A week and then go away. Arrived in Kazakhstan on January 6, the 2,300 soldiers from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) contingent, a kind of post-Soviet NATO led by Russia, began their withdrawal on Thursday, January 13.
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A ceremony was organized for the occasion under the fog of Almaty with a few medal presentations to settle what ultimately held the blitz. “The mission of the CSTO forces is accomplished”, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev assured two days earlier. The latter presented the violence of recent days as a “Armed aggression by international terrorists against our country” having justified “Sending a contingent of peacekeeping troops”.
A mission in the form of a signal
“The mission of the CSTO was accomplished the moment the first Russian soldiers touched Kazakh soil”, explains Temur Umarov, a specialist in Central Asia with the Carnegie Center in Moscow. Demonstrations against the rise in the cost of fuel, which erupted across the country on January 2, were indeed quickly mingled with violent clashes, especially in the city of Almaty, which killed more than a hundred people.
A confused and brutal sequence which, for observers of the country, would indicate that a power struggle within the Kazakh elite would have come to be grafted to the socio-economic demands of the population. In this context, “The role of the CSTO forces, especially the Russian forces, was symbolic: it was to show that Tokayev was supported by Moscow.” judge Temur Umarov. Composed mainly of Russian soldiers, but also of units from Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus, the CSTO’s peacekeeping mission was above all a signal to the Kazakh elites.
Assured of the support of the Kremlin, the Kazakh president was in fact able to launch a real purge against those close to his predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbaïev, authoritarian ruler of the country since the fall of the USSR. He left the presidency in 2019 to better take control of a security council transformed into a real center of power.
Time for the purge
the “Head of the nation” – official title given to himself by Nursultan Nazarbayev in 2019 – remains untraceable. His close family, who had grown tremendously rich during his reign, also disappeared, and some of them may have fled the country.
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The most senior victim of this purge remains Karim Massimov, the powerful former head of the Kazakh security services, today indicted for high treason. But this purge could quickly spread to the entire Nazarbayev clan: in a speech on January 11, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev called on the state to cease all dealings with Operator ROP, a recycling company controlled by the younger daughter of Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Arrived when the bulk of the violence had already passed, the CSTO forces had only to show up. Russian soldiers quickly positioned themselves near Almaty airport, while a Belarusian unit guarded an ammunition depot nearby and a group of Kyrgyz soldiers secured a power station.
At the same time, the Kazakh security forces announced the arrest of nearly 8,000 “Terrorists” who, according to a confused explanation of the power, would have come to destabilize the country from abroad. The departure of the CSTO forces is expected to take about ten days – longer than the mission itself.
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