The events of June 9 -13, 2019, have already become a part of history, so they can be analyzed and thought over in order to connect the dots and comprehend their meaning.
Let us start by saying that, in our opinion, the early presidential elections of June 9, 2019, as well as the fact that the electoral commissions and local authorities actively participated in them alongside Kasym-Zhomart Tokayev have prompted the expression of all kinds of protest sentiments in the Kazakh society. With that, the number of the protesters was not big, several thousand people at the most. This was confirmed by the latest data released by the Ministry of Interior.
In particular, according to the head of the Ministry Erlan Turgumbayev, about 4 thousand people were arrested for participating in the June 9 -13 protests. Of these, 3 thousand people were «protocoled and released», 677 people were placed under administrative arrest, on 305 people administrative fines were imposed.
Since, during the riot squats, the siloviki acted blantly, without trying to establish guilt or innocence of those arrested and taken to police stations (which can be proved by a number of videos on the internet), one can safely assume that the 3 thousand of the «protocoled» citizens were, to a large extent, those usually called «looky-loos» or simply those who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And since it is unlikely that the law-enforcement structures were able to arrest all the protesters, especially at night time, while dominating their opponents quantity-wise and employing numerous undercover agents whose task was to register all the developments and uncover the active protesters, we believe that the total number of the meetings participants constituted 2 thousand people. At best.
If we are correct in our assessment, this means that the number of the protesters was dismal. Had Akorda not been frightened by the risk of the civil actions growing first into a forceful confrontation and then into a revolution, the events of June 9 -13, 2019, could have ended quite differently: the people would have cried out, expressed their protest and then gone home.
However, the protesters were arrested, taken to police stations, even brought to distant locations, trialed (often at night-time) without the right to defend themselves. All in all, this was a true massive-scale mayhem.
Recorded on video and social media, this mayhem has kissed goodbye Akorda’s attempts to both legitimize transferring the presidential powers from Nursultan Nazarbayev to Kasym-Zhomart Tokayev and to demonstrate that the situation in the country is starting to change for the better.
At the same time, the brouhaha surrounding the events of June 9 — 13, 2019, has spread over the early presidential elections, their outcome and the events that happened before them. As a result, Kazakhstan has, yet again, confirmed its reputation as a state with the authoritarian political system and practices.
In our opinion, the fact that the total number of the protesters was extremely low in comparison to the overall number of people living in the country and to the number of the citizens voted for Amirzhan Kosanov at the June 9 elections (basis points and about 0,1%, correspondingly) is critical for Kazakhstan’s future. Because the general passivity of the population, while allowing Akorda to preserve the proverbial political stability, simultaneously shuts down the possibility of conducting the real political reforms.
For even if Kasym-Zhomart Tokayev, supported a part of the ruling elite, suddenly dares to make real changes, there will be no one to carry out these intentions. And then Kazakhstan will be forced to wait for the super-presidential vertical to weaken to a great degree and for the protest moods to grow up to the same degree and for them to overlap as it once happened in the USSR. And then the ruling elite and the citizens will be forced to «move along» if only in order to «survive» in the new circumstances.
For this reason, we consider Akorda’s «victory» over the June 2019 protests a «pyrhic» one. And we believe it did a much greater damage to the victor than a «defeat» would have done. If only because the number of those disliking the authorities certainly didn’t go down whereas the number of those who, directly or indirectly, suffered from Akorda’s despotism has grown in a drastic way.
