Feel like you’re comparing apples to oranges there.
Kazakhstan fuel protests/insurrection...
- Thread starter dowie
- Start date
Because the whole world always looks at what happens in the US while other countries are burning and no one notices.
It has nothing to do with that. We simply don't seem to care about Kazakhstan for some reason. There is a lot of bad things going on in the world today/yesterday but many of it is ignored.
Majority of us in the west only see things the media/gov decides to put under under magnifying glass. Troops around Ukraine - big deal and everyone is screaming about it. Literally Russian troops inside Kazakhstan shooting protesters - crickets.
Which just shows that we are very selective about things we care about. We can make small thing in grand scheme of things magnified and look horrific. Yet at same time we can ignore a blazing fire and just brush it off with couple minutes of news.
We see things where we want to see them and ignore things we do not care about. Yet somehow we still present ourselves as the world police.
Look at the Ukranian Conflict thread, just how much excitement there is and discussion. Yet Kazahstan thread (this one) where things are much more heated and worse - crickets once again. It just shows that even on this forum, a place that most likely represents a better educated side of our society is still just as everyone - heavily influenced by what the media is feeding them.
Ukraine has been a frozen conflict for past 5-6 years and yet monthly it seems everyone goes into whole frenzy as media feeds the whole thing. Yet Kazakhstan which once again, is super hot right now, due to lack of media/gov attention no one cares about it.
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Post soviet republics, especially in central Asia are quite underdeveloped in terms of societal institutions or any democratic process and since USSR dissolution all of them settled into tribal authoritarian regime. Economic development is lacklustre, nepotism and cronyism is just the only reality, if you're not part of the family/tribe then there is no chance of success. This is of course absolutely terrible for the populace.
So protests make absolute sense and even though reasons for protests seem absurd and likely was just the last straw rather than key issue (gas prices are crazy cheap even after the change, this is not a legitimate reason to protest). So general displeasure from the populace is absolutely understandable but the violent response seems to come out of nowhere.
I was not paying particularly close attention to what was going on but I think protests were peaceful until Tokayev removed Nazarbayev as the head of the security council, which leads me to believe that Tokayev had used protests as a pretext to do a soft coup and remove Nazarbayev's tribe from key positions of power.
Unless I missed something (and correct me if I am in fact wrong on that) it is only after Nazarbayev was ousted did we start seeing major violence in Astana.
Tokayev's request for Russia's peacekeeper's make sense as he cannot trust internal security forces not to side with Nazarbayev.
My point is that what is happening is not particularly people vs dictator but rather old guard vs new guard and this is where the violence and bloodshed is happening.
On the other side are the actual peaceful people protesting the awful authoritarian structure that are caught up in the middle. I do not think Tokayev particularly needs to kill protestors to calm things down despite western media painting a narrative that he is mowing his people down with orders shoot to kill without asking questions.
Anybody more involved in Kazakhstan can confirm deny the above suspicion?
Edit: correction, I think most of the violence is happening in Almaty.
Edit2: I think I am way off, apparently Nazarbayev did not flea and supports Tokayev. Not a lot of information is coming (not a lot of people seem to be interested in Kazakhstan).
All of this does not make a lot of sense, I never expected Kazakhstan to be such a powder keg, I wonder how long until public will get to see the whole picture, what and why happened, was it really just theatrics to silence protests? Time will tell.
So protests make absolute sense and even though reasons for protests seem absurd and likely was just the last straw rather than key issue (gas prices are crazy cheap even after the change, this is not a legitimate reason to protest). So general displeasure from the populace is absolutely understandable but the violent response seems to come out of nowhere.
I was not paying particularly close attention to what was going on but I think protests were peaceful until Tokayev removed Nazarbayev as the head of the security council, which leads me to believe that Tokayev had used protests as a pretext to do a soft coup and remove Nazarbayev's tribe from key positions of power.
Unless I missed something (and correct me if I am in fact wrong on that) it is only after Nazarbayev was ousted did we start seeing major violence in Astana.
Tokayev's request for Russia's peacekeeper's make sense as he cannot trust internal security forces not to side with Nazarbayev.
My point is that what is happening is not particularly people vs dictator but rather old guard vs new guard and this is where the violence and bloodshed is happening.
On the other side are the actual peaceful people protesting the awful authoritarian structure that are caught up in the middle. I do not think Tokayev particularly needs to kill protestors to calm things down despite western media painting a narrative that he is mowing his people down with orders shoot to kill without asking questions.
Anybody more involved in Kazakhstan can confirm deny the above suspicion?
Edit: correction, I think most of the violence is happening in Almaty.
Edit2: I think I am way off, apparently Nazarbayev did not flea and supports Tokayev. Not a lot of information is coming (not a lot of people seem to be interested in Kazakhstan).
All of this does not make a lot of sense, I never expected Kazakhstan to be such a powder keg, I wonder how long until public will get to see the whole picture, what and why happened, was it really just theatrics to silence protests? Time will tell.
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Slight difference between 100,000 troops on a order ready to invade a country in Europe and and what's happening in Kazakhstan, they have unfortunately been invited in by the government of that country, for good or bad to help ' stabilise the country' they will not annex it like they want to do with Ukraine, just prop it up like Belarus.
Ukraine is very much not inviting the Russians in.
Apples and oranges.
Ukraine is very much not inviting the Russians in.
Apples and oranges.
me neither who cares?
what do you think the rest of the world thinks every time we invade a middle eastern country/africa or America does?
somehow it's different when it's us trying to bring regime change or maintain it.
after all we are the "good guys"