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Comment by lowkey_ | Hacker News Reader

For anyone unaware, earlier this year, Kazakhstan faced protests over gas prices (it was a tipping point, there's a lot of wealth inequality) and this president requested the help of Russian security forces to enter the country and help quell riots, and they ended up killing rioters [1].

Most of my Kazakh friends were rooting for the rioters, wanting a more free Kazakhstan, while one friend close to the government was sharing government-sponsored propaganda against the rioters.

It's interesting to see the Kazakh president now take this stance and say all of this.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-59894266

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Things aren't actually as clear-cut as you say. While protests started out peacefully things quickly escalated into violence, especially in Almaty. Most notably, armed bandits captured the city's airport, burned most of the government buildings, tried to assault multiple law enforcement agency offices, tried to go live on multiple TV channels, robbed ATMs, etc. The government has promised a large-scale investigation into the events, but is is already clear those people didn't want either freedom nor democracy and were quite probably influenced by criminal and illegal armed groups.

Seems pretty clear cut to me. Rioting implies violence. The examples you noted are bound to happen durring such times.

The top comment implies that the protestors who demanded lower gas (propane, not gasoline) prices and later political reforms were the ones responsible for violence, or involved in it. There's plenty of evidence that this isn't the case.

People who started the violence were clearly trained for this and very organized, they were shooting police on the streets, looting firearm stores, giving away firearms to random people to encourage chaos. Also the government ordered police and SWAT teams to leave the cities for 1-2 days which hints at some officials being involved in this.

Russian army wasn't involved in fighting on the streets and certainly wasn't "killing" anyone. Russians were invited mainly for a political and morale effect.

I don't know what the top commenter was reading to get these conclusions, but they are clearly not representing any of the mainstream hypotheses explaining the events. I'm saying this as someone who has his family there when it happened and followed every single piece of news from there full time. And after everything was over I went there and talk to some people who witnessed the events.

> The top comment implies that the protestors who demanded lower gas (propane, not gasoline) prices and later political reforms were the ones responsible for violence, or involved in it.

What section are you refering to? Must have lost something

A good account about why it isn't so clear cut: https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/02/24/what-happened-in-kaz...

In a video from January 5th, people can be seen snatching up rifles offloaded by a truck. Some were likely convinced on the spot to grab one of the firearms being handed out, but who was responsible for acquiring them?

Simplest theory:

- weapons were owned by the military or LE

- Weapons were stolen from storage or armory by corrupt officials and put somewhere less secure for later sale

- someone who knew where they were and wanted to support the rioters stole them and shared them out quickly

- or criminal elements stole them and spread them to seed more chaos and tie up LE while they focused on robbing something more substantial

Highly factual and well-written. Thanks for sharing the link.

Escalation into violence does not discredit a revolution while it IS extremely regrettable and perhaps discredits the people involved. If escalation into violence was able to discredit a revolution, the regular every-day violence inflicted on the civilian population by bad cops, etc would discredit the government or at least policing.

At the point where rioters are being killed instead of merely arrested it's hard for me to look negatively at the rioters choosing to strike out with violence of their own. They aren't using the tools and backing of the state to oppress.

This happens even in my US city.

When there is a major protest that keeps the Police busy, criminals take the opportunity to loot stores while there is no law enforcement to stop them.

Rioters are not always on the good side. One recent example is what happened in South Africa a couple months ago:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-57996373

Also, nowhere in the article it says that Russian security forces ended up killing rioters.

According to official sources, Russian forces were dislocated to guard important objects which allowed Kazakh forces to quell the terrorists and take situation under control. So Russian forces did not engage in the actual fight, but rather backed up Kazakh forces.

What really happened is that Kazakh military did not want to obey the President orders when this chaos started. It's speculated that this was act of treason by some high officials in an attempt of coup. That's why Tokaev asked Russia to intervene. After Russia confirmed that they actually do support Tokaev with some symbolic forces sent, Kazakh military started to obey the orders and started to actually do what they must. That's my opinion.

The way you frame the situation is hardly justified, most of what you say doesn't match any of the commonly accepted explanations.

First of all, it's not bad president against good protestors. There were actually two things going on on the streets: peaceful protestors with political and economical demands, and armed organized bandits/terrorists wreaking havoc and destabilising situation as much as they could.

The bandits were killing the police (also going to hospitals to finish any wounded police officers they could find), storming jails trying to set criminals free, burning government buildings, they gave fake calls to firefighters and killed the crews when those arrived.

I leave it to you to read up on who could be orchestrating the bandits. I suggest you focus on local (CIS-based, Russian speaking) news media and telegram channels for that. But one of the important hypotheses is that it was all made by the forces in power opposing Tokaev (the president), and he called the Russians because he didn't trust his own men's loyalty. Russians were protecting some critical infrastructure (which never got attacked, so they didn't fight anyone) including president's headquarters (which was very, very far from the core of riots).

If it's obvious to us that big changes are coming, it must be obvious to them.

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