Amnesty International recently apprised Sting about the situation in Kazakhstan regarding the repression and crackdown against oil workers, their union leaders, their legal representatives & of the human rights NGOs working with them. In light of this current situation, with the unacceptable treatment being meted to these Kazakh oil/gas workers, their families and legal representation, which is extremely serious and continues to worsen, Amnesty International feel his presence in Astana will be interpreted as an endorsement of the presidents’ administration and surely will go against everything he has stood for, while supporting Amnesty and the fight for human rights, for the past 40 years. As a result, Sting has made a decision not to participate in the Astana Day Festival.

“Hunger strikes, imprisoned workers and tens of thousands on strike represents a virtual picket line which I have no intention of crossing,” Sting commented. “The Kazakh gas and oil workers and their families need our support and the spotlight of the international media on their situation in the hope of bringing about positive change.”

Sting got quite a bit of criticism for playing in Uzbekistan two years ago, an incident that got more attention recently when Lola Karimova-Tilyaeva, daughter of dictator Islam Karimov, sued a French newspaper for libel for calling her a “dictator’s daughter” (She lost on the truth-defense; evidence suggests Karimov is a dictator).

And in general the Kazakhstan regime has been criticized in the past for bringing in big names to play for their birthday parties, their kids’ birthday parties, but not for the population in general. Tickets to see Sting cost from 10,000 tenge to 100,000 tenge. We paid about 20,000 to see Mashina Vremini so the range was reasonable.

For some reason, the Astana city official website simply states that, “According to the organizers, Sting’s concert is canceled due to reasons beyond the control of the Kazakh side, since all conditions of technical and everyday artist’s rider were performed at 100%.” Nothing about the strikes.

Incidentally, Sting also played the New Year’s concert/TV special in Russia last year.

Apparently the blast was strong enough that neighbors 50-60 meters away found bits of steel Buildings in the area were also damaged, with windows blown in and walls hit by shrapnel.

An anonymous letter to Tengri News recounts the events:

I live in a five-storied building on Karasai batyr street. At 3.31 a.m. the windows in our house started trembling, there was a loud blast and windows were broken in places by the blast wave. I ran outside and came up to the blast area where people have already started gathered. There I saw a red Audi C4 with a Pavlodar plate number. I saw a part of a human body with my own eyes (I didn’t see the second person, I saw only one) under the windows of a nearby two-storied building. Body parts were even in my building’s yard, almost 200 meters from the site. I found the documents, the cell phone. Both men (killed in the blast) were ethnic Russian. It is quite possible that it was not a terroristic act, as the car owner is part of a hunters’ society (the society ID was among the documents). Maybe the car had explosives used for fish inside, I don’t know. The fact is that the blast was very strong and the car parts flew apart many meters from the incident site. The emergency teams were slow. The first car (they were district police officers) came 20-25 minutes after. It took the rest even longer to arrive. Firemen arrived after 40 minutes. There was almost nothing left of the car, just a pile of metal.

A comment on zakon.kz claims that the son was accused of stabbing and beating up three men in a cafe.

Whether or not the son was guilty, the troubling fact remains that this woman felt there was no recourse for justice for her and that she felt that Nurotan was somehow culpable or involved in the same institutions as the court system. In the wake of this act, prisoner protests involving self-mutilation, strikes in Mangistau and possibly the bombings on KNB offices in Astana and Aktobe, the government should take a long hard look at whether or not people feel they have just representation and free avenues to appeal the decisions of officials. Otherwise tragic protests like this one will only continue.

Photo by Leroy and Anne Welling

Actually when you see these rings in the museums, they are referred to as matchmaker rings. I assume that’s a bad translation of marriage rings. But possibly these are given to matchmakers upon completion of a successful job well done?

In either case, nothing like the typical Western scott kay engagement rings.

Ran across a great series of photographs by Manuel Capurso called From Akmola to Astana, which documents Astana capturing both the old and the new.

It’s an interesting set. Anyone who has lived in Astana for some time will have noticed the sharp contrasts between the two cities and the surrealism of new modern buildings being constructed in the middle of the steppe. He’s captured a lot of that as well as some faces of Astana.

I have no idea if the pictures are being exhibited anywhere but there are a few on his site and more on Capurso’s blog.

So as spring starts to come, and we get ready for the Nauryz rainstorm and the April blizzard, I was thinking about how to deal with the weather in Astana and what you need to bring with you or buy here.

First of all, the fact of the matter is that it is very cold here in the winter and the winter is quite long. The average yearly temperature is 1.8C according to the World Meteorological Organization. And the summers are quite hot, reaching 25-30C. So that gives you an idea of how long and cold the winter is to bring down the average like that. You will need a warm coat, gloves, a warm hat, a scarf and long underwear. I recommend buying the coat elsewhere because here fur coats are expensive and Goretex or other synthetic winter coats are even more expensive. Also buy serious winter boots or get a nice pair of fur-lined boots here. It does make a difference.

It’s also worth noting that many apartments have no thermostat or heat controls. The heat just blasts out of the radiators. So many people end up opening windows to keep the interior temperature down. This can lead to a never-ending cycle of opening the window, getting cold, closing the window, getting hot, opening the window… Another issue is that the constant heat makes the air quite dry (and of course we’re nowhere near the ocean), so I have heard of some expats getting a humidifier.

Also the Kazakhstani tolerance for heat is much higher than the American tolerance, in my experience, so if you go over to someone’s house, dress in layers so you can survive the street and then strip down when you get to your destination. Personally I find myself sweating away in the winter in stores and taxis because they keep the heat so high and I’m so bundled up.

Now the flip side of the long cold winter is the short, but hot summer. It really can get up to 30C in July, especially in the sun. I actually worked in an office once where all the men would close themselves in their offices and take off their shirts to work! Investing in T-shirts and lightweight work shirts is also worth it. Particularly as it’s not very socially acceptable to go around in shorts. All that stuff can be bought here, of course.

Interestingly it doesn’t rain or snow very much here, so you don’t have to worry too much about precipitation. It does get quite windy out here on the flat steppes with nothing to break the wind between the Ural mountains and the Chinese border, but that’s mainly an issue of keeping warm against the wind. And bringing a heavy rock to hold things down if you go sit in the park.

Finally it’s getting a bit warmer out here on the frozen steppes. Astana is not as exciting a place to live as Almaty for outdoor fun, but over the years we’ve discovered a few places to go. I’ve posted on some of them before like the yurt camp near Astana and Eco-Village where you can actually ride horses. Never been out to the reservoir, but I always see my neighbors packing up on the weekends with their Big Agnes tents, shashlik grills, and camping supplies to go out there. One of these days I’ll have to try some camping here, but haven’t been able to find the time to do much more than go up to Boraboe a few times a year and stay in a guest house.

Any suggestions for good outdoors activities and places to go outside of Astana?

But what I thought was most interesting was that one woman claimed that the solution to the problem was to grow all your food yourself. Now here in the northern part of Kazakhstan, where there is snow on the ground 6 months of the year and the temperature gets down to -20 or -30, I’m not sure if you can really grow enough to feed yourself in such a short growing season. I’m not sure you can grow anything much more than potatoes in such a climate, unless you decide to use hydroponics or some kind of indoor garden.

One man stood up strongly for the argument that all a human being needs to eat is meat. Kazakh ancestors, I gather, didn’t stay in any one place long enough to garden, so all they ever ate was meat (and animal by-products such as milk and blood). In fact, according to this colleague, beshbarmak with onions and noodles is not real Kazakh beshbarmak. Authentic beshbarmak should be noting more than boiled meat! (By the way, it is widely believed that meat from Akmola state, where Astana is located, is the best of all meat in Kazakhstan).

I believe that back in the day, Turkic-Mongolian nomads ate a diet that was largely meat. But I’m not sure how long they lived back then or how healthy they were! I’m not ready to cancel food imports from the rest of the world to Astana quite yet.

Even if the evidence isn’t overly convincing, apparently many residents of Astana and Kostanai reported seeing a slow-moving glowing ball in the sky between 7:30 and 7:45am, the 28th. Officials think it was likely a rocket taking off from Baykanour. Apparently the Russians don’t always tell them when a rocket takes off (although so many rocket launches get press attention). However officials are unable to explain why people in Pavlodar claimed to have also seen a UFO the week before.

If it was a UFO, I just hope it doesn’t have a ten-foot tall robot with it that can destroy metal and shut off electricity from the whole planet.