18.12.2011, 21:17:18

The building of the Ozenmunaigas company, burned during the riots in Zhanaozen. Photo by RIA Novosti, Anatoly Ustinenko

became famous

Zhanaozen is taken under full control by police and special forces

A special correspondent for Lenta.ru arrived in the Kazakh city of Zhanaozen, where riots broke out the day before, ending in a clash between the crowd and the police. As a result, people died, and a wave of pogroms and arson swept through the city. What is happening in the city now and what both its residents and police officers who witnessed and participated in these events are talking about, read in the report by Ilya Azar.

“Of course, we feel sorry for the dead, but we became famous throughout the world by showing that the people can cope with a bad government,” taxi driver Ursunbay notes a little cynically on the way from the port of Aktau to the city of Zhanaozen. The long road in the dark encourages frankness, and he says that he served 12 years in prison for the murder of two “grandfathers” in the army.

Disorder

The only way to travel the 150 kilometers separating Aktau and Zhanaozen, where clashes took place between police and strikers from the Ozenmunaigas oil company on December 16, is by taxi. There is a curfew in Zhanaozen from 11 pm to 7 am, but entry into the city is also limited during the daytime.

The day before, the President of Kazakhstan introduced a state of emergency in Zhanaozen, which significantly limited the rights and freedoms of city residents and its guests until January 5.

Two days after the riots, Zhanaozen looks a bit like the Kyrgyz city of Osh. Along the central streets there are also burnt shops, department stores and restaurants. But there are no Uzbeks in Zhanaozen, so the residential buildings were practically not touched, but the akimat (mayor’s office) and the Ozenmunaigas representative office got it.

Early on Sunday morning, several rooms on the first floor of the akimat are still smoldering, the smoke, through which the outlines of the absurd frame of the metal detector appear, corrodes the eyes. The hotel and restaurant complex next door were looted and burned.

The events that “glorified” Zhanaozen throughout the world took place in the central square of the city (it’s called the Square here). In honor of the 20th anniversary of Kazakhstan's independence, a large turquoise stage, yurts (in which the fair was supposed to take place) and a large Christmas tree were installed here.

Everything would be fine, but in the same area (very vast) oil workers fired from the Ozenmunaigas company have been on strike for six months. They had not received their salaries all this time, so their mood was not the most festive. What actually happened on December 16 is not known for certain. Almost everyone in Zhanaozen or Aktau has their own more or less original version.

In Aktau, one of the oil workers striking here (by the way, he promised a repetition of similar riots in this port city in the near future) called beshbarmak the trigger for the violence. This Kazakh national dish of boiled meat in broth was allegedly eaten by the mayor of the city in one of the yurts on the square.

“Eat, you’re hungry, since you’ve been sitting without work for so long,” the mayor allegedly said, having satisfied his appetite, and threw the bones he had gnawed to the oil workers.

Others say that the police first provoked the strikers and then began to forcefully push them out of the square. But in any case, no one denies that it was not the oil workers who were to blame for the subsequent clashes, but young guys - either provocateurs, or simply embittered lumpen.

“Students organized this, guys 20-21 years old, but the oil workers will still be judged,” says one of the city residents. The video footage of the riots clearly shows that it was not oil workers who were destroying and breaking the Christmas tree and breaking the glass in the police station. They are easily recognized by their identical burgundy overalls.

somewhere Be that as it may, the youth managed to get hold of sawed-off shotguns and Kalashnikovs and wounded six policemen (one of them is in a coma). There were about a hundred people in the city at that moment, and they could not seriously resist the crowd.

“They ran towards the special forces, they shot, some fell, but no one ran away, they continued to run forward. The police killed three and then ran away. That’s when the looting began, back and forth,” said one of the eyewitnesses of those events.

Men, when they talk about what happened on December 16, are even a little proud of the recklessness of their fellow countrymen. Women, of course, are differently minded.

The passage to the city hospital is blocked by a special forces detachment. They pass the girl with the package through a line of dirty gray shields, and her mother begins to sob bitterly.

“My son Marat just went out to look for his younger brother. They invited the children to the parade, and then started shooting. Why?! My son was wounded in the stomach, God willing, he will survive,” she laments.

Another resident of Zhanaozen, Nadira, has her own store, which she defended from looters for two nights. “We had a war, even a real war,” Nadira says about how on December 16, women and children fled from the square when they suddenly started shooting at the crowd with live ammunition.

After a short retreat and regrouping of forces, the police returned to the city center, and police and military forces were transferred from all regions to Zhanaozen. The city was soon taken under control. According to official data, this resulted in casualties: 13 people were killed and 99 injured. According to rumors that are rapidly spreading throughout the city, up to 100 people died. It is not easy to check this data, since you cannot get to the morgue or hospital, and official information is very scarce. During the day, dozens of relatives are on duty at the entrance to hospitals.

Square

On Saturday and Sunday, the police became the absolute masters of the square (and the entire city). The special forces are dressed in bulletproof vests, helmets and black masks with slits for the eyes. They behave defiantly, passers-by who stop near the square are rudely driven away, and those who start taking photographs are threatened with violence.

Each special forces soldier has a baton with him, many have pistols or machine guns. On the morning of December 18, there were about 200 special forces soldiers on the square at the same time, who were either warming themselves by the fire or trying to clear the square a little of evidence of the pogroms: bottle necks with pieces of rags (Molotov cocktails), pieces of reinforcement, sticks.

“Better help us get out,” said the special forces soldier, who did not let us into the square and was carrying a huge cauldron to his comrades.

The burned cars around the square and the burnt frame of a police bus on the square itself have not yet been touched by anyone. At the junction at the entrance to the square there is an overturned tank (possibly with gasoline), which everyone is driving around as diligently as they once drove around a damaged Georgian tank at one of the intersections of Tskhinvali. No one removes flag poles, a long iron counter and a school desk from the roadway.

The perimeter of the area is surrounded by three- or four-story residential buildings. In the courtyard of one of them there is a yurt, where people come for funerals, according to Kazakh tradition. The brother of driller Zharas Shupashev, who died on December 16, Arman, says that he still cannot take his body from the morgue and bury it.

While we are talking to him, a platoon of special forces passing by draws attention to the Kommersant photojournalist filming them. “Hey, take the fucking camera away or we’ll take it away,” they shouted, and soon the machine gunners who stood out from the ranks led my colleagues and me to the authorities.

So we managed to get into the very center of the square, where we had previously unsuccessfully tried to penetrate through the police cordon. Here lies the skeleton of a fallen and burnt Christmas tree. A high official who arrived in time rudely explained to us that we had violated the presidential decree on a state of emergency, after which we were taken in a pasik to the Zhanaozen city police department. In the courtyard of the department, as well as at the entrance to the city, there are armored personnel carriers, and there are crowds of people at the checkpoint.

The police

The modest building of the police department of the town of 70 thousand is seething, its already cramped corridors are full of special forces and officers of all stripes and from all over the country. The investigator who is working on our “case” complains that he was sent from Aktau, taken away from work, and now he has been eating stewed meat for two days (shops in the city have been closed for the third day) and sleeps in someone else’s office, right on the table.

There is confusion in the department. There was a warehouse of empty bottles in the toilet, dirty sheepskin coats were lying everywhere, and there were bloody stains on the walls. “It was we who slaughtered the sheep in honor of the holiday. We took it to the buffet and got it dirty,” the plainclothes officer explains to me. It is unknown whether the sheep were slaughtered in the square, which was also full of blood.

There is basically no Internet in Zhanaozen. Mobile communications practically do not work. Only in some places in the city does Beeline get reception. For example, in one office of the police department, where we spent most of the time, the phone did not receive reception, but from another floor we managed to send an SMS to Moscow.

The police explained to us that foreigners are not allowed to be in the territory where the state of emergency is in force. However, in the text of Nazarbayev’s there is no such clause decree. There is also no mention of restrictions on the work of the media, especially writing journalists.

After that, voice recorders, a laptop, a camera and mobile phones were confiscated from us, and they began to carefully check them for the presence of materials from Zhanaozen. In the end, the notebook with notes and contacts was not returned to my colleague from Kommersant, Vladimir Solovyov, and all the entries made on December 18 were deleted from my voice recorder.

While waiting for high authorities, the investigators and police officers who were constantly on duty in the room shared their vision of the situation.

“I was standing with a shield in front of the akimat building when the crowd came. They were all blue! I shout to them: “Get the fuck out of here,” and they continue on. We shoot in the air, but they don’t stop, "The provocateurs are inciting them there, and they move on. What should we do? We are following the order, protecting the akim! But they will let us fuck ourselves if we leave the position," the policeman explained to me.

According to the investigator who confiscated our telephones with voice recorders, “uneducated, reckless Kazakhs who came from Turkmenistan, Iran and other countries” performed in the square. “Yes, they actually shot themselves,” the prosecutor who entered the office suddenly chuckled and ran back into the corridor.

“We understand who is behind them. The United States benefits from destabilizing the situation. So you have all these Nemtsovs, Navalnys and other human rights activists coming to Bolotnaya. But there’s no place to put brands on them!” the investigator fumes. “That, by the way, is “I read Lenta.ru, and it smells of a strong scent of liberalism.”

Luckily for us, the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the republic, Kalmukhanbet Kasymov, turned out to be in the same police department. He explained to us that the protesters were demanding unrealistic wages, that “all the wounds were mainly in the limbs,” and if a bullet hit the head, it was only “due to a ricochet.”

After we created a fuss in the Russian media, we were allowed to go home, although in order to get out of the city we had to show our passports more than once and explain the reasons for being in Zhanaozen.

City Police

Everything according to the plot

Unrest in Zhanaozen

During the four hours that we spent at the police station, the city was flooded with special forces, who were several times more numerous than the townspeople. I have never seen such an abundance of police in such a limited area - even during the heyday of the Strategy-31 actions on Triumfalnaya. Under the gunpoint of dozens of special forces, a government delegation led by the Deputy Prime Minister and accredited journalists inspected the burned facilities and area.

At the same time, a massive cleanup was taking place on the neighboring streets: groups of special forces stopped and meticulously inspected almost every passing car. Cars were crowded at the main exits from the city, although no one controlled the less obvious paths (in Zhanaozen, not all streets are paved).

Already on the Zhanaozen-Aktau highway, the checkpoint was practically unavoidable. Thanks to our journalistic IDs and to the place where Kasymov’s name was mentioned, we managed to avoid a new arrest. Others were much less fortunate. When we were leaving, SOBR (Special Rapid Reaction Squad) harshly detained five people. They were thrown to the ground, face down in the dust, and kicked in the arms and head. The previous batch of the same detainees was brought to the police department with noise and uproar while we were still there.

Ilya Azar (Zhanaozen - Aktau)

became famous

Disorder

Square

The police

City Police

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