Nursultan blockade

1000 detainees, cordoned cities, a complete shutdown of social networks - the first presidential elections without Nazarbayev got into history

A resident of Almaty Arman Abdullakhanov, about the paternal abilities of which Kazakhstani media wrote several laudatory materials, last Sunday decided to go on a bicycle for bread. On the way back, passing by Old Square (officially it is called Astana), Abdullakhanov joined the thick of people and police officers, and after a few moments he was detained and sent to a carZak along with a bicycle. The police considered that he was taking part in an unauthorized rally against the presidential election and the Nazarbayev regime.

Abdullakhanov was lucky: in the Zhetysus police department, where he and several dozen detainees were brought for registration, one of the police officers realized that the hero father was detained by accident, and advised him to “slowly leave”. Other detainees did not find such benefactors: in four days, from June 9 to 12, in a number of Kazakhstani cities-primarily in Almaty and Nur Sultan-at least a thousand people were detained, who, according to official information of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, tried to protest against the early presidential elections and, perhaps, are supporters of the “democratic choice of Kazakhstan” in the country prohibited in the country. Its founder - the disgraced oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov - lives in France and for several months in a row campaigned for the active boycott of the entire election campaign. A large number of detentions in the DVK are already considered their triumph, as this means that dissatisfaction with the current regime is already overwhelming over the edge.

This time the police clearly played Riser to Ablyazov: out of thousands of detainees, several hundred are random passers -by. A typical scenario: I went out for bread - and found himself in the isolator.

It’s good even if in their city: at some point, all police departments in the two largest cities of the country were crowded, so many detainees were taken out of Nur Sultan by buses to a neighboring Karaganda region.

“It was generally a nightmare,” the director of the Kazakhstan International Human Rights Bureau Evgeny Zhovtis grabs his head. - Not only is it on our roads to go there for at least ten hours, but for almost a day people were not released from the bus for almost a day, and they just went to the toilet for themselves. They did not give food to anyone, water was given at least sometimes. ”

Judged in three shifts, says Zhovtis. The judges were imported from the same Nur-Sultan to observe the jurisdiction, which only emphasized the inadequacy of what was happening: the whole body of people in the mantles was sent for distant lands to endure a warning or fine. Then the tactics changed, and everyone began to give typical terms for such violations: women - 5 days, men - 10 days without the possibility of appeal. “This, of course, is not the Stalin Troika, but it is difficult to find another analogy,” says the human rights activist.

Many people were taken right from the house without warning, so on the first day of the social media tape they were full of missing ads. Then all this stopped - in the country, social networks turned off for several days. Even WhatsApp ceased to work, to which Kazakhstan’s authorities were very loyal before. Some people used instant money transfers to transmit messages (you can write there, and it was not blocked).

The opposition activists simply turned off the SIM cards-they were easy to calculate, since they were all required to register them.

Only VKontakte worked and beloved by the elected president Kasim-Zhomart Tokaev Twitter. “He instructed the Prosecutor General to ensure the legal rights of citizens, establish the exact number of detainees and their degree of guilt. Innocent citizens and persons who accidentally found themselves in protests should be released, ”Tokaev wrote, and they gradually began to release people. But not immediately, but the next day: on the 12th day, on the day of the inauguration (to which none of the leaders of other countries was called to at all), Ablyazov announced a national action of the protest. About two hundred people were detained in Almaty (according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs - not a single one): they also grabbed everyone indiscriminately. From the bench in the park, a well -known model with cerebral palsy Kamill Shokanov was seized and dragged into a car zakak.

“My disease of cerebral palsy“ helped ”me yesterday. When I started asking what was happening, the cops realized that I had a disease, I was released. I thought that this would never happen to me when I read such things, ”writes Shokanova. -I thought it was only with those who are plackets (empty-no empty) in their hands. I'm shocked. No words. "

“This is the principle of stele with a reproduct,” Zhovtis explains. - The police below have no competencies to think about the consequences: they were told to clean everything - they grab all. They said to let go - they begin to let go. The system is absolutely personalistic.

In Nur-Sultan, almost no one went to the rally, but there was almost nowhere to go: the city was at a siege position for four days, the key public platforms were cordoned off by police from Sunday. This was especially ironic during the first press conference of Tokayev as the chosen president, where he promised to “think” about the development of freedoms in the country. At the same time, one of the first decrees, who gained almost 71% of Tokayev, reassigned the head of the Karim Masimov, head of the national security committee, in which social networks blocking became commonplace. The president also said that he was not a “transit passenger”, so it is better to stop all the conversations about transferring power to him from the resignation of Nursultan Nazarbayev: now, they say, the president is different - and this president is he.

But this is a clear self -deception: the detentions show that the Security Council, controlled by Nazarbayev and which the security forces are included, decided not to limit himself to the role of the strategic decision -making center and began to steer the country in operational regime. This is fraught with a great conflict between the presidential administration and the security forces in the very near future. It’s better not to ride a bicycle for a bicycle for bread.