Kazakhs Crack Down on Journalists

OJR Staff
posted: 2002-09-05

It's a good thing this article isn't coming to you from Kazakhstan. If it were, this online publication could be sued in a kangaroo court, its editor could be beaten into a coma and its author could be murdered.

Not that we'll reveal earth-shattering secrets here, but even repeating the truth as it has appeared a thousand times before on the Web -- if you host those words in Kazakhstan itself -- will land you before a court, if you're lucky, or in the hospital or morgue, if you're not.

The most recent violent attack on an online journalist came just a few days ago. On August 28, Sergei Duvanov, online commentator and editor-in-chief of a human rights bulletin published by the non-governmental organization Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law (KIBHR), was beaten unconscious by three unknown assailants as he returned to his Almaty home in the evening. This was no petty mugging: Duvanov's attackers left his keys, wallet and mobile phone untouched, telling their victim, "You know what this is for -- next time we'll cripple you."

The 49-year-old Duvanov had already fallen afoul of the authorities for his online work and is currently being prosecuted for "harming the honor and dignity" of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev in his 6 May article "Silence of the Lambs" on kub.kz (Click here for the English translation). Every international body following Duvanov's case -- from Human Rights Watch (HRW) to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to Reporters without Borders (RSF) to the Committee to Protect Journalists -- has suggested a political motive for the assault, which put Duvanov in the hospital with knife wounds, heavy bruising and a concussion.

"This brutal attack once more confirms what appears to be an emerging pattern of harassment of media professionals and human rights defenders in Kazakhstan," said Ambassador Gérard Stoudmann, director of the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.

"Coming on the heels of Duvanov's courageous reporting and in light of the Kazakh government's general intolerance of independent media, it is difficult to dismiss this attack as a simple act of hooliganism," said Elizabeth Andersen, executive director of the Europe and Central Asia division at HRW, who also stated: "Punishing journalists under so-called 'honor and dignity' laws is an outdated Soviet tactic that undermines the Kazakh government's claims to an open society. These laws were used by the Soviets to hide abuses and criminalize dissent, and President Nazarbaev is using them the same way today."

The attack seems to be simply a continuation of the harassment directed against the online journalist in the courts. Legal attacks and violent assaults against journalists, online and off, are sadly nothing new in Kazakhstan.

Open season on journalists

Less than two weeks before the assault on Duvanov, on August 16, well-known TV presenter Artur Platonov claimed he was brutally beaten by three former police officers as he was driving home. He was hospitalized with a broken nose and contusions.

Platonov's show, "Portret Nedely" (Portrait of the Week), private TV station KTK's main current affairs program, is frequently critical of the police and the government, and Platonov has received many threats in the past. His colleagues at KTK called his beating "an attack of intimidation," and international organizations agree.

"There is no shadow of a doubt that Artur Platonov was attacked because his work as a political affairs journalist has ruffled feathers," Robert Ménard, secretary-general of Reporters without Borders said. "International attention is focusing more and more on the suspect behavior of the Kazakh authorities as the attacks against the independent news media increase... In this case, the authorities go so far as to ridiculously claim that the journalist broke his own nose in a car accident," he noted.

Sometimes the victims are not so lucky to escape. On June 21, Leila Bayseitova, 25-year-old daughter of Kazakh opposition journalist Lira Bayseitova, received terminal injuries while in police custody. She died five days later.

A report released by Reporters without Borders and Damocles Network at the end of August says the authorities' claim that she committed suicide was "riddled with discrepancies and not very convincing" and believe there are "possible links between this death and Lira Bayseitova's professional activity."

A joke of a legal system

But international organizations' calls for thorough and independent investigations of these attacks on journalists are not likely to be heeded. This is, after all, Kazakhstan, where the courts and the police are about as corrupt and compromised as can be imagined. Kazakh laws are used to destroy independent journalism, not protect it.

To see how the legal system works against online publishing in Kazakhstan, one need only look at the recent case of Internews Kazakhstan, the representative office of the American non-profit Internews, a media-support NGO working in 24 countries world-wide with support from USAID and other international donors. On July 30, the Kazakh Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Internews Kazakhstan, upholding a May ruling against the NGO for defamation. The civil suit was brought by Rakhat Aliev, who claimed he was libeled by the article "Khabarization of the entire country," [text in Russian] which appeared on the Internews Kazakhstan Web site in August-September 2001.

During the trial, the courts made no attempt to provide a fair trial. There were procedural irregularities, and the judges dismissed relevant evidence, including the fact that the Internews article was really only a rehash of well-known public information. It merely restated facts easily available on the Web already on sites such as the BBC, Freedom House, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters without Borders and even the U.S. State Department's online human rights report. None of this mattered to the Kazakh judges.

The court's obvious favoritism toward Aliev was only to be expected in this post-Soviet authoritarian state; after all, Aliev is not your normal litigant. He is former deputy head of the National Security Committee (KNB, the successor to the KGB), former senior official at the Kazakh tax office and current Kazakh ambassador to Austria.

Aliev also happens to be Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev's son-in-law. His wife is Dariga Nazarbaeva, Nazarbaev's daughter and herself the chair of Kazakhstan's Congress of Journalists and head of the Khabar news agency. Together, Aliev and Nazarbaeva control several TV and radio stations in the country (two also sharing the name "Khabar"), as well as a handful of leading newspapers and an advertising agency.

But that truth is exactly what we're not supposed to say. Saying that is precisely what got Internews Kazakhstan in trouble – Aliev didn't like anyone pointing out the enormous media holding he and his wife control. The government and much of the dominant media in Kazakhstan, you see, are what you might call "family businesses," but you're not allowed to say that online. "Khabarization" is a taboo subject.

Still, you don't see Aliev suing the BBC, Freedom House, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters without Borders or the US State Department for online defamation. Kazakh law treats Web sites registered in Kazakhstan as mass media, fully answerable to the faulty and blatantly unfair Kazakh legal system. Everything else on the Web is "improper"; try to even refer to Web sites outside of Kazakhstan in your own defense -- as Internews did in its case -- and the judges will ignore your argument, saying these are not "official sources."

And just what are "official sources"? No points for guessing: Kazakh government-approved sources only. Referring to information from "non-official" sources in mass media in Kazakhstan makes you responsible for their accuracy.

What's more, the burden of proof for demonstrating accuracy lies on the broadcaster, journal, newspaper or Web site that cites, republishes or summarizes a "non-official" source, rather than on the accuser. In simple terms: you're guilty, unless you prove your innocence.

Given the current state of Kazakh legal and extra-legal harassment of journalists, one cannot be surprised by the final verdict. This case only further demonstrates both that it is impossible to get a fair trial in Kazakhstan (especially when the case involves the president's family) and that the law itself is extremely repressive.

All of this is what you'd expect from a regime Reporters without Borders labeled "an enemy of the Internet" and which it summarized in its 2002 Annual Report with these words: "Repetitive attacks, pressure and intimidation on the media in a country run by President Nazarbaev's family and its allies."

In the past week or two, however, some analysts have re-evaluated these recent attacks and intimidation. Writing for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Zamira Eshanova says there may "be more to such attacks than simply the state's desire to crack down on independent media." She believes they may represent a power struggle among the regime's inner elite, specifically, between the Interior Ministry and Rakhat Aliev.

Eshanova reminds us that Aliev, who was once deputy head of the National Security Committee and had at one time been seen as Nazarbaev's successor, "has repeatedly clashed with the Interior Ministry in the struggle for power in the country's upper political echelons." Platonov's news program on KTK-TV often criticized the Interior Ministry, and KTK is controlled by Aliev and his wife, Dariga Nazarbaeva.

Suspicions were raised further when Dariga Nazarbaeva, who has rarely cared about intimidation of journalists or press freedom in the past, suddenly started showing interest in Platonov's case. The attack on Platonov was one of Khabar news agency's top stories, and on August 19, she even stated publicly that the assault on Platonov represented a political attack on her father, President Nursultan Nazarbaev.

The First Family seems to be circling the wagons. The attack on online journalist Duvanov even saw the President himself get in on the act, expressing his "profound concern" over the assault and claiming it was another provocation by a "third force" determined to smear him and undermine his authority, as explained by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's "Reporting Central Asia" service on 30 August.

You could hear journalists' jaws falling open across the country at that. This was, after all, the same president who once infamously remarked, "The independent media is called independent because nothing depends on it."

If Nazarbaev's "third force" actually exists, it is depressing news for Kazakh journalists. It's bad enough for journalists to be intimidated, beaten and killed by one force in politics. If now they are the target for two competing forces, each trying to silence dissent and discredit the other through violent attacks on journalists, then the situation can only get worse.

The longer-term implications of legal and extra-legal intimidation of journalists for online publishing in Kazakhstan are decidedly grim. As would be expected given the harsh legal treatment of Web sites registered in Kazakhstan, many online publishers are simply hosting their pages outside the country.

Ivan Sigal, Internews Regional Director for Central Asia, told me, "One of the first things we did in response to the [Aliev] lawsuit was move all the content of our site onto our American server, at internews.org/kz. So if you go to internews.kz, you'll see that it immediately dumps you onto internews.org/kz."

Other media are following suit, and they, along with many sites of the political opposition, are now hosted in Russia, Europe, or the United States. This, however, solves little due to one other negative aspect of online journalism in Kazakhstan: Government blocking.

The Kazakh government, like neighboring China (see OJR report "Censorship Wins Out"), routinely blocks outside Web sites it doesn't like. On government instructions, the country's two largest Internet providers, Kaztelecom and Nursat, censor their users' connections to the outside Web world, blocking some sites and even redirecting users to "cleansed" proxy sites. This has been noted by many observers, including the U.S. State Department's Kazakhstan Country Report on Human Rights Practices 2001. A few high-level words to Kaztelecom and Nursat is enough to get an external site onto the blacklist.

The best-known example of state-ordered redirecting is eurasia.org.ru. If you attempt to download the pages of this Russia-based Kazakh opposition site from a terminal within Kazakhstan, you end up on a similar yet altered site -- some articles are missing, others have been changed. It clearly takes a lot of work, but as Sigal notes: "There's no question that this is a concerted effort."

Moving your online publication outside of Kazakhstan, then, is clearly no panacea to the problem of government censorship.

The resulting situation for online journalists in Kazakhstan -- as it is for most other types of journalists here -- has moved from bad to worse to down-right appalling. For Kazakh journalists, the situation is a straightforward one of: Can't win. Can't break even. Can't get out of the game.

The author is a media expert working closely with journalists in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries.