Video by US Embassy, Astana.
Robert O. Blake, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, recently gave a talk at Nazarbayev University on April 23 when he visited the region.
Watch it, it's interesting. For one, you can see the Administration seems to be a bit more foreward-leaning on human rights issues although it would be better if it were more robust.
Blake says in response to a question about the low level of press freedom in Kazakhstan and the closure of the independent newspaper Respublika (which now comes out on Facebook), that this is part of a regional trend of "more constraints for civil society as a whole".
All this work for years by the US in "nation'building" in Afghanistan and regional involvement -- and this is what we get: a situation that Blake acknowledges is ""quite risky" at this "sensitive time" for what's happening in Afghanistan and in Russia.
"We have to reverse this trend," he says, although it doesn't seem at all clear how that could be done, and if more freedoms are allowed, in the long run this will be more stabilizing. He gave a nod to religious freedom as well as press freedom and freedom of association.
Blake says he "conveys privately and publicly in both Kazakhstan and elsewhere" US concerns about human rights.
Asked about whether there was a reluctance by US universities to partner with the state-run Nazarbayev University, apparently in reference to a magazine article (which I don't know), Blake insisted that the US favoured exchange.
"We strongly support these kinds of exchange programs,"he said and spoke of his own experience studying at university with foreigners with whom he remained in touch years later.
Although this meeting took place after the Boston bombing and the arrest of two Kazakh students, it did not appear -- at least from this session where the case didn't even come up -- that there would be any lessening of exchange opportunities for Kazakhs. If anything, Blake called out the Central Asian governments for curtailing opportunities for their students to go abroad, because they were afraid they would "bring back ideas to try to change their societies". "We will continue to strongly support and advocate for these programs," said Blake.
There's a huge fear and even hysteria around this issue -- in part fueled by pre-anticipatory fear-mongering such as has come from Casey Michaels on Twitter. I've repeatedly challenged him on his claims that there is any kind of hateful stereotyping of Kazakhs as a result of these arrests. I just don't see it and I have no reason not to see it if is is there.
Even so, there is likely to be more careful checking of these applications for visas and the travel of Kazakhs as anyone else coming from any country associated even in a small way with terrorism, given that one of the students returned to the US even though he was expelled from his university for non-attendance and shouldn't have had a valid student visa.
