A uneasy calm may now prevail between Kurds and Kazaks after last autumn’s
violence, but most Kurds feel they have no option but to leave.
By Elena Eliseeva in Shymkent (RCA No. 528, 22-Jan-08)
Fearing for their physical safety, many ethnic Kurds say they plan to leave
southern Kazakstan, as reports of low-level violence against them continue.
Zara, an inhabitant of the southern city of Shymkent, says her family and many
other local Kurds plan to sell up and leave following a spate of attacks on the
community last November.
“Of course we are afraid to leave - we have lived here all our lives - but we
are also afraid to stay,” Zara told IWPR.
“We don’t know what is coming next. The newspapers are writing bad things about
us Kurds. If the community elders say so, we will certainly leave.”
The trouble dates from the end of October, when a Kurdish teenager from the
village of Mayatas, in the Tolebi district of South Kazakstan region, was
accused of sexually assaulting a four-year-old Kazak boy. (See previous IWPR
story, Kazakstan: Ethnic Clash a Worrying Sign.) After the latter’s father went
to the police, locals took the law into their own hands and started burning and
looting houses and beating up Kurds.
The violence then spilled over into other towns and villages where to Kurds
live.
Although attacks on people and property soon died down, work to reconcile the
communities and foster greater tolerance have not yielded results.
Kurds in the South Kazakstan region interviewed by IWPR say although the mass
looting has not recurred, small-scale incidents have continued.
“We have a bad feeling,” said one local from the Tolebi district. “Things are
not the same as before.”
Official statistics suggest that there about 46,000 Kurds now living in
Kazakstan, of whom 7,000 live in the South Kazakstan administrative region.
The Kurds belong to a community deported wholesale from Armenia and Azerbaijan
in 1937, and from Georgia in 1944. Like hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Volga
Germans, Crimean Tatars and other ethnic groups, they were deemed suspect by
Stalin, who ordered them to be shifted far into the interior of the Soviet
Union.
Kazim Nadirov, who heads the Kurdish National Centre in Shymkent, said the
conflict was now frozen rather than resolved.
Nadirov said that when cross-community meetings were arranged recently, Kurds
found themselves being told to leave the area.
“At all the meetings I took part in, there was only one subject - leave, full
stop,” he claimed. “Even when the public prosecutor was sitting next to me in
those meetings... we were subjected to insults. I pointed out that as we are
full citizens, they cannot say this and that we are as entitled to protection as
they were. But that changed nothing.”
According to Nadirov, the majority of Kurds now have no confidence in their
future.
Local media reported that a complete reconciliation between the communities had
taken place following a meeting of elders in Lenger, the administrative centre
of Tolebi district.
But members of the Kurdish community disagreed, some describing the meeting as
humiliating.
“They said from the platform, ‘The Kurds are begging forgiveness, so we will
forgive them,” said one local Kurdish businessman. “But why should I ask to be
forgiven? I have never seen this teenager. How can one blame a whole people for
the crime of one person?”
Nadirov said he believed most of the Kurds in South Kazakstan region would be
gone by spring, once they looked at their options for resettling elsewhere.
Moreover, attacks on Kurdish families have not stopped entirely, he said, adding
that his cultural centre has recorded about 30 cases of arson attacks since the
mass lootings of last year.
“Most involve arsonists setting fire to the winter fodder set aside for the
cattle,” Nadirov said. “They burned more than 17 tons of hay belonging to one
family. That family owned 400 head of cattle, but they had to sell them because
without fodder, the cattle would have died.”
Other Kurds report acts of intimidation designed to make their lives impossible.
One man aged 60 from the village of Kok-Tobe in the Ordabas district said he was
the regular target of intimidation at the market.
“When you take your sheep to the bazaar, the young men come up to you with a
buyer and say, ‘You will sell your sheep to this buyer for 3,000 tenge each -
when each one should cost no less than 15,000 tenge [around $120],” he said.
“You can’t do anything about it – you have to sell your livestock at that
price.”
Local authorities have made no official pronouncements about the problem. When
asked, they have tended to blame the situation on “outside interference”.
Sadu Bekenov, a member of the regional council for South Kazakstan region,
claimed certain groups – which he did not identify - were exploiting the
situation to stir up ethnic tensions.
“You could say destructive forces have used this recent criminal offence, in
order to give it a political tinge,” he said.“Someone is trying to inflame
ethnic conflict with the help of young people who lack worldly experience and
knowledge of history.” According to Nadirov, the Kurds feel abandoned and
defenceless.
“It is difficult to be a nation without a homeland,” he lamented. “If we had a
country of our own with a consulate in Kazakstan, would this happen? I’m sure it
wouldn’t. But there’s absolutely no one to stand up for us.”
Elena Eliseeva is an IWPR contributor in Shymkent.
