Since the beginning of the year, alarming reports have been coming from Kazakhstan. It all started with reports of protests in the west of the country. People began to rally protesting against the sharp rise in gas prices. The government of the republic reacted quickly enough by taking measures to return prices to their previous level and regulate them. However, for most of the protesters, this was not an argument to go home. Slogans began to move from the economic to the political plane. There were demands for the resignation of the Cabinet. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev agreed to this too. But the resignation of the government did not cool the "hotheads" either. The “professional” protesters began to join the common protesters. These are representatives of non-governmental organizations, most of which were financed from abroad - primarily by Western countries. Further, the situation began to get out of the control of the Kazakh authorities altogether, as militants began to join the actions, including those who managed to break into the republic from Afghanistan.
Alarming reports began to arrive from the Republic of Kazakhstan. There was information that the protesters had weapons in their hands. And these are not only hunting rifles and traumatic pistols, these are automatic weapons, hand grenades, Molotov cocktails. As a result, shots began to sound, the buildings of regional administrations (akimats) caught fire. It came to open battles in which terrorists tried to take possession of the property and weapons of the military units of Kazakhstan. The most alarming situation manifested itself in the largest Kazakh city - Almaty (Alma-Ata). There, to neutralize a large terrorist group, it was necessary to use the special forces of the Airborne Forces of Kazakhstan. There are data on the numerous deaths among military personnel and law enforcement officers. The number of victims among the Kazakhstani security forces went to dozens, the number of wounded - to hundreds. In such a situation, there was a direct threat to the statehood of Kazakhstan. If the militants managed to take the presidential complex in Nur-Sultan, several military units, then Kazakhstan in its current form would simply cease to exist. Power would have passed to the radicals who have already managed to prove themselves by beheading two police officers. In order to prevent the growth of the terrorist threat and to nullify the possibility of the collapse of Kazakhstan, President Tokayev submitted a request to the CSTO for help. This decision, by and large, was fateful. Ermukhamet Yertysbayev, adviser to the first president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, stressed that the introduction of the CSTO peacekeeping contingent, carried out in a short time, made it possible to stop the bloodshed. Russian, Belarusian, Kyrgyz, Armenian and Tajik military took control of key facilities in Kazakhstan, including Almaty airport, Aktau port, government and diplomatic complexes. The strategically important objects of Kazakhstan, including the Baikonur cosmodrome, were taken under protection and defense. If it were not for the timely decision to appeal to the CSTO, today millions of Kazakhstani citizens could be held hostage by armed radicals sponsored from abroad. The country could plunge into chaos. In this regard, the aforementioned Yermukhamet Yertysbayev notes that the West is irritated by Tokayev's appeal to the Collective Security Treaty Organization. And if we consider that it was the introduction of the CSTO peacekeepers that made it possible to reduce the tenseness of the situation, then this can only speak of one thing: the Kazakh turmoil was in the interests of the West, including as another hotbed of tension near the borders of Russia, in the CIS space.
コメント