What just happened
- Prince Andrew was reported to be considering an out-of-court settlement with Virginia Giuffre, even though he denies her accusations of sexual assault.
- Fans queued all day for tickets to early matches in the first Africa Cup of Nations football tournament to be held in Cameroon in 50 years, which starts on Sunday.
- The actor Ryan Reynolds appeared with Winnie the Pooh in a mobile phone ad, a day after Pooh fell out of copyright and into the public domain.
With apologies to Billy Crystal, something’s spooking the Kazakhs. At first it seemed to be nothing more than a spike in the cost of liquified petroleum gas, but fuel price riots three days ago in Almaty spiralled quickly into Kazakhstan’s most serious and widespread political violence in 30 years.
More than 3,000 protesters are reported detained in the past 24 hours. The unloved regime built by ex-president Nursultan Nazarbayev and now run by his hand-picked successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, claims to have “liquidated” (killed) 26 rioters in retaliation for the deaths of 18 police. Witnesses spoke of smoke and flames coming from the presidential residence and pools of blood outside it. There are rumours Nazarbayev has fled.
Last night Tokayev said order in Almaty, the country’s biggest city, was largely restored after 2,500 Russian and Belarusian “peacekeepers” flew in in military transports. There was more gunfire this morning after he told security forces to shoot to kill, but until today Tokayev has been on the defensive:
- On Tuesday he sacked his prime minister and cabinet.
- On Wednesday he called on the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (otherwise known as Russia) to help him get tough with the rioters.
- On Thursday he demoted Nazarbayev, removing him from the life chairmanship of the national security council to which he retreated from the presidency three years ago.
So what? After three decades of enforced calm, Kazakhstan (population 18 million, land area roughly the same as western Europe) is suddenly a geopolitical laboratory too:
- Putin is using the crisis to normalise Russian military intervention in his near-abroad. In principle the CSTO is an answer to Nato. In practice he has used it as a police delivery mechanism for which he will demand payback.
- That doesn’t mean he’ll welcome the assignment: it’s a distraction from his efforts to project force in Ukraine, and it’s a response to unrest that echoes Belarus and could be copied in Russia.
- Kazakhstan has been Central Asia’s big, inert ballast tank ever since so-called independence in 1991; a place of wild beauty, staggering corruption, slowly rising incomes and some enthusiastic bitcoin mining. If it opts for revolution, the whole region could.
Revolution?
- This is, admittedly, unlikely. Even before Tokayev’s claim to have restored order, these protests appeared leaderless and uncoordinated.
- They are being quashed according to a tried and tested Kremlin strategy: shoot, clear, jail, hold.
- On the other hand, Tokayev effectively admitted early on that he couldn’t trust his own security forces after some were seen abandoning their weapons and walking away from Almaty’s central square. For people of Tokayev’s generation that recalls the crazy days of 1991.
To note: cracks have been appearing in ex-Soviet Central Asia’s placid facade ever since the death of the tyrant Islam Karimov in neighbouring Uzbekistan five years ago. His successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, didn’t get, or read, the “how to be a dictator” memo and has been loosening state controls in pursuit of growth. Kyrgyzstan, another neighbour, hosted its latest revolution just two years ago.
To watch: Kremlin statements about Kazakhstan’s 20 per cent ethnic Russian minority. 20 per cent is big, and Putin has already used smaller “oppressed” Russian minorities as a pretext for high-impact meddling in Ukraine, Georgia and Lithuania. If this was a movie it would have to be The Empire Strikes Back.
