Kazakhstan has achieved a cherished foreign policy goal, securing a commitment to host an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe summit this fall.
Archeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered the grave of a gold-clad ancient Scythian warrior who has already earned himself a nickname: “The Sun Lord.” Researchers uncovered the find in a Scythian grave consisting of seven burial mounds in Karaganda Region east of the capital, Astana.
The opulence of the warrior’s burial indicates that he was a leader as well as a fighter, expedition leader Arman Beysenov explained. “He was probably a ruler and a warrior simultaneously,” Beysenov said in remarks quoted by the Kazinform news agency on July 16. “The person’s torso was entirely covered with gold. The figure of a leader like this was associated with the sun. He was a sort of ‘sun lord.’”
The warrior was likely buried in the 4th or 5th century BC in a grave that was actually discovered half a century ago, though excavation work only started last year.
Robbers had looted the grave in ancient times, Beysenov said, but it still contained quite a horde of ancient treasure. One of the burial mounds alone yielded 130 gold objects that included the figure of a feline predator, pendants and parts of sword belts. Archeologists also found hundreds of gold beads and 14 bronze arrowheads in the grave.
Inevitably, the archeological discovery is being trumpeted as comparable to that of the Golden Man, found in the Issyk burial mound just outside Kazakhstan’s commercial capital, Almaty, in 1969. The Golden Man, who’s believed to have been a young Scythian prince who lived in the 4th or 5th century BC, was interred wearing some 4,000 gold ornaments.
Kazakhstan's leader had some surprise greetings as he celebrated his 70th birthday on July 6 – Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev not only sent his wishes via Twitter, he also wrote them in Kazakh.
“Today Nursultan Nazarbayev, a great friend of Russia, is 70 years old. Happy Birthday!” Medvedev – who’s known as an avid user of new media – tweeted in Russian, before continuing in Kazakh: “I congratulate you on your celebration!”
The shrewdly-designed tweet from the Kremlin will be well-received by Nazarbayev, both as testimony to his close relationship with the Russian president and as a boost to efforts to get Kazakhstan – where Russian dominates public life – speaking Kazakh.
Twitter has yet to take off in a big way as a social and media tool in Kazakhstan. Government officials are, however, eager to keep up with the times – Prime Minister Karim Masimov runs an active blog and the rest of the government is following his orders to do likewise, with mixed results.
Though officials in Kazakhstan’s corridors of power have yet to fully harness the power of new media, social networking sites such as Facebook and Russia’s Odnoklassniki are very popular among ordinary people in Kazakhstan, so much so that a Kazakh version, On, has recently sprung up. Kazakh pop stars are running blogs there, and ordinary people are busy taking part in the online exchange of views and looking up their old school friends.
Nazarbayev doesn’t yet have an On presence, but you never know – he may be lured into trying out the latest online trends by responding to media savvy Medvedev’s birthday tweet.
When Kazakhstan assumed the 2010 chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), officials in Astana touted their country’s capabilities as a regional diplomatic trouble-shooter.
The recent ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan has left children distressed and traumatized. Nearly a month after clashes broke out between Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities, many children are still living in uncomfortable conditions, missing the homes they fled in fear for their lives and worrying about their futures.
I recently visited some displaced ethnic Uzbek children at a school in Osh where half of the 60 people living in the corridors are children.
Eleven-year-old Saidmurat Abbos-ogli fled with his parents and two brothers as armed gangs attacked their neighborhood of Cheremushki. “I was frightened that all the Uzbeks would be killed,” he said.
“I want to go home but there’s no chance,” said another boy, 17-year-old Doston Zakirov. Some families have no homes left to go to; others are afraid they’ll be targeted by fresh violence.
One 17-year-old said he’d received threats over the telephone from a former friend who’s ethnic Kyrgyz. He said the boy threatened to kill him if he returned home and told him ethnic Uzbeks should go and live in Uzbekistan.
Some of the children face dealing with the trauma without their parents’ support. Sixteen-year-old Rakhmatullo Madaminov is one – his father was hospitalized after being beaten up during the violence and his mother is a migrant worker in Russia.
“We estimate that around 150,000 children have been affected,” Anna Ford, Media Manager of the UK-based charity Save the Children, said. “Many of them are still suffering from emotional distress.”
Activists in Kazakhstan have made a spoof video clip purporting to show a human sacrifice appealing to the “forces of darkness” to grant President Nursultan Nazarbayev eternal life.
The tongue-in-cheek video, which was filmed by a group calling itself the “Obedient Herd” and has been posted on YouTube, shows a group of people dressed in Ku Klux Klan-esque tall white hats and long white cloaks marching through a field carrying portraits of Nazarbayev to solemn background music.
They set the portraits against a tree. One of them is sacrificed with a knife, as text flashes up on the screen: “In the run-up to the 70th birthday of the leader of their nation, the devoted sheep have carried out a sacrificial ritual. The groveling herd has appealed to the forces of darkness with a request to grant our Great Leader immortality.”
This is a humorous take on a controversial new law granting Nazarbayev – who celebrates his 70th birthday on July 6 – the title of “leader of the nation” with accompanying extra powers.
As pressure mounts on civil society in Kazakhstan, humor is becoming an alternative means for protest. Performance artist Kanat Ibragimov, for example, is becoming well-known for his tongue-in-cheek actions. He gate-crashed this April’s Eurasian Media Forum – brainchild of the president’s daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva – to distribute leaflets while fellow artist Aynur Saydenova played La Marseillaise on a violin. Ibragimov’s leaflets bore a concise message: “kop soz, bok soz,” which loosely translates from Kazakh as “lots of words, lots of excrement.”
A Bishkek-based human rights activist working in violence-plagued Osh, who was interrogated over a false media report, has expressed concern that the authorities are seeking to hush up the real circumstances surrounding ethnic violence that has left up to 2,000 dead.
The Osh prosecutor’s office summoned Tolekan Ismailova and fellow activist Aziza Abdurasulova after media reports quoting them said 20 people had died during a security sweep in the mainly Uzbek-populated village of Nariman on June 21.
Ismailova acknowledged the reports were false – the official death toll was two – and put it down to a “technical mistake, which distorted data about the situation in Nariman.”
The two activists spent several hours on June 28 under interrogation at the Osh prosecutor’s office in an episode Ismailova described as “strange and alarming.”
In remarks quoted by the 24.kg news agency, she suggested the authorities may be seeking to hush up the truth. “The impression is forming that they want us [rights activists] ‘sent out’ of here to cover up the scale of crimes committed with the connivance of bodies of power,” she said.
Officers exhume unidentified bodies they say are Kyrgyz and were hurriedly buried in an Uzbek cemetery.
Osh investigators have embarked on a macabre task that could stir tensions between Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities ahead tomorrow’s referendum on constitutional reform.
Early on June 26, Kyrgyz troops began exhuming bodies from a graveyard in an Uzbek mahalla (neighborhood) on Kurmanjan Datka Street. Officials say they have been ordered to dig up 10 unidentified corpses that were hurriedly buried during the ethnic violence that left hundreds – if not thousands – dead.
Officials overseeing the operation at the cemetery said the corpses are of ethnic Kyrgyz buried in an Uzbek graveyard.
“These are Kyrgyz corpses,” an Interior Ministry officer from Osh, wearing civilian clothes and a medical mask over his mouth and who declined to give his name, told EurasiaNet.org. “When the war [ethnic fighting] was taking place, they took them and buried them here. The local people did it. … These corpses are unidentified and there are Kyrgyz people looking for their relatives.” He did not provide any substantiation for the allegations.
Nearby, an elderly Uzbek man, visibly upset, was tending the grave of his nephew, Nabijon Korabayev, who was killed in the violence. As armed soldiers shoveled the earth out of a grave behind him, he knelt to pray by his nephew’s burial spot.
Troops kept other local people at a distance and discouraged them from talking to journalists. Contacted by telephone, one resident said there was tension in the area; troops have been conducting house-to-house sweeps and summoning some members of the community for questioning at the prosecutor’s office.
Interior Ministry forces from Bishkek guarding the graveyard during the exhumation said they doubted any reconciliation was possible between Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities in the wake of the bloodshed.
“There won’t be any [reconciliation]. There are a lot of Kyrgyz casualties and they have relatives,” said one officer speaking on condition of anonymity.
Kyrgyzstan’s tourist industry looks set to become hostage to the violence that has engulfed the country in recent months.
Kazakh tourists who normally flock to Lake Issyk-Kul in northern Kyrgyzstan are shying away from holidays at the popular spot this summer, a Kazakh tourism official says.
“In connection with the unrest in Kyrgyzstan, demand for holidays in Issyk-Kul has dropped to zero,” Rustem Asenov, head of the Department for the Development of Tourism in Kazakhstan’s commercial capital of Almaty, told the local Vecherniy Almaty newspaper.
Almaty, just three hours’ drive from the Kyrgyz border, is usually a prime source of tourists for Issyk-Kul: around 12,000 visitors from the city usually head there on organized tours every year, Asenov added, and that figure doesn’t include independent travellers making their own way from Kazakhstan. According to some estimates, up to a million Kazakhs holiday at the lake every summer.
This year, though, security fears are pushing visitors to other destinations. This will upset business at the resorts, where Kazakhs are known as big spenders.
The news comes in the wake of a row over Kazakh property on Issyk-Kul, a picturesque mountain-fringed lake that was developed as a tourist destination in Soviet times.
Deputy leader of the provisional government Azimbek Beknazarov has proposed the government consider nationalizing four Kazakhstan-owned resorts on the lake.
Omurbek Tekebayev is increasingly looking like the loose cannon of Kyrgyzstan’s provisional government. As if the divided leaders don’t have enough on their hands as they battle ethnic violence in the south and push Sunday’s referendum through to win a mandate to govern, Tekebayev, a deputy chairman of the provisional government, has called for this fall’s parliamentary vote to be pulled forward.
Parliamentary elections are currently scheduled for October 10, but Tekebayev now favors a vote in September, the 24.kg news agency reports, on the grounds that the transition period is too long.
AFP news agency adds that Tekebayev, who leads the Ata-Meken ("Fatherland") party, is pushing for a vote in the first 10 days of September, which most likely means September 5 since elections are usually held on Sundays.
The politically ambitious Tekebayev no doubt feels power within his grasp and is afraid of losing momentum in the long build-up to the election, but his apparently off-the-cuff remarks underscore the divisions threatening to tear the caretaker government apart.
Tekebayev has some innovative ideas on how the new parliamentary system that provisional leaders hope will be voted in on June 27 will work, too. He says he expects the system to harness all kinds of qualities in the people working within it – not only positive ones such as patriotism and selflessness, but also negative ones like the urge for vengeance and greed.
