed to get into the hospital that day. Korkel herself lives in one of the auls [villages] outside of Uzen, but they had come to visit her sister for those days. Her sister's husband is an oil worker, and her sister had gone to strike on the square. But Korkel took her niece, a student of School No. 3, to a strange morning assembly, where they had to "dress warmly." Together with a column of children, she had come to the square.
So this sister, who had family who were part of the striking workers, herself went to take part with a child in the state-orchestrated school-children's participation in the official independence day celebration.
"I heard the first shots. I said: we aren't going there. But my niece said -- mama's over there! Well, we went ahead. When they began shooting, the wounded and killed were dragged back. Five people were lain at my feet. Four were killed, one was still alive. Then people began stopping a van going by and loaded both dead and alive people, and I went along with them and went to the hospital"
[Note -- several mistakes in Michael Hancock-Parmer's translation: it isn't that "the wounded were pushing us back. Five people fell at my feet" because it's genitive plural, and then third-person plural past tense -- it should be "the wounded and killed were dragged away" "ubitykh i rannenykh ottaskivali nazad" and then it is not that the dead "fell" at her feet, rather: "people lay the dead at her feet" ("k moim nogam polozhili 5 cheloveka," i.e. other people placed the dead at her feet). Also, it wasn't 3rd grade, although the child was presumably young, but school no. 3 "3-i shkoli".]
She then follows with the story of counting bodies in the morgue. So she's someone who is not herself a striking worker, but has family who are; she is someone who went along to an official apparently compulsory school program and who saw shocking events she recorded. There doesn't seem to be any reason to impugn her narrative. People were shot and we see videos of the dead and wounded dragged away. She wasn't in the midst of the strikers such as to be motivated to exaggerate, even with family. She took part in an official event with a child, and was moved by a sense of the horror of the situation to come to the hospital because dead people had literally landed at her feet.
Given this alternative narrative -- let's call it that, in the absence of corroboration everyone is happy with -- I think we have to say this: while the Nazarbayev regime has acknowledged 16 deaths, due to significant independently-obtained information there may be more, and impartial and credible national and international investigations should be held.
HAVE YOU EVER STAYED ALL NIGHT IN A MORGUE COUNTING DEAD PEOPLE?
Now, how could you count 64 people in the morgue if there weren't really 64 people (the officials now say there are only 16). It's not out of a desire to maliciously lie and defame another country or one's own -- that doesn't seem to be operative to here. That's why the claim that Russian or Kazakh journalists reporting alternative narratives to the official one using sources they find credible aren't "hysterical" or "wildly irresponsible" -- and I resent when they are called that, given their good-faith effort to get at the truth. That is, I resent it simply based on my own experience for years with these courageous people, and I await a possible other explanation than their own cynical manipulation.
If Hancock-Parmer can distract from the bold fact of Kostyuchenko's source who said she personally saw the bodies and counted them, and try to impugn this account by a host of other distracting factlets (like the supposed telling failure not to repeat that it was independence day?), I'm going to push back and say this in defense of the witness and Kostyuchenko's choice to trust her, as a good-faith explanation of how they could have been mistaken, even if credible: Strange, even such a seemingly simple thing like counting people in a morgue after you've gone through the shock and horror of having five dead people lain at your feet can get muddled under the stress and chaos of a fresh scene like this; you could count rows twice. Not likely, but one hypothesis. For another the morgue may not be an official morgue but can be a temporary morgue or merely a receiving area in a hospital where dead and wounded are mixed, or where dead from some other reason, like natural causes, could be mixed with the dead from this incident. We don't know all the details that would help us figure out whether that kind of mistake was made.
Usually when "too many" dead are counted, it's because wounded are counted, too. And in the translation of the story Hancock-Parmer supplies, there is a line about "70 wounded" that instantly suggests that could have become the line about dead, mistakenly. (Kostyuchenko actually reported at least 400 wounded) -- if reporters were only going by verbal accounts from officials or eyewitnesses on the scene.
In all the weeks of discussion at Registan, the link to all of the Novaya Gazeta articles were never supplied and still haven't been. Here is the first story.
HOOLIGANS DID IT
When you hear a story about "hooligans" or youths breaking free in a choreographed state function like independence day, the first thing you think of in the Soviet and post-Soviet context is "provocation" -- that the security police agitate people to commit violent acts as an excuse to crack down, or to discredit the movement. At least, that's the first thing you think of if you are a human rights activist or a political dissident of some kind like me. The governments always blame unspecified "hooligans"; sometimes those "hooligans" are legitimate protesters, sometimes they are police plants.
It's not what you think of when you are an academic or a think-tank fellow, and there you might take the rioting youths first as being rowdy members of the movement itself. That's because you're trained to look for narratives from the authorities, not the resisters.
I myself have witnessed quite a few demonstrations in Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, South Africa and other countries and of course here at home, including three large Occupy Wall Street rallies. And I see in all these situations the kinds of organized bands of people who seem to materialize out of the subways in black hoodies who push the crowd to extremes. In Russia, it could be the Putin-sponsored Nashi; in Minsk there was the fellow banging the door of the election office and talking clandestinely into his sleeve to his superiors. In Manhattan it might be the extreme Marxist-Lenininst factions or (as those activists themselves believe, police provocateurs). They function in obvious fashions -- deliberately screaming, shouting, pushing fences, throwing rocks, climbing street lamps, sometimes drunk or on drugs or feigning to be so.
In the Novaya Gazeta piece, a striking oil worker Sapar Uskenov says, true to expectation, "This was a provocation. We were peacefully standing on the square, when a police bus ran into us. At that time young people staged a pogrom, then the police began to disperse us from the square. Our guys naturally began to resist. A clash occured, shooting broke out, chaos set in. I saw a lot of people killed and wounded. It was awful."
BTW, I could say I have seen the same thing at the Republican convention in New York City a few years ago, when police on motorcycles rammed into a crowd that refused to disperse, and so it's always worth keeping a curious mind when discussing police brutality and ask, "And what were people doing before that?" Were they really standing peacefully? All of them? And so on.
WHEN IS A POGROM NOT A POGROM?
Hancock-Parmer makes much of Ames' use of the word "pogrom" in English to translate the Russian word "pogrom" but it isn't quite the exoticism he seems to imply, or only associated with the Tsar's or the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. Kyrgyz and Uzbek people used the word "pogrom" to describe what happened in Osh in 2010 and this crept into usage in English-language reports. When Russians use this, they are using a word without connotation to any historical period or persecution of one people -- it's a word with the root for "thunder" and means a large-scale assault.
To avoid sounding as if you are likening to the Holocaust a rampage of young people who may or may not have been provocateurs that wound up with perhaps only 16 people dead, you could use the word "rampage" or "riot" or "crackdown" or "attack" or something else. But it isn't wrong to use the word pogrom -- and people use it all the time in English in regards to this region -- it's just inviting connotations that may not help tell the story.
Even so, those with a feel for this region and its many crackdowns will likely concur that this *was* a provocation. But by whom, for what? Perhaps the police only meant to pin a few broken store windows or burnt cars on trouble-makers they'd been longing to put away for awhile. But in a place like Kazakhstan, they could have made a dirty windshield a pretext for doing that if they want, so it's not clear what the point would have been. Were radical elements in the movement pushing it to worse violence, with "worse the better" politics? Was one radical faction fighting another? Possibly.
DID THE RIOTERS RELATE TO THE STRIKERS?
But the operative thing to ask here about Hancock-Parmer's account is why he believes that the shootings may have nothing to do with the original strikes.
That makes no sense, when Novaya Gazeta quotes *a striking worker* who describes who they were attacked by young people instigating a pogrom. Those youths may have been provocateurs, or may have been townspeople disgruntled about something else, but the context here is that striking workers attending this event were attacked -- provoked, and then some people were shot. So this news accounts show they are related.
In the rest of this piece, we have Kenjegali Suyeuov the chair of the Aktau Mangistau regional independent trade union saying that the prosecutor general was deliberately distorting information and that "according to some information about 70 people were killed, but this is inaccurate information because until late at night, shots continued in the city. I can't say exactly who is shooting at the police. It is possible that those people are not from among the striking oil workers."
So this labor leader cites the 70 because he believes it was reliable, and thinks it could be more, and also indicates that those taking up arms against police might not be strikers.
Galym Ageleulov, a human rights defender who had been helping the strikers for months, said that he thought the riots in Zhanaozen were provoked "by hired men". This is a story heard in many incidents throughout the region; usual the word used about such people is that they are "otmorozki," or sort of zombies able to engage in cold murders, sometimes either Chechens or Russians who fought in Chechnya. (And because this meme is so lodged in the mind and in the press you always have to ask.)
So we have a situation where people perceive the riots as related to the general situation of unrest for months caused by the worker's strike, but striking workers saying they were provoked by provocateurs and various people saying that maybe they weren't related. A contextual relationship; not a factual relationship in terms of who did the rioting. I will return to this point below.
ELENA KOSTYUCHENO'S REPORTS
Again, Kostyuchenko's first story on December 17 is here:
She says in fact that the authorities announced 10 had been killed, but according to eyewitnesses "tens" had been killed. She is reporting this situation accurately and like any Western wire service would require that it be reported in this first news story. So it's hard to accept disparagement of her reporting when she has in fact done what any good reporter would do: report the official number, and then indicate that eyewitnesses gave a higher number.
She goes on to explain the context that the strikers demanded equal pay to that of Chinese specialists, and improvement of work conditions and an independent trade union. (Interestingly, when Turkmen gas pipeline builders went on strike over the same issue, the Chinese themselves instantly responded and demanded that their authoritarian Turkmen leaders give them higher pay and better working conditions. That's how they wanted to get the pipeline built.)
Then, lower down in the story, she explains that "from social networks" (likely a reference to Respublika, the opposition paper, on Facebook, and other twitter and blog accounts) there was the figure of 70 killed and more than 500 were wounded." She writes:
Human rights activists learned about the situation only when in the hospital in Aktau (the nearest large city), an immediate collection of blood donations was made. All the non-state media and human rights organizations were blocked, the roads to Zhanaozen were closed, and cell phone connection, telephone lines, and Internet were turned off.
OK, people, why are we hollering at journalists trying to get the story on the scene here, with THAT kind of closed, black box? Why are we disparaging their ability, and claiming that they can't or won't correct a false number of 70? They can't, under these conditions, and it is most definitely not out of bad will and the desire to blacken the reputation of Nazarbayev -- already blackened enough with 10 or 16, as it later turned out, and not 60 more.
And that's really the essence of the troubling babble about this at Registan. Joshua Foust even set up the premise that if there were only 16 killed, then Nazarbayev could survive; if there were 70, his regime would likely face severe challenges:
If there are only a few more dead — say, if the total dead stays under 20 or 25 — then there’s a fair chance Nazarbayev will pull out of this with no further action on his part needed. I stand by my call to fire or imprison those police officers who shot fleeing protesters in the back, but from a public relations perspective, firing so many elite people involved in the crisis (and his unequivocal apology and promise of aid to the vicitms’ families) could easily be perceived by the majority of Kazakhs as having handled the situation.
But in other countries and situations, governments can be mightily shaken by only handfuls of killings, and even if top officials are fired, it can have a far more profound effect for decades. Only 4 were killed in Kent State -- didn't that shake the president and the country? On Bloody Sunday in Northern Island, only 26 were killed, but yet that shook the country and even to this day the British government is still trying to come to terms with the accountability required.
Sixteen is bad enough and profoundly shook the Nazarbayev regime, causing him to fire even his own son-in-law, obviously a dramatic act for one of the Soviet clan families, and top oil officials, also a troubling admission of guilt. And even if it doesn't mean any Arab Spring, it is not a case to trivialize as a local labour dispute.
In another troubling post, Foust says that "the police should be punished" -- as if it were enough to have a stern call to bring the full extent of the law on just those individual police! The police in a vertikal command situation like Kazakhstan were likely only following orders, or in a context of impunity; usually in these countries, when something bad happens and somewhere there is a disaster, a high official can be fired -- like a major over the arms depot explosion -- and not in fact the soldier or guard on duty that may have carelessly flicked the cigarette. Surely it seems obvious that the police had to have had orders to act as they did -- and yet Nazarbayev is going after the business side of this tragedy, not the top Interior Ministry and KNB side.
Calling for punishment of local police in a situation where workers have been on strike for months on end and their lawyer thrown in jail, and even two deaths occurred related to the strikes is hardly the human rights approach; it's the feigning of the human rights approach. Real accountability would have to come at the very top, and since that's not likely given the need for Nazarbayev to save face (and his taking up the role of the "good cop" in this affair), at least Interior Ministry and gas and oil officials ministers -- higher than the oil company executives and local police administers. It's not about police brutality; it's about regime brutality. It's not about just the killings in Zhanaozen but the entire strike for months.
A few other points about the story of December 17
o Paul Murphy, the Irish Socialist Party MEP, also gives the figures of 70 protesters killed and 500 wounded, "from that information that I have in hand". He says:
"Workers occupied some of the buildings in the city, some of the buildings were set on fire. In Zhanaozen, 1,500 soldiers were brought in, tanks were sent in."
That suggests there *is* a connection between the long-time strikers and the rampage in Zhanaozen. He doesn't say who set the buildings on fire but the implication is occupying workers. Of course, Murphy, as a socialist, is politically supporting striking workers sticking it to large oil corporations, so he may have an axe to grind. But he reported it as he saw it, and Kostyuchenko cited him as a source, to create a number of impressions of the scene so the reader could judge for themselves.
She also cites a TV employee in Aktau who says:
"It's not completely true that the demonstration was peaceful. I was born and grew up in this region. Protests have been going on in Zhanaozen since 2008. There were enough sparks, so that the situation became critical."
o Zhanna Baysalova, an independent journalist from Alma-Ata, says:
"We mangaed to telephone one of the Zhanaozen activists, Sholpan. She was in the hospital at the time of the demonstration. They are all in shock from the official information that the prosecutor has confirmed only 10 people killed. She says that she personally saw at least 25 bodies. Her spouse is also wounded, he was shot in the legs. She managed to say that there were no riots in the city now but there was "some kind of confusion." Then the call was cut off. The domestic flights to Aktau (the nearest largest city to zhanaozen--EK) were cancelled in Kazakhstan."
What Kostyuchenko has done on day one here is honestly reported what others are saying about the scene, after the official version. She is not blessing what they are saying, but she is chronicling it so we can see. *And that's what we need journalists to do in closed societies where the Internet and the roads are closed.* To gather alternative narratives so we can try to put it all together. Maybe some will have to be discarded later with fact-checking; maybe some will turn out to be exaggerated. But the gathering and chronicling of alternative narratives in a closed situation, even if it doesn't fit the classic paradign of Western wire-service journalism, is a valuable reporting activity and civic duty that should be sustained and validated, not scorned.
KOSTYUCHENKO'S REPORT OF THE SOURCE WHO VISITED THE MORGUE
I'm not sure why Hancock-Parmer has not cited this first report by Kostyuchenko which frames her role as a journalist doing her job: reporting the official numbers (then only 10), but gathering eyewitness reports and reports from supporters on the scene like Murphy who gave her a different story. Maybe because that wouldn't help his point that she couldn't be trusted?
Kostyuchenko's next report of Dec. 20, you can read here in the original
Hancock in my view tendentiously opts for the translation of "riot" for "bunt" -- bunt is word that Russians have used for many situations, is generally related to rebellions, i.e. led with a purpose, not just rioting for the hell of it.
I don't have time to do a line by line examination of where else he may have skewed the translation, I will take it on faith that he has rendered it accurately, and in any event, here's the link he didn't supply to the original: we see here in this story then that the prosecutor speaks of "11 dead and 70 wounded" -- one possible source of "the 70".
Then we get a very detailed accounting of the count by Kostyuchenko's source, Kokel.
First two children whose bodies were in the far corner. Then three kids who were burned in a store whose bodies were unrecognizable. Then we see how it is that a larger count could have happened -- not through incompetence (this eye-witness interviewed by Kostyuchenko is in the morgue of an area that police have closed off, doing her best!), but through the situation itself:
o "the bodies were piled one on top of another"
o "They brought 21 bodies to the morgue, but at 9 o'oclock, Tamila, who works in the morgue, locked the door with a key and went home, but they continued to bring in bodies."
So as I initially suggested, what was happening was that bodies were not being brought into a formal morgue room, but were piling up outside in the hall, where they may have then been mixed with wounded or not been counted/tagged correctly by a visitor.
"Then they opened the next room and began to put bodies one on top of another. And until the morning of the 17th, until 9:00 o'clock, until I went home, they brought 43 more people"
On the one hand, we have a very persistent eyewitness [not journalist] willing to stay in a dangerous zone with a lot of dead bodies and count them, who says she counted 67 in this scene. And given the time and persistence and the fact that surely, even with mistakes, you wouldn't mistake 16 for so many more in this setting.
On the other hand, we do have a setting where wounded and dead may have been informally mixed up and possibly over-counted, and where 21 could be solidly counted, but the next 43 or so may not have been.
THE OFFICIAL LIST OF NAMES
The authorities have given out 16 names, and presumably, if relatives didn't see their loved ones' names on that list, they would come forward and say they know for a fact that their relatives were killed, too. No such people have come forward. It's possible in a situation like this that some people who are feared dead are in fact only in hiding, and perhaps relatives hope that if names aren't mentioned, that their relatives are in hiding, and that mentioning them might make it worse for them. But scores of them?
There's a lot we don't know about this situation, but one thing we can see is the factitiousness -- I have to make up a new usage for this word just try to capture this curious phenomenon -- of the accounts on Registan. Hancock-Parmer showers us with factoids to distract us from the one obvious fact on the ground -- which is Kostyuchenko's SOURCE counted bodies in a morgue and she reported on them because she found it credible. He makes strange, pouncing accusations -- like the fact that Kostyuchenko didn't repeat the fact that it was independence day -- to try to undermine her credibility or judgement about a source.
But why should she repeat this in a third piece, when she quoted the prosecutor mentioning it in the first piece, here? And when it was an obvious fact that people may have taken for granted.
LINKAGE BETWEEN RIOTERS AND STRIKERS?
The prosecutor quoted says the riots were caused by striking workers in the Kazmunaygaz uniforms.
There's much more going on in Hancock-Parmer's explication of Ames, but I'll focus on one odd criticism:
This allows me to raise another question: What direct evidence do we have that the oil strike and the riots were even connected? If he really wants to dig into Elena’s article, he’ll see that the strikers don’t believe they’re connected. Dauren, an oil-worker on strike whose name Elena changed to protect his identity, explained his suspicion about the rowdy young men, most likely unemployed, who showed up in the square directly before the riots to join the strikers in solidarity.
Er, the direct evidence we have is that a number of the witnesses or those involved have said they were. Starting with that prosecutor Kostyuchenko first reported -- and if we're going to be good journalists and report the official narrative first, why would we discard the official narrative that the rioters and the strikers were related? They were even in uniforms. They even rampaged carefully, we're told, leaving stores not related to the oil company.
There are two motivations for not connecting them -- one would be the regime's, or those hoping to exonerate the regime, by saying that random hooligans broke up an independence day celebration with riots but these were unrelated to the long-simmering problems of the striking workers so that the police shooting becomes an isolated act on a holiday, not the culmination of months of unrest now put down deliberately and savagely to ensure it stops.
The other could be the striker workers themselves, who don't want to be accused of starting riots to keep the nobility of their cause intact. But the local prosecutor has interrupted that first narrative and others interrupted the second.
Murphy, the Irish socialist, for one. Others say they aren't sure, or that they are even "hired men". But it would be foolish to pin the validation of a connection between the strikes and the pogroms on the confirmation of the strikers as pogromers. Because this was an area where people have been on strike and discontent had been rampant for months. As the TV journalist who said he had grown up in the area put it, there were enough sparks to light the tinder, and no, the demonstrations weren't completely peaceful.
Hancock-Parmer may have undertaken this work on behalf of his friend Joshua Foust in good faith; but then, he seems to be trying less to find out what really happened to the poor people of Zhanaozen than to demonstrate that Foust is "no more flawed, nor more corrupt, than the rest of us." It's not about his employees or his past, however; it's about the bad faith of writing piece after piece that are protective of Nazarbayev in the end -- by minimizing the extent and significance of the tragedy; by asking only for prosecution of local police; by questioning the integrity of Russian journalists on the scene, and even suggesting that if "only" 16 people were killed, Nazarbayev gets to save it.
