Massacre in Kazakhstan: A Video the World Needs to See...And Understand

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT. Footage from Zhanaozen in Kazakstan of police attacking --- and murdering --- protesters. English subtitles.

Yesterday a video from the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan was released on-line. It shows security forces in Zhanaozen advancing against protesters, shooting them, and then beating and stomping on their bodies. The footage confirms earlier reports that a protest by oil workers on Friday, the Kazakhstan day of national independence, had climaxed in violence, with the death of 15 demonstrators and upwards of 100 wounded. Activists claim both figures are much higher, suggesting as many as 55 deaths.

The footage, seemingly shot by two women from the window of a high-rise apartment block, captures the moment that a wave of police fire on unarmed demonstrators, clearly fleeing for their lives. A man, who appears to have collapsed after being shot in the leg, is viciously attacked by a policeman with a baton. As one of the women filming comments, "Look at them, they are just beating them to death." The police continue to advance, hitting the fallen protesters as they pass them, before converging in a group, perhaps to take stock of their carnage.

Before the emergence of this video, accounts by Western media of the events in Zhanaozen strove to bracket the protests in a familiar narrative.

Whilst TIME magazine perhaps rightly made "The Protester" its person of the year, the tendency to treat 2011 as a series of national uprisings risks the creation of a false frame through which disparate struggles are seen. When a situation of protest emerges --- in what is an unfamiliar country for "Western" commentators --- familiar stories are written: protesters demonstrated, security forces retaliated, suppression ensured, revolution beckons. Thus, in discussing events in Kazakhstan,comparisons to the so-called Arab Spring were not far behind.

However, Twitter #hashtags and Facebook groups have not followed Indeed, there was an almost eerie silence from Kazakhstan in the immediate aftermath of Friday's events --- a far cry from the organisational clamour and on-line activist presence seen in many other sites of national protest these past twelve months. And, in what could be heard, there was a counter-narrative: these protests were fomented by extremist Islamist groups bent on far more than resolving labour disputes.

To be sure, the protests were not necessarily calm and controlled. It appears that several demonstrators sets fires.But renegade acts were not inspired by wider ideologies; they were the product of a very specific and localised anger.

As Joshua Foust pointed out, this was mostly a local affair:

The riots in Kazakhstan are actually a localized labor dispute between some oil workers striking for better working conditions and higher pay and the state-run oil company, OzenMunaiGaz (with the clever acronym OMG). There is also terrorism in Kazakhstan, a worrying trend that so far has remained very small scale -- limited to a few bombs and a bunch of scary talk on the Internet. But there's no apparent reason to combine the two into a broad argument about some Arab Spring-inspired uprising in Central Asia. And that does not match with the facts of what has happened....

Zhanaozen is 100 miles away from the nearest city. It is tiny and isolated within Kazakhstan. Even its local anchor city, Aktau, is cut off from the rest of Kazakhstan and only accessible by air, since the roadways connecting it to other places in the country are too long to drive and not well maintained. The workers' plight has been blunted somewhat by the Kazakh government's response that these oil workers already make substantially above average wages -- a message that has resonance in a country that struggles with sharp divides in wealth and power. Geographic isolation plus economic disparity equals no revolution.

So, while we should keep an eye on Kazakhstan, we should also keep in mind what isn't happening. It's easy to fall into declaring the sky is falling every time something dramatic happens, but the reality is, sadly, far more boring.

The rapid reaction of Kazakhstan authorities to these events was repressive measures. A State of Emergency was declared, Zhanaozen was cut off from the outside world by a police cordon and threats were made to restrict Internet access.

Still, the emergence of the video has created shockwaves. The Kazakhstani Ambassador to the United States, Erlan Idrissov, described the footage as "shocking". Radio Free Europe reported:

Idrissov intimated that government officials had seen the video and planned to investigate:

"I cannot tell you anything specific of this -- how this came into being, who made the video, et cetera, et cetera," he said. "This is for experts to discuss. The events broke out [on] the sixteenth [of December] and you have this [video] on the twenty first. But one thing for sure is that the government is aware of this coverage and at the very top level it has been ensured that this and other similar facts will be thoroughly investigated."

Idrissov added that, if the video and any other footage like it turned out to be authentic, then "justice will be brought."

The video reveals brutality, plain and simple. It captures part of a massacre of protesters over a labour dispute. This is the essential point. These demonstrating indiviudals had no overt complaint against their nation's governance. They just wanted to advocate a better standard of living. And yet they were massacred.

Brutality against trade unionism is, sadly, not uncommon: Colombia in South America is a contemporary case study. But such violent and unwarranted reprisal against striking workers is both shocking and disturbing.

I wonder --- and this is no more than speculation --- whether the Kazakhstani forces, or maybe just the police in Zhanaozen, interpreted the protests through the lens that has come to frame so much of the unrest in 2011, the lens through which Western media first tried to interpret the violence. The simple wish of individuals to articulate a grievance was read as a seditious threat against the State, one which had to be cut off with any means necessary.

The world needs to see the video above, first and foremost, because it reveals an atrocity that needs to be acknowledged and addressed. Secondly, yet equally essential, is the footage punctures --- and punctures hard --- the wish of oppresive regimes across the globe to frame all protest as a national threat that must be contained.

And similarly, it punctures the the wish of Western media to inflate unfamiliar local struggles into narratives of revolutionary intent. The tragic fact of a massacre is enough. It does a disservice to the dead to frame it in any other way.