Reports of party officials staying in nicer tents than the victims are sad, but not wholly unexpected. Reports that the temporary housing for villagers is not very nice also doesn’t particularly bother me. But claims that officials are delaying distributing aid are disturbing. Hopefully they aren’t planning to wait until the 6th of July!

Another interesting facet of this disaster is that suddenly Kazakhstan seems to have discovered solicitation of funds for disaster relief. For the first time, I have seen boxes at cash registers asking for aid for a particular disaster. Members of Parliament, province governments and ministries all made very public donations (after an act of government) and citizens are being urged to give. I even saw a truck with bullhorns on it announcing that NurOtan was taking donations. This includes donations for the people in East Kazakhstan who are victims of floods due to too much snow melting, not infrastructure fail.

I wonder why this solicitation is starting now. I don’t remember this much noise being made after the mining disasters in Temirtau or floods in East Kazakhstan last year or the sudden blizzard in South Kazakhstan that closed roads. Is Kazakhstan learning from Haiti disaster relief? Let’s hope this marks the start of public charitable giving.

Amazing video. Go to the Youtube site to check out others by the same author. Although not showing any bloodshed, it’s quite shocking to see how well armed some of the protesters are. Where do people get automatic rifles? You can also see, in this encounter, on the main street of Bishkek a couple of blocks from the Presidential Administration, how easy it was to intimidate the police (or that at this point police orders were not to make too much trouble and avoid dangerous situations). Finally, notice how riled up the people get when the police run away. There is obviously a lot of bottled up tension here.

According to Megapolis [RUS] (which has the most detailed account of the incident), the commanding Lieutenant assembled the battalion for the usual end of the day debriefing when he was summoned by his commanding officer. Serekbayev was left in charge of the platoon. Apparently, Serekbayev lined the platoon up and began examining them. When Orazbayev’s answer did not please him, he punched him in the rib cage, knocking him to the floor. He never regained consciousness. Two other soliders were also beaten although they did not die.

Serekvbayev, who has not denied his guilt, has been removed from duty and the investigation is ongoing.

It is further alleged [RUS] that the army notified the parents by saying “[Your son] died. Do you want us to send you the body or will you come to get it?” No apology, no introduction, no softening the blow. Just a bureaucratic problem to be solved.

This case is more disturbing taken in conjunction with the recent sentencing of another sergeant for beating recruits. This case, in which a young recruit also died of his injuries, is even more disturbing because it appears that the convicted had a criminal record before he joined the Army. He received 5 years of jail time, which some feel is highly disproportionate to his crimes.

I will note from personal experience that when I recently lectured about getting a job in the US, I mentioned in response to a question that military service tended to look good on a resume because it indicated the applicant had discipline and knew a number of job skills. The audience looked shocked before explaining to me that most people in Kazakhstan view soldiers as one step above criminals. Is that in fact the case? How do you feel about soldiers? Why is the army not better regulated?

The teaser sums it up pretty well:

The Kazakh language is a guarantee of success both in your career and in a stable future. This us how civil servants usually try to get Russian-speaking citizens of Kazakhstan to learn the official language of Kazakhstan. However, personal experience shows that by far not everything is so clear and optimistic. Before you stands a person who studied Kazakh for 4 years. She can speak, translate, write and read in Kazakhstan. And so far what has changed in her life? Nothing.

The author claims that as a journalist she would only need to use Kazakh if she worked for a government paper and they don’t pay enough anyway! She goes on to say that not enough of her acquaintances speak Kazakh and all of them speak Russian anyway, so socially there’s no particular reason to know Kazakh. She also notes that a certain percent of her Kazakh friends are unpleasantly surprised that she can understand them in Kazakh because it means they can’t talk behind her back–which is actually a pretty good reason to learn!

She goes on to give a few reasons why she feels people in Kazakhstan don’t speak Kazakh freely and why they aren’t learning. First, although the government is spending 5 billion tenge to develop the Kazakh language, the government doesn’t provide any kind of assistance or encouragement to people who want to learn–be it money or moral support. Second, she blames the teachers and the education system for being far too strict with students which makes people not want to learn the language. In particular she says comments like, “You still write in a Russian style,” can discourage non-Kazakhs from trying to learn. Furthermore she highlights that teachers teach grammar but not conversation. In other words, teachers aren’t teaching people to speak Kazakh, but to parse it grammatically. She also points out that new forms of learning–computer programs or educational TV–are practically non-existent. She quotes, rather amusingly, the head of a software company from 2 years ago saying that 20 electronic textbooks have been produced for learning Kazakh and already 25 people are using them in Turkey! How will that help teach 16 million Kazakhstani?

I don’t agree totally with her solutions for these problems but I think she has highlighted the problems with teaching people Kazakh quite well. They need to make it easy and interesting for people to learn Kazakh and they need to stop creating artificial conditions to make people learn Kazakh and look for real reasons why people should learn it. Educational TV programs are a fairly easy and relatively cheap way to start. Subsidized lessons are another. Classes in government offices and businesses (with people given the time off from work) would be great to see as well. Or they need to give up on the program entirely, stop worrying about language and let those who want to speak and learn Kazakh do so.

As always, I would love to hear what you guys think about this issue and this article.

But more seriously, disabled children are not normally sent to school. In fact I have yet to a see a school equipped for a physically disabled person. Every school has stairs to the front entrance and narrow stairs to each floor. A kid in a wheelchair would be helpless. Teachers are not trained in any way to deal with disabled children or children with learning disabilities. So they are either sent away to special boarding schools or have tutors come to their houses.

But it’s not only school. Soviet standards dictated that houses with five or less floors didn’t need elevators. So many buildings don’t have them. Or if they do, the entrance is up a flight of stairs. So many physically handicapped people can’t even leave their homes. Sidewalks in Almaty even have stairs on them. You may have seen ramps in the sidewalks with little steps in the middle and though those were for a wheelchair. You were wrong; those are for handcarts! Even the Ministry of Social Protection makes people in wheelchairs go in through the garage!

I’ve been talking a lot about people with physical handicaps because those accommodations (elevators, ramps, ground floor entrances) are most noticeably absent. However parents and teachers are not taught coping mechanisms for dealing with physical or mental handicaps. While I’m sure that doctors and social workers try, there isn’t any kind of institutional support for teaching enabling strategies, outside of a few NGOs (I understand there is such an NGO in Almaty that does work with the disabled and their family to work with the handicap and integrate people into society).

What there is, are special companies that employ the handicapped. These companies have special status in winning government contracts. Apparently the sheets on the trains are made by the handicapped as well as some school uniforms! However, these companies tend to be only factories that don’t pay higher wages or give any better benefits to their workers. So basically the only jobs open to the handicapped are minimum wage, industrial work at a factory machine!

Unfortunately, the usual pattern appears to be that if a family gives birth to a disabled child or someone in the family is injured seriously in an accident, Mom or Dad will have to quit their job to stay home and be a caretaker. They receive an inadequately small allowance from the government. But invalids are left at home, badly educated and lacking job skills. Or the opportunity to physically go to a job. In fact, after the age of eighteen, disabled people can be sent to state nursing homes! So a family that can’t or doesn’t want to take care of their disabled son or daughter can send him or her to live with abandoned pensioners from the age of 18!

The picture seems pretty bleak and I would love to hear in the comments that I am wrong and that there are stories of hope for the handicapped.

The controversy is exacerbated by of the financial crisis which is causing unemployment, rises in prices and an increase in the cost of living. The poor have no place to live. There have been clashes with police in Shanyrak and other regions as well as protests, letters to the akimat and other political actions in the past few years. However storming the akimat building in Almaty is something new.

On 10 Dec dozens of protestors tried to meet with the akim to protest the demolition of their homes. When they were not given a meeting, they tried to force their way into the building. Then on 16 Dec, Independence Day, 400 protesters assembled on Republic Square to protest housing issues, calling for the government to resign.

16 Dec was chosen as Independence Day because it commemorates protests on that day in 1986 against the Soviet Union’s choice of an ethnic Russian to be head of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.

It is not a surprise that the events received no coverage in the local news. However it is a good sign in a country that has been perceived as cracking down on human rights that the head of the 16 Dec protests was sentenced to only 15 days in prison for leading an unregistered assembly. Ainur Kurmanov is the chairman of the unregistered Talmas movement. Talmas is Kazakh for Persistence.

Many commentators have noted the high level of approval for the government in Kazakhstan and the general political apathy of the population, especially compared to other post-Soviet states such as Georgia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. Many believe that the high standard of living in Kazakhstan and the availability of consumer goods has made people content with the political situation. If the financial crisis causes the economy and the consumer market to shrink, there may be more protests on the horizon.

One tradition that I gather is a carry-over from Soviet times is the Subbotnik where people volunteer their time on Saturdays to do community service. In principle it’s a nice idea. Residents of an apartment complex go collect trash or repaint playground equipment or weed the lawns and sidewalks. Organizations like political parties or unions also make a big showing by sending members out to clean up leaves or what not.

However, more problematically, schools send kids out to sweep the yards, plant flowers, and even do more technical work like repainting. The times I have witnessed this the whole thing was over seen by teachers, some of whom treat the kids like laborers, yelling at them, ordering them around, telling them to work harder. I was also shocked to visit a school in Astana recently and see a calendar of summer events. Amid Kazakh language camp ad an Archeological Field Trip (which sounds neat–can I go?) was Repair Week with junior high school students assigned to do repairs at school. And Cleaning Week, where students will clean the entire school. During summer break! It is specially disturbing when kids are used to do work that should be done by hired staff, or work that requires training to be done correctly. In other words free child labor is exploited to save costs. Furthermore repair work could be dangerous for children.

In fact compared to Western schools, schools here demand quite a bit of labor from their students. Students are usually responsible for ringing the bell, going from class to class to register absences, collecting money for special events or birthday presents, even unlocking and locking classroom doors. It seems odd that a school would distract its students from becoming educated by giving them so many extra duties. In fact every day, two or three students are “on duty” and skip classes to do menial work that could easily be done by teachers or administrators. I hope that this trend of treating students as servants will be phased out.

In terms of what we traditionally see as child labor, it is certainly not uncommon to see children working at the bazaar, or small stores. There is a fruit stand near my house where a 12-13 year old boy always serves us while his mother looks on and cares for a small baby. I asked once why the boy was working. This family lives in a village near Astana. The father works in Astana so everyday he brings his family to the city and sets up the stand. Then he goes to work. An older brother spends the day securing shipments, buying from village farmers, driving goods to the stand, and any other odd jobs that need to be done. Mom has no one to leave the baby with, so she comes to oversee things but mostly has to care for the infant. Leaving the kid to work the stand. Of course he goes to school during the school year, but fruit stands only work in the summer anyway. It’s hard not to be a bit sympathetic toward this family, who claim that Father’s wage simply isn’t enough to support them and the stand is not profitable enough to make a profit. This sort of story is common throughout the world of course.

But other examples are a little more problematic. For example, a kid helping his older brother who runs a delivery service. I watched the other day as the big brother drove the truck to a store nearby and then send his little brother out to haul boxes, while he “guarded the truck” i.e. listened to the radio and smoked. I’d guess the kid was 10-12 years old! Or the child conductor on the bus a few months ago. Mommy (I assume) wearing the proper conductor uniform sat in the front and chatted with the driver, while her son ran around collecting money and giving out tickets. Truly disgusting.

Does anyone else have anecdotes of child labor? What can we do about it? Or is it not a serious problem? Maybe children should be put to work, especially if the family needs the extra labor? What do you think?

“Discrimination against Kazakh citizens can be observed both at the stage of signing individual labour contracts and during the entire employment process – while exercising the right to safe working conditions, the right to conclude a collective agreement freely, as well as the rights for rest and payment,” Kushkaliyev said.

In all, 127 warrants have been issued by the Prosecutor General and initiated 245 cases. Investigations have been carried out since the beginning of this year. So far 22 licenses have suspended and 5 revoked from foreign companies.

For example, Dongil High Vill Co., a Korean construction company which is building an elite housing complex in Astana, is paying local accountants over $5000 less than foreign colleagues, according to the Prosecutor General. It is true that foreign employees often receive equivalent to levels of their home country. They also often get a stipend for rent and another one to travel home and bring possessions over. However, a $5000 difference is pretty extreme. That more than covers rent of a super-elite apartment and two or three flights home to Korea.

Gazeta.kz also reports that ArcelorMittal Temirtau is ordered to decease age discrimination in hiring people. Apparently, the Human Resources Director of the company said that the company only hires women under 40 years of age and men under 45 years in a media source. Age discrimination is illegal in Kazakhstan, although it is not uncommon for employees to specify age-requirements in job advertisements or for job-wanted classifieds to include personal information like age.

Of course, ArcelorMittal is also under investigation for possibly violating safety regulations after two explosions in two years at their mine in Temirtau. Whether the age-discrimination charge is serious enough for the Prosecutor to follow up on it alone, or whether it is being used to bring pressure on an already besieged company, is unknown. But considering the tragic loss of so many Kazakhstan miners, I have no problem with the government being a bit heavy-handed if there is evidence of violations.

The executive director of the board of B.N.N. Pegasus apparently thinks the group were terrorists, but it is not the first time there has been violence between Turkish workers and citizens of Kazakhstan. In October of 2006, there was a major brawl in Atyrau between Turkish and Kazakh workers. There have been any number of similar clashes and commentary on Internet bulletin boards and news sites seems to indicate tension between natives of Kazakhstan and Turkish workers working in this country. Some Kazakhstany have complained that Turks take jobs that could have gone to Kazakhs, receive preferential treatment from Turkish supervisors, and treat Kazakhs as second-class citizens. On the other hand, some Turks seem to feel that Kazakhs are not grateful that many Turkish companies work in Kazakhstan and boost the economy.

As construction is almost frozen in the country due to lack of credit and striking workers, any social tension might well be multiplied. In any case, it is a horrible tragedy that workers were attacked and hopefully it was an isolated incident.