In Almaty, Kazakhstan, the search for families to find their relatives arrested ·Global Voices

Ten days after the wave of violence that tore apart Almaty, Kazakhstan's economic and cultural lung, an opaque curtain has just been drawn on its burning town hall. Once bumpy, the city is now prostrated in mourning and doubt. Eleven portraits of police and soldiers killed during the disturbances follow one another on the giant screens of the square. But nothing to recall the more than 200 civilians who died in the protests against rising energy prices that began on January 2. The Russian military, who came to assist the regime, rushed into their large aircraft and disappeared northward.

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Civilians killed for no reason, arbitrary arrests, torture to extract confessions … Like a locomotive launched at full speed, the repressive machine is rushing. In the cabin, a President, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. In power since 2019, he has freed himself from the tutelage of his master, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the country's inescapable political figure for 30 years, and claims to build a "new Kazakhstan". But emancipation was accompanied by fierce rhetoric. On January 8, Tokayev tweeted the bloodbath by an attack by "20,000 terrorists" on Almaty. Some of them "spoke languages other than Kazakh" and were "run from one centre", he assured. The day before, he had ordered the security forces to "shoot without warning" the "bandits and terrorists".

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Since then, no information has been filtered about this mysterious "single centre" or about the "foreigners" in Almaty. It is still unknown why the police suddenly disappeared on the evening of 5 January, handing over two million inhabitants to gangs of looters, sometimes armed. It is also unknown who "kidnapped"-according to the police-41 bodies, who disappeared from the city's morgues, yet guarded by police and surrounded by surveillance cameras.?

Trapped civilians

What goes back now are the testimonies of civilians trapped between mysterious armed gangs and the security forces, under political pressure to arrest these 20,000 "terrorists".

On Wednesday, January 5, around noon, when Sayat Adilbekuly, 28, left his home to buy medicines, he had no idea what was going on. Her 1 ½ year old daughter has been ill for a week, her fever has risen and she is coughing heavily. This wedding photographer is trying to order drugs over the Internet with express delivery. In vain. Demonstrations are taking place in the city centre, not before. The man then takes his car, goes around the pharmacies in his neighbourhood, in the suburbs of Almaty. They're all closed. He calls his wife Guzal to explain his delay and decides to go downtown, to the general pharmacy.

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