Teleconference with the leaders of the CSTO alliance, a mini Warsaw pact. “Riots stirred up by foreign centers, we will stop them”
Un attack from abroad, hatched by “a single center”, an attempt – “neither the first, certainly not the last” – to carry out a “colorful revolution with the technologies of the Maidan”. While his diplomats are engaged in negotiations with the United States to prevent a war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin connects in videoconference with the President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev, the Belarussian Aleksandr Lukashenko, and the other leaders of the former Soviet countries adhering to the Pact of collective defense, to accuse never mentioned but very recognizable “external destructive forces” of the revolt in Almaty. And it reconfigures the defense alliance that arose on the ashes of the former USSR, and remained practically inactive in the previous decades, as a sort of new Warsaw Pact that will undertake from now on to protect the regimes that are part of it: the source the “external” threat is never mentioned, but the rhetoric of “color revolutions” has been part of Moscow’s accusations of the West for years.
“We will not allow anyone to destabilize our house,” promises the Russian president to this new alliance of autocrats, who seem to share the same language and the same fears. Putin dictates the line and explains that the street uprising in Kazakh cities was not a protest born of social anger and the desire for political liberalization. Tokayev goes further and speaks of an “attempted coup”, and of “terrorists” who allegedly prepared the attack for several years, and stormed the former capital Almaty and then “took away the bodies of their accomplices from the morgues ». An attempt probably to remedy his tweet a few days ago about 20,000 “terrorists”, which was later deleted, and also the declaration of the Kazakh Ministry of the Interior on 164 civilians killed, including some children. Number subsequently denied, and reduced to 26 “criminals” and 17 policemen, while those arrested throughout the country would be almost 8 thousand, again according to official data.
The reliability of these numbers can be measured by the case of Vikram Ruzakhunov, a famous Kyrgyz jazz pianist, who arrived to play in Kazakhstan and was arrested by the police. National television showed him, with obvious signs of being beaten on his face, as he “confessed” to being an unemployed person recruited from unknown persons in exchange for $ 200 to participate in the riots. Freed the next day thanks to the intervention of the Kyrgyz government, the musician said he had lent himself to the propaganda staging to be deported to his country, and to save himself.
Tokayev appears not to be concerned with providing evidence of “outside interference”, nor did he specify which forces would attempt the “coup.” In Kazakhstan, however, this allusion is clear to many. In recent days, three senior police officers have died: one suffered a heart attack, two others committed suicide. The first Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbaev continues not to appear in public, while his followers are arrested or fired. Evgheny Zhovtis, director of the International Human Rights Office of Kazakhstan, expresses to Le Monde the suspicion of many that the mob that ransacked and assaulted the buildings of power in Almaty was manipulated by Nazarbayev’s men, to put Tokayev in trouble. who in turn was trying to marginalize his political mentor’s clan.
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