Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
For the first time in 30 years, Russians are heading to Central Asia rather than the other way around – to escape war
News about Central Asia usually involves talk of migration. Especially if the country in question is Tajikistan, where one million people – 10% of the population – work as (...)
Kyrgyzstan is a product of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, born under the auspices of self-determination and a capitalist economy, in line with post-cold war’s end-of-history expectations. Among neighboring Central Asian countries, Kyrgyzstan is the only democracyin the region. Now, 31 (...)
Workers in Kazakhstan have faced pressure for years but continue to fight for their rights and social justice, new reporting by openDemocracy and Kazakhstani independent media Vlast.kz shows
Nationwide protests rocked Kazakhstan earlier this year, starting with an anti-inflation demo in the (...)
The mothers claim they were first on the streets during the January protests, the largest and most violent in the country’s post-Soviet history
It’s evening in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan, and a long queue of women and children is standing outside an elite residential complex. They’re (...)
In Kazakhstan, where a Soviet past still lingers, there are clear generational divides in opinion towards Putin’s invasion.
As Russia’s catastrophic war against Ukraine wages for a fourth week, Kazakhstan’s government has taken an official stance of neutrality – yet its people are divided.
This (...)
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has already begun to have a negative economic impact on the five Central Asian republics
During the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Turkey, which took place from March 11-13, the Kyrgyz Republic’s foreign minister, Ruslan Kazakbaev, told Helga Maria Schmid, (...)
The Cotton Campaign—a global coalition of human rights, labor, responsible investor and business organizations—yesterday ended its call for a global boycott of Uzbek cotton at an event hosted by the country’s Ministry of Labor for media, activists and government officials in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. (...)
Oil workers and state employees want higher salaries, and the unemployed wants jobs.
The west of Kazakhstan is in ferment once more.
Only six weeks after protests in the Mangystau region triggered a chain reaction of nationwide rallies that culminated with deadly unrest in the city of (...)
Last month’s uprising in Kazakhstan began with oilworkers and spread countrywide, as workers created new councils to coordinate the movement. In response, the government shed some of its top officials and killed hundreds of protesters. After a week of action, and in the face of foreign (...)
Kazakhstan’s new Fund for the People is just a giveaway
The government’s anti-terrorist operation concluded last week in Kazakhstan, as the country’s leadership laid the blame on a foreign-trained group of 20,000 for the violent clashes that led to over 200 dead in Almaty, the largest city and (...)
The largest former Soviet republic in Central Asia, Kazakhstan, has never witnessed scenes like these: on 2 January, massive protests erupted in the west of the country in response to an increase in the price of liquid petroleum gas. Within a matter of days, a wave of protests had engulfed the (...)
1. Kazakhstan was portrayed as Central Asia’s poster child whose impressive economic performance and welcoming investment climate made it a stable, upper-middle-income country pursuing a multi-vector foreign policy. Of course, there was considerable corruption as the Nazarbayev family and (...)
The recent violent protests in Kazakhstan are still reverberating, despite the Russian-led intervention force’s recent withdrawal. It is now evident that they were not a singular unified phenomenon. Rather they were a cascade of entwined events, beginning with regional grassroots protests, then (...)
Blame ‘free’ market reforms that benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class for the country’s recent protests.
The recent protests in oil-rich Kazakhstan have highlighted the devastating effects of rent extraction. The country’s largest sellers of liquefied petroleum gas (...)
There has been a rapid and strong response to the circulation of this Kazakhstan solidarity statement. Very close to 200 signatures in almost 40 countries were collected in the space of just two days, with many prominent individuals and organisations.
We, socialists, trade unionists, human (...)
Around 50 people braved teeming rain and the challenges of travelling during the pandemic to protest against the barbarous actions of the Kazakh regime against its own people, writes Terry Conway.
Called by AntiCapitalistResistance (ACR) and supported by the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, (...)
The Kazakh government has unleashed ferocious repression against the uprising that exploded last week.
Security forces opened fire on demonstrators. “Dozens” died, according to media reports, but on 7 January president Kasym-Jomart Tokaev let slip that “hundreds” had been killed. Tokaev also said (...)
The popular revolt in Kazakhstan concerns us. Although the decisive factor was the increase in fuel prices, the revolt is part of a wider context. The movement was built in the workplaces, matured within them, and the workers themselves defined and enriched their demands and their methods of (...)
Today all post-Soviet mass-media and TV channels are riveted to the protests that suddenly engulfed Kazakhstan. To some they arouse hope, to others – horror and rejection. There are contradictions and different interpretations of what is happening: righteous people’s protest, clan wrangling, (...)
Witnesses in Almaty describe scenes of chaos in streets as Russian ‘peacekeepers’ arrive in country
Dozens of protesters and at least 12 police officers have died in ongoing violence in Kazakhstan, authorities have claimed, as “peacekeepers” from a Russian-led military alliance arrived in the (...)
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