Eurasia note #11- Kazakh Protests
Energy prices and climate lockdown are heading your way, too
Tbilisi, Jan 5, 2022
Protestors attacked government buildings in Kazakhstan’s largest city Almaty after spreading from the regions, in its largest demonstrations since independence. There is the risk of copycat action — not just by people but also governments.
This is no mere protest somewhere in the former Soviet Union. This is a country that policymakers discuss in the same breath as a new world order, the “dawn of the East.” The capital city Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana) is rich in new world or masonic symbolism.
Rising fuel prices sparked attacks on police and massed crowds around public buildings. Energy has overtaken Covid as the pressing concern in many countries and as the next driver of The Great Reset — crisis being a great opportunity according to the head of the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum, Rockefeller Brothers, Prince Charles and the Pope.
Energy shortages and calls for a climate-induced lockdown are being disseminated through the press, along with articles asking if Covid has run its course.
Could the protests have outside influence as the government was quick to claim — another border country in Russia’s zone of influence? This is the Caspian, after all, one of the three leafs of Bunting’s Cloverleaf Map which centred the world in Jerusalem; and a focus of geopolitical machinations from Mackinder to Brzezinski.
For now it looks like officials failed to respond quickly enough to organic protests.
Authorities in the capital imposed a curfew, a familiar lockdown measure. More significant were orders to seize weapons and ammunition from individuals, and ban their sale. Mobile internet data services were suspended and messaging apps blocked in many parts of the country. Travel in and out of the main city was halted. Like many Western countries, protests are illegal without prior authorization.
In this era of interdependence, Europe’s Rapid Response Units and the U.S. Department of Heimat Security will watch, weigh and perhaps adopt what works.
(Article approx 1,000 words, 6 minute read follows).
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev imposed a state of emergency and accepted the government’s resignation, though ministers continue to serve until replaced. Former president Nursultan Nazarbayev, 81, wields great influence having ruled for 30 years. He is still chairman of the Security Council.
The immediate trigger for protest was a doubling in the litre cost of liquefied gas to 120 tenge ($0.27) which is used in place of petrol or gasoline for vehicles.
Kazakhstan has a history of popular dissent and clumsy, even brutal, government response. In Dec 2011, oil workers demanded higher wages in the oil city of Zhanaozen. Police answered the Independence Day rally by opening fire, killing 14.
In 2016 a foreign land lease law led to protests over land rights. In 2019, the death of five siblings in a fire led to a protest by mothers demanding better housing conditions. The government resigned.
Initially, on Jan 2, a couple of thousand protestors took to the streets of Zhanaozen and Aktau. Protests in the west of the country were peaceful. The government had agreed price controls before the latest riots, but only in the region of Mangistau.
The lack of broader price controls, and government communications ordering protestors to obey the law, only enraged them in the largest city, up to 5,000 taking to the streets of Almaty and even the capital Nur-Sultan. In the Western Military District of Aktobe protestors reportedly attacked the regional government white house. These are large numbers for Kazakhstan, not relative to its population of 18 million but because many are dependent on state jobs.
As police cars were set ablaze the president ordered price controls on other fuels and essential goods.
Economic reform
Kazakhstan has the authoritarian inheritance of the Soviet regime and like other countries in the region, like Kyrgyzstan or Ukraine, tends to reform only when social crises force it to do so. The model of the old nomenklatura — families and their retainers embedded in the state-corporate system — provides little internal impetus for reform. In addition the country has both Russian-speaking and Kazakh-native populations, a parallel with Ukraine.
Reforms that do happen are often market initiatives — such as moving internal oil and gas sales to a commodity exchange — but such changes rarely take account of ordinary citizens. KazMunayGas, the national exploration and transportation company, now trades its product on the Caspian Commodity Exchange, making it vulnerable to international market pressures. It is also increasingly the target of quotas for greenhouse gas and carbon.
Kazakhstan is a regional business hub and Nur-Sultan, formerly Astana, a rapidly-growing banking centre. Yet the promise of future prosperity does little for people who withstand low salaries only because fuel for their cars and homes has been low.
Hope for raising living standards lies with regional trading zones. It is a pillar of the Eurasian Economic Union, initially formed by Russia and Belarus and now joined by other Central Asian countries. It is a partner in China’s Belt and Road reaching from the Middle East to Europe.
Dawn of the East
The city founded as Astana, or “capital,” in 1997 is a hit with those who study symbolism and the plans for new world governance. The buildings are space age or masonic depending on perspective.
Talk of the new world order coming from the East is not restricted to mystery schools. The prestigious Valdai Discussion Club in 2019 considered “The Dawn of the East and the World Political Order.” [1]
The argument for running the show from the East is based on centuries-old economic logic. After all, it draws on the historic Silk Road. The new twist is whether the evolution of trade, technology and “resource wars” require a new system of international relations, replacing the current global rules.
This is presented in the media as a matter of geopolitics, or a multipolar versus unipolar world. However the clamour by the financial-digital complex to Build Back Better shows they have new socio-political structures in mind down to the level of the individual citizen.
The concept of nationalism is shamed in the West as much as it is championed in the East. This includes the notion of sovereignty and national identity. This is partly a matter of business culture in a region where personal relationships and trust are as important as a contract: unlike the West you cannot expect a fruitful business relationship if you fly in, sign and vanish.
Politics also plays a role and much is said for the popular audience —one leader’s cultural identity is another’s right to organize the domestic hierarchy in his image.
Caspian diversions
President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that conrol of the region was key to the coming century. This Rockefeller-sponsored academic was only updating an old scorecard in his book The Grand Chessboard.
Tsar Alexander II opened the region's oil industry to foreign players, abolishing the state monopoly. Soon on the spot was Alphonse de Rothschild who founded what would become in 1883 the Caspian and Black Sea Oil Company.
Rothschild provided logistics for the Nobel brothers, younger siblings of Alfred, and also influenced the trading practices of Rockefeller, according to the research of Jennifer Siegel, Chair of History and Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.
Another ringing bell from history is the presence of Reuters. Twenty years after founding the news agency, the banker Julius de Reuter secured the “Reuter concession” in Persia in 1872.
This gave him “control over Persian roads, telegraphs, mills, factories, extraction of resources” — which Britain’s Lord Curzon, the future Viceroy of India, called the greatest ever takeover of resources by a foreigner.
Protests were such that the concession was cancelled but Reuter (born Israel Beer Josaphat) was compensated with a new concession to run the Imperial Bank of Persia that was the privately owned central bank from 1889 to 1929.
Today Kazakhstan has the largest proven oil reserves in the Caspian Sea region though Iran, which also shares the coastline tends to be the biggest exporter. Azerbaijan is the other leading oil player, with natural gas fields in all countries of the region.
We know how history went. Russia’s reforming administrators and Tsars were assassinated. We are told it was just a bunch of bomb-throwing students, the grass-roots Colored Revolutions of their time. Prof Antony Sutton would reveal that the The Bolsheviks were richly financed by bankers in New York and London.
Iran was still battling over the share of its own resouces in 1953, when prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was ousted by Britain and the U.S.. This territory has long been coveted by powerful families in banking and energy.
Perhaps there is something to the symbolism of Astana Nur-Sultan, not perhaps as the headquarters of a new world order but as one of its watchtowers.
See my previous articles in the series:
Eurasia Notes #10 - Belt And Brace — War jaw is a distraction from reshaping politics and trade
Eurasia Notes #5 - Great Game Over — Did The Investors just give Afghanistan to China?
[1] Olga Krasnyak, Asia & The Pacific Policy Society, 2019 - Is A New World Order Coming From The East?
Dastard be their names. Some followup as one must know "this is how the game is played" when it's for ALL of the marbles:
From Robert Fisk—the preeminent Middle East reporter of our time. Taken from his epic tome The Great War For Civilisation -- The Conquest of the Middle East —2005 [All 1045 pages of it]
"Christopher Montague Woodhouse was asking himself if he had helped to create the Islamic revolution in Iran.
He was an old man now, but you could see the energy that still gripped him, a tall, dignified, brave and ruthless seventy-nine-year-old. It was snowing that morning in Oxford in 1997, but he had come to the gate of his retirement home to greet me, his handshake a vise. He sat ramrod-straight in his library with the mind of a young man, answering my questions with the exactness of the Greek scholar he was, each sentence carefully crafted. He had been Britain’s senior agent in “Operation Boot” in 1953, the overthrow of Iran’s only democratic prime minister, Mohamed Mossadegh. It was “Monty” Woodhouse who helped to bring the Shah of Iran back from exile, [he] along with his colleagues in the CIA, who set in motion a quarter-century in which the Shah of Shahs, “Light of the Aryans”, would obediently rule Iran—repressively, savagely, corruptly and in imperious isolation—on our behalf.
Woodhouse was a reminder that “The Plot”—the international conspiracy, moamara in Arabic*—was not always the product of Middle East imagination. Woodhouse was in the last years of a life in which he had been a guerrilla fighter in Greece [WW II], a Tory MP, and a much honoured Greek linguist and academic.
Almost everyone who had destroyed Iranian democracy was now dead: CIA boss Allen Dulles, Robin Zaehner of the British Foreign Office, the two mysterious Rashidian brothers, who organised the coup, Mossadegh himself and the last Shah of Iran. Except for Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA man in Tehran [at the time of the coup], “Monty” was the last survivor.[…]
* The overall tenor of the book is about various Arabic countries, and the West’s relationship to them, therefore a commensurate word in Farsi is not used. Fisk both speaks and writes Arabic, I know not of his fluency in Farsi.~ djo
…There were also lessons for for the Americans and the British, and for the Shah, had they chosen to pay attention. The Shah would henceforth always be seen as a tool of the United States and Britain. The fall of Mossadegh, as James A. Brill has written, “began a new era of intervention and growing hostility to the United States among the awakened forces of Iranian nationalism.” Woodhouse was to become deeply depressed by Khomeini’s subsequent revolution. “I felt that the work we had done was wasted, that a sort of complacency had taken over once the Shah had been restored,” he said. Things were were taken for granted too easily,” After Mossadeg had been booted out, Allen Dulles praised Woodhouse for visiting Washington and persuading the Eisenhower administration to back the coup. “That was a nice little egg you laid when you were here last time!” he told the man from MI6. [Truman, the presidential adoptive father/facilitator of the CIA in 1947, had turned Dulles’ Iranian coup plans down.] ~ djo
But we don’t go in for “little eggs” any more. More ambitious ideological projects, vast armies—and bigger egos—are involved in “regime change” today. [Stated in 2005] Maybe that’s why they can fail so quickly and so bloodily. The coup against Mossadegh was the first such operation carried out by the Americans in the Cold War—and the last by the British. At least we never claimed Mossadegh had weapons of mass destruction. But the final word must go to the CIA’s man, Kermit Roosevelt. “If we are ever going to try something like this again,” he wrote with great prescience, “we must be absolutely sure that [the] people and army want what we want.”
The “sort of complacency” which Woodhouse defined was based upon the security services which the Shah established after his return. Savak— Sazman-i Etelaat va Amniyat-i Keshvar, the “National Information and Security Organisation”—was to become the most notorious and the most murderous, its torture chambers among the Middle East’s most terrible institutions. A permanent secret U.S. mission was attached to Savak’s headquarters. Methods of interrogation included—apart from the conventional electric wires attached to genitals, beating on the soles of the feet and nail extraction—rape and “cooking,” the latter a self-explanatory form of suffering in which the victim was strapped to a bed of wire that was then electrified to become a red-hot toaster.* Mohamed Heikal, that greatest of Egyptian journalists, once editor of Al-Ahram and former confidant of Nasser, has described how Savak filmed the torture of a young Iranian woman, how she was stripped naked and how cigarettes were then used to burn her nipples. According to Heikal, the film was later distributed by the CIA to other intelligence agencies working for American-supported regimes around the world including Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines.[…]