Reporting on Clashes between Oil Workers
It happens sometimes that a blogger suddenly becomes a reporter, finding himself in the middle of breaking news. This is about the Atyrau Informant, a blog from Atyrau, the city in Western Kazakhstan rich in oil and foreign oil companies. The original goal of the blog is to serve as a portal for exchange of information between expats and locals and write about life in Atyrau. On October 20, when violent clashes between Kazakh and Turkish workers of Tengiz broke out, leaving about 140 people injured, Yerlan, who is running the blog, started providing the first-hand material on the incident.
This comes as a good source of information taking into account that most English-language media still focus on Kazakhstan’s tenge misprint and Rakhat Aliyev’s invitation for Borat to visit the country. Posting photos (attention, the images can be disturbing), the Atyrau Informant raises legitimate questions about reasons for the lack of reporting on the clashes in main Kazakhstan media like Khabar, or online newspaper Gazeta.kz.
This is not first time when Atyrau Region acts like the battlefield for Kazakh and Turkish personnel. Several reasons might cause conflict and most popular is difference in wages and labour conditions in turkish owned companies. National employees are paid 2-3 times less than personnel with Turkish citizenship. This causes protests in local community and leads to cold war…
According to the Atyrau Informant, the fact that the accident “may seriously damage intenational reputation of country, especially considering abovementioned case in Temirtau and 72 HIV-positive new-born childs in Shymkent”, made the state-media careful about reporting on it. Could it also be that the mining accident in Karaganda, when 41 people dies, is still not forgotten? Could it be an unlucky coincidence that Dariga Nazarbayeva has just published a statement in Karavan newspaper urging Kazakhstan to improve its labor legislation and see that foreign investors abide by it?
…statements like “You will be fired and replaced by anyone else from people who are waiting for a job like dogs in front of the doors” addressed to national workers make them silent and impair their rights to negotiate labour conditions with mangament team. Organization of trade (labour) unions inside the company is not permitted as well, writes Yerlan.
For Sean Roberts, who concludes in his assessment of the event, “it is apparent that Kazakh nationalism is entering a new era of political importance, and this will cause at least some uneasiness for citizens who are not ethnically Kazakh as well as for foreign investors, businessmen, and workers in Kazakhstan into the near future.” The news (link in Russian) that the police arrested 40 citizens of Turkey who worked in Atyrau illegally could well prove this conclusion.
on October 23rd, 2006 at 4:48 am
Thank you. Very informative.
Please continue
on October 23rd, 2006 at 12:47 pm
A previous comment had to be deleted because it condoned violence.
on October 24th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
this is terrible. it does not make us look good internationally!
on October 27th, 2006 at 8:53 am
I was there When incident was happened.It was an massacre and madness.Turks helped to built new kazakhstan.But for now on for turk?sh majority Kazakhstan is not an friend and brotherhood county.
on October 27th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Being Kazakh-Turk myself, this really was a big scandal for all of us. There have been endless discussions on this topic especially in the Altayeli forum (of the Kazakh-Turks in Turkey and all over the world), trying to figure out whose fault all of this was and whether there is a Kazakh-Turkish hostility in Kazakhstan. The latest posts emphasise again, the brotherhood and the friendship of the two Turkic nations and point out to an article in the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet by a Kazakh-Turk, evaluating the situation and repeating over and over again, the number of Turkish firms in Kazakhstan and that this one slip cannot eradicate the strong connection of brotherhood between the two countries. The article(in Turkish) is available under http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/5324966.asp?yazarid=42&gid=61.
on November 2nd, 2006 at 6:45 pm
“National employees are paid 2-3 times less than personnel with Turkish citizenship. This causes protests in local community and leads to cold war…”
Look, perhaps there is also something else that one has to face: Turks (and Chinese) are generally harder-working and savvier than Kazakhs who can sometimes be as ‘naglii’ as lazy. Also, alcoholism is not so much of a problem among Turks and Chinese.
on February 19th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Turks deserve it!!! Actually, it is less than that should be done. Don’t consider all turks as innocence. They have done a lot of thing illegal, fraud, treating unethically local people. Why those thing don’t happen to other nationalities. It is clear that it is problem of only turks living in Kazakhstan. I am not against of any nationality but I have seen a lot of thing that our people really don’t deserve it from turks. It is almost everywhere common history where turks live (not all of them of course)