What's at stake in Kazakhstan?

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2022

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

How might the protests shake up the economy, trade and business in the Central Asian nation?

Ed Butler speaks to Diana Kudaibergenova, a sociology professor at Cambridge University and herself Kazakh, about what motivated the protests, and whether the apparent ouster of former President Nursultan Nazarbayev plus a host of new economic reforms will be enough to appease the protesters.

But what does all this mean for foreign business interests in the country? Kate Mallinson of Chatham House says many Western oil executives will be having sleepless nights, while Russia's President Vladimir Putin may require an economic dividend for his military help in stabilising the situation.

And what of Kazakhstan's other giant neighbour, China? Raffaello Pantucci of the Royal United Services Institute says the upheaval has come at a time when many Kazakhs were questioning the seeming one-sidedness of their increasingly close economic ties.

(Picture: Kazakh security officials stand guard in the aftermath of protests in Almaty; Credit: Pavel Pavlov/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, the economic pressures
0:06.8	that some say led a nation to revolt. This is a huge problem in Kazakhstan, inequality. People would
0:13.3	hear about the levels of wealth accumulated by senior figures and would also look at the capital
0:18.0	city, which was constantly having these beautiful new buildings popping up, and then we'd notice that their lives actually were not very good
0:23.2	at all. Well, the protests in Kazakhstan do appear to have been silenced this week, but what are the
0:29.1	economic spinoffs internationally of what's happened? I think the management of these international
0:35.4	oil companies will be watching Kazakhstan very nervously at the moment,
0:40.3	and it's probably causing quite a few sleepless nights because the picture is still very unclear.
0:46.5	Step Change, Business Daily from the BBC.
0:53.3	Thank you. The sound of violence on the streets of Kazakhstan's bigger city last week.
1:05.4	Shouting protesters, most of them unarmed, it seems, met with tear gas, stun grenades,
1:13.0	and in some cases, live realms.
1:24.3	The protests are the right thing to do. We've had enough.
1:28.1	They haven't been listening to the people. A politician once said,
1:32.1	if there is no way of having a peaceful revolution, there will be a military one.
1:34.2	I think the people have awoken.
1:43.1	Well, it didn't turn out that way. After the situation was apparently getting out of control,
1:51.9	President Tchaev called in military help from abroad, the CSTO, an alliance of former Soviet neighbors led by Russia.
2:01.3	And as President Putin in Moscow made clear at a press conference, he wasn't going to allow another popular uprising like the one seen in Ukraine and Georgia.
2:07.0	Fuel prices were the initial trigger. And in each different city and region of Kazakhstan,
2:11.0	it's a huge country. There are different grievances, increasing inequality, and people seeing how much lavish corruption is ongoing at the highest level of the elites.
2:19.8	So, of course, it created this sort of anger. It's also about, like, you know, dignity and understanding that your voice is heard.
	...

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