Kazakhstan: What Happened in Zhanaozen?

On December 16, 2011, local and special police squads opened fire on unarmed residents in Zhanaozen, a city in Kazakhstan’s southwest. The residents had been standing in the city’s main square for seven months, protesting to demand higher salaries and better working conditions at the nearby oil fields. According to official data, 17 people were killed; over a hundred protesters and others were injured. The Kazakh government has tried to head off future civil disobedience since 2011 in part by hushing up revelations and reporting about what many now call the Zhanaozen massacre.

Protests Led to Unrest

Zhanaozen is a city of close to 90,000 people in Mangystau province. The province is considered the most expensive and most environmentally risky in Kazakhstan, and Zhanaozen its most expensive and risky city. The population has dropped by over 10,000 since the massacre a decade ago. Recent droughts hit the livestock of hundreds of farmers hard, creating further economic hardship in the region.

The protests in 2011 were at a scale not seen before in Kazakhstan’s modern history. They started in the outskirts of Aktau, Mangystau province’s center. In mid-May 2011, oil workers employed by Karazhanbasmunai, a joint venture between Kazakhstan’s state-owned oil company and a Chinese company, began protesting. They declared a hunger strike until company officials agreed on a salary raise.

In the span of two weeks, oil workers in Zhanaozen, most of them employed by UzenMunaiGas, a subsidiary of the Kazakhstan state-owned KazMunayGas, also went on strike, demanding an increase in wages, boosted payments for harsh working conditions, a cessation of interference in the work of labor unions, and for the company to stop pressuring labor activists.

Company officials called the workers’ demands unreasonable and illegal and said negotiations would be held only if the strikes ended.

According to witnesses interviewed by RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service, the number of protesters had reached 2,000 in late May and early June. Oil workers continued protesting throughout summer, while security services employed various tactics to pressure, harass, and assault the striking workers.

On May 24, a city court declared the strike illegal and special police squads interrupted the protests near UzenMunaiGas work sites, which led the striking workers to relocate to the city center.

As the summer of 2011 waned, pressure on the striking workers and supporters intensified.

Natalya Sokolova, a legal defender of Karazhanbasmunai employees, was sentenced to six years in August 2011 for giving legal support to the striking oil workers. Another activist, Natalya Azhigalieva, was jailed for 15 days for disobeying police orders. Activists were reportedly beaten to death by “hired” attackers, their family members raped and killed. In one particularly troubling incident in late August 2011, the 18-year-old daughter of the chairman of the trade union of striking UzenMunaiGas workers went missing. Her dead body was found by a shepherd in a field four days later.

Major human rights organizations and Western countries began to pay closer attention to human rights violations in Kazakhstan as the strikes continued. The musical artist Sting made headlines by canceling a concert in Kazakhstan’s capital, then named Astana, specifically after hearing of the violation of oil workers’ human rights.

On October 27, 2011, an unidentified person attacked Yestay Karashayev, a leading activist in the protests, shooting him with a rubber bullet. The intimidation worked. He stopped protesting and avoided interviews with media outlets.

Shooting at the Defeated

On December 15, the eve of Kazakhstan’s Independence Day, hundreds of people were still protesting peacefully in the city’s main square, despite the fact that many of them had already been fired from their jobs. Between May and December of 2011, 1,080 workers from Karazhanbasmunai and 1,450 workers from UzenMunaiGas had been fired.

The Zhanaozen city administration began preparations for the Independence Day holiday without any communication with the protesters in the city center. Protesters were not in the mood for celebration and strongly opposed efforts to prepare for Independence Day, which later led to clashes with police as they closed the main square to protesters.

In human rights activist Galym Ageleuov’s documentary, “Zhanaozen Diary,” Ageleuov interviews Venera Popova, a city resident, who witnessed the events of the day of the massacre. She says “riots were provoked by unidentified people.”

“Suddenly fire started in the office of UzenMunaiGas, smoke appeared from every window at the same time, despite the fact that the office was fenced and guarded well. It was a provocation. Oil workers were standing where they always did, in the main square,” Popova said.

She also said that “after the fire started in UzenMunaiGas’ office, protesting oil workers decided to go into the building, to save documents to prove that they had worked for the company and they faced the armed special squad, who opened fire on them.”

State-owned local papers reported that the police squad was not armed, but that detail was debunked by videos uploaded to YouTube, which showed the squad starting to shoot at protesters.

In a December 2020 report by RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service, protest participants and witnesses shared their memories of that day.

Onaygul Dosmagambetova, a Zhanaozen resident, was with the oil workers almost every day in the main square for the seven months of protest that preceded the massacre. When she arrived in the square on December 16, she saw “totally different people, pretending as protesters, but they were not.”

They were “hired” looters, believes Nurzhan Narenov, another city resident and protester.

Ageleuov also suspects that organized crime groups might have been hired to discredit the striking oil workers and other protestors in Zhanaozen.

“Secret services had a clear plan on how to discredit those who are on strike. They invited organized crime groups for this. I cannot say for sure, but I have information that such groups were brought from the nearest areas. For example, from the Atyrau province. I was told about that new UzenMunaiGas jackets were thrown somewhere in the Atyrau after it all happened,” Ageleuov said in a 2019 interview with Current Time.

Sholpan Utekeeva, a city resident whose husband was also injured in the 2011 violence, helped take injured people to the hospital. “[A] three-story hospital was swamped with blood,” Utekeeva said in an interview.

In total, as a result of the ensuring riots, a number of buildings were looted and some set on fire, including eight banking facilities (ATMs and banks), 20 stores, two cafes, a notary office, two pawnshops, mayoral offices in Zhanaozen and Tenge village, two police facilities, the Aru-Ana Hotel, an UzenMunaiGaz company building, and three private houses. More than 20 vehicles were burned or otherwise damaged; and materials for the Independence Day celebration, including yurts, musical equipment, and a New Year’s tree in the main square, were destroyed.

The United States was gravely concerned about the outbreak of violence in Kazakhstan and called for restraint. Human Rights Watch asked the Kazakh government not to violate human rights and Amnesty International demanded the authorities eliminate torture and objectively investigate the use of firearms on protesters in Zhanaozen.

On December 17, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev declared a state of emergency and Zhanaozen was isolated by police, who blocked all highways in and out. Police started to count victims and detain dozens of protesters for prosecution.

Trial of the Zhanaozen 37

According to official figures, 17 people died in the Zhanaozen massacre, over a hundred were injured, and some people went missing. Residents of the city and human rights activists have said that the true number of victims could be several times more than the official figures.

In Zhanaozen, when the state of emergency was declared, hundreds of men of all ages went through police detention and beatings. Thirty-seven people, including striking oil workers and other protest participants, ultimately faced criminal charges; the majority were sentenced to jail terms for participation in the riots, the destruction of property, robberies, and thefts, and use of violence against civilians and the authorities.

The first court hearings were scheduled for March 23, 2012. In the pre-trial period after the violence of mid-December, the alleged organizers of the riots and witnesses alike were questioned by police. According to some, the police beat them, kept them in inhuman conditions, and put them under severe psychological pressure.

For example, Bazarbay Kenzhenbayev, who was taken into custody on December 16, 2011, died after police torture. His daughter, Assem Kenzhebayeva, went to look for her father on the evening of December 16 and was taken in by police too. She witnessed brutal torture in the basement of the police department.

“I sat there for half an hour (in a police basement), and saw terrifying things. There were a lot of people, their faces were difficult to recognize since the basement was poorly lit. There were five or six girls next to me. They were forced to stand completely naked. There were several more girls sitting in the corner. Masked men beat them on their knees with batons and belts,” Assem said, describing the scene.

Journalists were forbidden from recording the trial. Some were banned from entering the court entirely.

Alexander Bozhenko, one of the key witnesses in the trial of the Zhanaozen 37, was beaten and tortured to give false testimony. In court, he opposed the statement he’d earlier given to police and said that “he was forced to do so.” Nearly six months after his testimony, Bozhenko died under strange circumstances.

Ageleuov, the activist and documnetarian, told RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service that Bozhenko was probably killed for talking to the media openly about police torture and those senior officials who might be involved in human rights abuses.

The trials went fast; some witnesses never testified. Human rights activists asked for a transparent court process and five of the 12 defense lawyers asked for the judge to be changed, claiming that the sitting judge was biased in favor of the state, but the requests were rejected.

The verdict was announced on June 4, 2012. The most severe sentence – seven years in a prison colony – was given to Rosa Tuletayeva, a 46-year-old activist from Zhanaozen. More than half of the 37 defendants received suspended sentences and three were acquitted.

Later, five police officers and the head of the detention center in Zhanaozen, where people were reported to have been tortured, were convicted of abuse of authority.

A Decade Later: Was Justice Served?

Many Zhanaozen residents won’t celebrate Kazakhstan’s Independence Day on December 16, as it is also the day when their loved ones died. In the eyes of many in Zhanaozen and beyond, justice for those killed and wounded a decade ago has not been served.

After the massacre, on December 22, 2011, President Nazarbayev visited Zhanaozen and promised to restore normality to the city. He also promised that the dismissed workers would be rehired. As RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service reported from Zhanaozen at the time, Nazarbayev hadn’t met with any protesters and avoided talking about victims of the massacre.

Nazarbayev fired the head of Mangystau province to placate local public anger. And during his visit to the province, he dismissed his son-in-law, Timur Kulibaev, from his top post at Samruk-Kazyna, Kazakhstan’s National Welfare Fund. The fund, Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund, owns shares in a number of major companies and development institutions, including the KazMunayGas oil company, whose employees were on strike in Zhanaozen.

Political scientists and activists argue that personnel changes in senior government positions are just political shuffling and don’t usually lead to positive developments following governance failures or other disasters. Ten years since the massacre, oil workers in Zhanaozen are still demanding raises and better working conditions.

A few days after his visit to the region in 2011, on December 26, Nazarbayev suggested that organized criminal groups were behind all of it, their only motive to make money. He also suggested that funding for the protests and violence came from abroad. The prosecutor’s investigation found nothing to support the president’s allegations on “money from abroad,” and there were never any organized crime groups identified and prosecuted for their alleged involvement in the looting.

Nazira Darimbet, a media critic at the New Reporter, a project created by the non-profit Internews Network, wrote last year about how Kazakh media covers Independence Day. She noted that pro-government media outlets tend to celebrate on December 16 by publishing celebratory speeches by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and former President Nazarbayev, while independent media sites often recall two moments of violence and struggle and public uprising: Zhanaozen as well as the December uprising of 1986, known as Jeltoqsan, when Kazakhs rioted following Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to replace Soviet Kazakhstan’s ethnic Kazakh head with an outsider.

It is now almost tradition for the public to mark Independence Day with debates and uncertainty: Is it a festive date or one marred by sorrow?

In an interview in 2020, Vladimir Kozlov, the former leader of the unregistered and banned Alga party, explained that because the strands of the crimes of Zhanaozen stretch upward into the political hierarchy, an objective investigation is unfathomable. Kozlov was arrested in 2012, his trial widely regarded as little but political persecution. Before his release in 2016, he was labeled a political prisoner by human rights organizations.

An objective investigation of the tragic events in Zhanaozen is impossible under the current political regime. And so, a decade after Zhanaozen, the truth remains silent, justice a distant prospect.