Juliette Rossant

Will Kazakhstan Follow Its Neighbors' Bloody Footsteps?

Rising tensions between Kazakhs and Russians could result in all-to-familiar tragedy

Fed up wht the senseless chaos of the Armenians fighting Azerbaijanis and Georgians killing Abkhazians, I had hoped that Kazakhstan would be blissfully tranquil. I was wrong.

My search for the soulf of Kazakh culture -- handed down by yurt-dwelling nomads who left behind few monuments and even fewer books -- took me to the frozen steppe of eastern Kazakhstan, where on a small but surefooted horses I followed Abdulhak Tulibayev and his golden eagle.

Abdulhak is one of the last followers of the 5,000-year-old tradition of hunting foxes with eagles. Over and over for two days, he would ride to the edge of a canyon and remove the leather hood from the bird's eyes. If the eagle spotted a fox in the distance, it would fly off and plunge down on the prey.

Back in our makeshift sleeping quarters, a two-room stone house that we shared with a family of four Kazakh farmers in a little village 60 miles north of the Kazakh capital of Almaty, I tried to get Abdulhak to talk about the revival of native culture since Kazakhstan became independent three years ago.

With a cold stare, Abdulhak refused to talk. "No one cares about eagle hunting," explained a local Russian-German ornithologist who had come with us. Even though the eagle is Kazakhstan's national symbol, the new Kazakh moneyed class is far more interested in the respective merits of buyng a BMW vs. a Mercedes.

But the subject of increasing tensions between Kazakhs and Russians gets Abdulhak to open up just a little. "I will never take Russians to hunt or teach them how to survive on the steppe, he growls. "Someday they will leave our country." The Russians, including Cossacks, form about 40% of Kazakhstan's population, little less than that of ethnic Kazkhs. The rest is fragmented among gruops ranging from Koreans to Uighurs.

In Almaty, a leafy Russian city nestled below the soaring Tien Shan mountains that separate the Centra Asian stepped from China, I found other signs of a proudly reemerging Kazkh culture. Gulzada Akmolova, 7, was dressed to the nines in a handmande embroidered dress with matching vest and tinkling silver jewelry. It was May Day, and her mother, dressed more soberly, was treating Gulzada to traditional Kazakh food such as lamb dumplings and mutton stew, sold at stalls that day in Almaty's main square.

As Gulzada carefully examined one of the lovely Kazkh dolls in a kiosk, her mother boasted of Gulzada's new school where lessons are taught of Kazakh, a language the motehr admitted she spoke with difficulty. At that school, English, "the language of the future," will come second, adn Russian, third, she said.

Kazakh-language schools are a source of pride for Kazakhs, but they're a sore point for the Russians, who are being excluded from the country's universities because they don't speak Kazakh. Kazakh nationalism had also led to the outster of Russians from most managerial, professional, and bureaucratic posts, and hundreds of thousands have emigrated back.

The fault lines are particularly eviden in areas where Kazakhs cohabit closely with Cossacks, descendants of Russian outlaws and adventurers who were given protection by the Tsars in exchange for serving as border guards in the outer reaches of the empire. Kazakhs, on the other hand, are a loose grouping of clans of Mongolian stock, descendants of Genghiz Khan who conquered Russia and much of Asia in the 14th and 15th centuries.

The Cossack businessmen I spoke with complained tha government officials, who were invaiably ethnic Kazakhs, would not grant them export licenses or allow them to participate n privatization. The Cossacks insisted that they needed recognition from the government as a separate ethnic group to ensure their rights.

Vladimir Osyanikov, the leader or Ataman of the Cossacks of Almaty, is a fire chief with meaty hands and a girth to match. When I spoke to him, he reeled off a dozen cases in which Cossacks had been kidnapped, killed, or harassed. "This could turn into a Georgia or a yugoslavia," he said. "But we will never give up our traditions or our arms, or let them force us off our land."

I had made the mistake of bringing a Kazakh translator, who after much flinching and head-shaking refused to translate all of what the Ataman said. "These people are responsible for all our [ethnic] problems," she said. "How dare they threaten us?"

President Nursultan Nazarbayev has made it clear that he doesn't want the Russians to leave: their skills are vital for the country's development. Most of Kazakhstan's trade is with Russia, and its vast reserves of oil must pass through Russia to reach hard-currency markets. Good relations with Russian are essential, but as a politician Nazarbayez also must take into accont the waves of anti-Russian feeling expressed by Kazakhs more and more openly.

Deteriorating relations between the Russians and Kazakhs isn't the only potential flashpoint. Among the Kazakhs, too, relations are becoming more complicated. The Kazakhs are grouped into three loose clans called hordes -- Large, Middle, and Small. While Moscow favored no particular horde, there are increasingly vocal complaints that Nazarbayev is favoring members of his Large Horde. He is accused of stacking the national parliament in favor of his own clain, for example. And jobs in the private and public sector are often awarded on the basis of horde membership, rather than merit.

So the challenges facing the country are manifold. If the increasingly nationalist Russians back in the homeland perceive that their cousins are being seriosuly threatened in Kazakhstan, or if maneuvering among the Kazakhs themselves becomes too fierce, Kazakhstan's once promising future could be shattered. That would create yet another conflagration that the outside world scarcely understands.

ROSSANT, CURRENTLY BASED in New York with Forbes, spent theree years as a freelance journalist in Moscow and Istanbul reporting on the momentous upheavals in the Caucasus and in Central Asia. [1995]

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