The bureaucratic hoops that people sometimes have to jump through to complete routine business in Kazakhstan are legendary. Frustrated by years of dealings with what they say are high-handed officials, one group of citizens has turned in desperation to the old Soviet method of samizdat to draw attention to their plight, Respublika reports.
Distributors of samizdat bypassed the Soviet censors by photocopying material and circulating it by hand. Now this group of inhabitants of two settlements outside Almaty, Bakay and Akbulak, have published a samizdat book to detail their twists and turns through the corridors of bureaucracy as they seek to complete the paperwork for land plots and property they say they've owned for up to a decade.
The book has a suitably surreal title: The Ordeal in the Land of Nurat, combining the name of President Nursultan Nazarbayev with that of Borat, the "Kazakh" hero of the famous film that lampooned a fictional Kazakhstan as a bizarre and insane place. The title also plays on the name of a trilogy by Russian writer Aleksey Tolstoy, The Ordeal, about the trials and tribulations of the October Revolution and the Civil War. In this case, the ordeal they describe is about becoming mired in a Kafkaesque nightmare as they strive to obtain their title deeds from recalcitrant officials.
The people who live in the settlements that ring booming cities such as Almaty and Astana are mainly migrants from rural Kazakhstan who have moved in search of work. Despite being once characterized as "social outsiders" by then-Almaty Mayor Imangali Tasmagambetov (who's now mayor of Astana), the inhabitants of these settlements are actually anything but that -- most have left impoverished regions to build better lives for their families, and they work hard in low-paid sectors that feed the economies of the cities they serve.
These people can't afford to buy housing in those cities due to sky-high prices. Instead, they've bought land in outlying areas and built their own houses -- but now they find they don't own them.
The group has written to Kazakhstan's foreign minister, Kanat Saudabayev, asking him to let them speak about their plight at next month's summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) but, perhaps not surprisingly, they've received no reply.
They've also lodged a request to hold a procession through Almaty on November 23, and if they get permission – which is unlikely, given tight restrictions on public assembly – they'll be marching under the slogan "Together with the president into the fight against corruption in the Almaty local authorities!"
As they deal with these disaffected people, the authorities might care to cast their minds back a few years. In 2006 Almaty authorities started demolishing what they said were illegal settlements, including some in Bakay. That led to pitched battles involving Molotov cocktail-wielding protestors and police, leaving one police officer dead in a settlement called Shanyrak.
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