A video of the massacre by the now shuttered K+ Internet video news site.
What a difference a year makes.
A year ago, Joshua Foust of American Security Project was arguing in the Atlantic that the massacre of workers in Zhanaozen didn't matter that much, because it was a local conflict, unrelated to any terrorist group, and not really a threat to the Nazarbayev regime.
I debated him on the Atlantic comments; so did Nate Schenkkan, then writing for EurasiaNet and now at Freedom House.
Foust's minimizing of the dreadful events of Zhanaozen was consistent with his overall Real-Politik theories summarized in his Why Human Rights Aren't Paramount at PBS (which I also debated in the comments.) Indeed, the theories of pragmatism ultimately conceding the status quo for the region's regimes is something Registan writers are known for -- a concept I call "The Small Game".
Foust, a former defense contractor and now an avid apologist for drones as the "smart" weapon, is known for his wildly nasty attacks on numerous human rights leaders, activists, and pundits who don't agree with him.
Given how much he had downplayed Zhanaozen, I confronted him, noting that his position was little different from a respected regional specialist, Martha Brill Olcott, who also didn't think that the regime would be threatened by any "Arab Spring" type movements -- whom he derided.
I came to her defense; Foust replied savagely; a State Department official who defended me and said I was only defending Olcott found his comment was removed -- developments I summarized here.
I continued to press for more investigation of the Zhanaozen events, just like all the major human rights groups. I interviewed a brave Russian journalist who had covered the massacre and had one eyewitness who said there were many more bodies of victims than officially reported; this was the question many were asking at the time.
Foust's persistent minimization of the massacre and his mean-spirited dismissal of the Russian journalist earned him lengthy takedowns from a notorious character named Mark Ames who is little better in his own track record. In a parallel development, another Registan writer, Michael Hancock-Parmer, bashed the woman Russian journalist in shameful ways which got a pile-on in the comments. Then a former professor of this author, Elise Anderson, took him to task for his questionable methods, and strikingly, Sarah Kendzior came along and evenutally creepily maneuvered the woman -- who in fact was spot on -- into conceding she might be wrong and ostensibly shouldn't have publicly harmed her student's online rep by dissing him. Say, does that method sound familiar!
We may never know how many people in fact were killed in Zhanaozen, although there do not seem to be 70.
But the events unleashed tidal ways of repression with grave consequences in ways that I think none of us had conceived when were were obsessing about the initial event itself and the body count -- on both sides of the debate.
Nate's account -- based on his eye-witness reporting and monitoring of the trial of Kozlov -- provides all the chilling details:
In the last year, the government has moved relentlessly and methodically to crush the country’s already limited civic life. Hundreds of locals in Zhanaozen and nearby Aktau were detained, and many of them likely tortured. Thirty-four oil workers were convicted of organizing the riots in a mass trial where detailed allegations of torture were ignored. The government investigation swept up a whole slew of civil society and opposition activists as material witnesses and possible defendants, before settling on Vladimir Kozlov.
Kozlov, leader of the unregistered opposition party Alga, and two codefendants were convicted in October of “inciting social hatred” against the government in order to create conflict in Zhanaozen. Somehow Kozlov—who even in the prosecution’s conspiratorial version of events never distributed or advocated the use of weapons—has become the one responsible for unarmed protesters being shot in the back. His trial, which Freedom House monitored and reported on, was marked by procedural irregularities and built around the testimony of his former fellow activists, many of whom had said they were tortured in their own trials.
I met Kozlov myself at the OSCE's Human Dimense Implementation Meeting before his arrest in 2010, and even then, the Kazakh ambassador and head of delegation interrupted his speech at the meeting and threatened him with charges of "inciting violence" merely because in his remarks, he said that when the opposition eventually came to power, it would address all the massive human rights violations of the regime. "We will come for you," he said -- and by that he didn't mean any violent reprisal, but trials for their human rights crimes.
As Schenkkan notes, despite the fact the government tried some people said to be responsible for the shootings, there is a very incomplete response:
The government of Kazakhstan has highlighted the fact that some local officials were tried on corruption charges, and a handful of police officers were found guilty of “exceeding authority” for their role in the Zhanaozen events. But specific and well-substantiated allegations of torture went uninvestigated. Despite President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s initial pledge that there would be an independent international inquiry, no such probe has materialized, even after the UN human rights commissioner explicitly requested it. One year later, we still do not know who gave the order to use live fire on unarmed protesters, and dozens of officers who participated in the shootings have faced no charges at all.
And as he notes, this has served to unleash a huge crackdown on civil society, such as it is, in ways I think we didn't anticipate a year ago:
Now the Kozlov conviction is being used to shutter media outlets associated with the opposition across the country on grounds of “extremism.” The verdict held that Kozlov led an “organized criminal group” funded by exiled oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov, establishing a guilt-by-association logic that could be used to punish practically anyone engaged in civic or political activism. The outlets that are being closed, like the newspaper Respublika, the online news site Stan TV, and the satellite broadcaster K+, have interacted regularly with all prominent figures in political life or civil society in Kazakhstan. Kazakh human rights activists are talking grimly about their country sliding toward conditions associated with Uzbekistan, long regarded as the most ruthless and aggressively repressive government in the region.
Yet the Real-Politik writers at Registan express no regrets or make no apologies for their minimizing of the events there -- Foust even said that if in fact 70 were found to be killed, maybe the regime would be shaken, but it wouldn't be by a few dozen -- a curious algorithm.
Now, Registan is taking the usual star turn, pretending to be a platform for discussion and debate, and providing space to the Kazakh ambassador, who naturally downplays all the negative events and attempts to spin them madly.
Giving this Kazakh official space is, I think the sort of thing most NGO advocacy organizations or even policy organizations might be reluctant to do -- the very frame lends a patina of legitimacy the regime certainly doesn't have. You can always call a dictator mouthpiece for a comment and quote it in your own article without having to yield your platform to them in faux free debate while people like Kozlov sit in cold jail cells. It's bad faith, really, to do that.
Meanwhile, Shenkkan, who obviously cares about Kozlov and did everything possible to monitor and report on his unfair trial and the other negative developments in Kazakhstan, regretably lends legitimacy to Registan's bad faith by submitting a guest post to Registan. (Note: the Kazakh ambassador gets his own byline in a separate box as "an opinion piece"; Shenkkan has to fit in under Nathan Hamm's byline as a "guest post". Difference in rank!)
Again, Registan is not a place of good faith or fairness, but a place very much of bad faith when it silences critics and defenders of critics who are legitimate, and pretends that's alright. Shenkkan shouldn't be part of that methodology or that company and lending the site the patina of legitimacy himself -- he was always seized on and quoted or offered space by the Registanis when they blocked or ignored or savaged other EurasiaNet writers and human rights advocates simply because he was a nice guy with really great regional knowledge who likes to get along with people.
In discussing Kazakhstan's national narrative, Foust now cunningly shifts his own narrative from one that minimizes Zhanaozen, or trashes Russian journalists trying to cover the atrocity, or people who confronted him with his minimization, and starts chiding Kazakhstan in dulcet tones about how it is not behaving like a mature, young wealthy state should be. The main message of the piece, in the undertow: Nazzy is bad on human rights, but who cares, he's opening up the mineral rights to foreigners again.
Last year, we were told that Russian journalists exaggerated things, "human rights are not paramount," the regime would stand, and human rights nervous nellies were too idealistic. Now, says Foust regarding the accusation that Respublika, Kozlov's publication, is "extremist" that it is not worthy of the regime:
Put simply, such an unnecessary attack on Kazakhstan’s still-fledgling political opposition is not the behavior of a growing, confident, young, dynamic country, which is what Kazakhstan clearly wants to be. It is the behavior of a weak, insecure, terribly afraid regime. Which could potentially be dangerous in the long run, not only in the case of another Zhanaozen massacre but more subtle forms of repression like further limiting speech and setting harsh limits on public gatherings.
It's not clear how subtle forms of repression are "more dangerous" than massacres, but let's welcome Foust to the Newly-Acquired Conscience Club because now he's scolding the regime about human rights lagging the way he used to scold other people for calling out the regime or his soft touch. I guess that's because it's okay to say these things now...or something....
Foust only has to plant a few dog whistles in his column to get the usual suspects turning out in the comments and basically sniping at the opposition, their newspapers, and castigating the very notion of any alturistic international community, because it is only interested in resource extraction, to hear them tell it. Mission accomplished!
