Kazakstan: Diaspora Kazaks Face Discrimination

Malakhat Buranova and her family moved back to Kazakstan from Tajikistan in 1998, but her family still hasn’t received its new identity papers.

Her lawyer Tatiana Kiseleva told IWPR that the family’s documents were all in order and had been submitted to the district migration police office in plenty of time, but things started moving only when they complained to the head of the local administration.

However, a problem appeared even here, with citizenship promised only for Malakhat and her children. The migration officials declared that her husband Kurbankulov, an ethnic Turkmen, was not eligible.

When Malakhat protested to a migration official, she said he shrugged and told her, “You should have married a Kazak.”

Ethnic Kazak exiles married to people of different Central Asian nationality are finding it hard to obtain citizenship for them, even though they are legally entitled to it.

Human rights activists working in the South Kazakstan region – where the majority of the returnees choose to settle – say that dozens of these “mixed marriage” families are affected, and warn that this could be just the tip of the iceberg.

After he was denied citizenship, the unemployment benefits Kurbankulov had been receiving were stopped. He now struggles to support his family by doing odd jobs around the area and helping neighbours with their household chores.

Arapkhan Bekturov - an expert on migration and demography in the regional administration - told IWPR that non-Kazak family members should have no problems gaining citizenship, citing a migration law passed on December 13, 1997.

But the local authorities, it seems, often choose to ignore this piece of legislation, and analysts believe that many officials are taking advantage of the returnees ignorance of Kazak law to mire them in seemingly endless bureaucracy.

They suspect that the officials deliberately complicate the process of citizenship - dragging it out and putting many obstacles in the way of non-Kazak applicants – because they are reluctant to grant them social benefits.

As a result, some of the returnees and their families give up and leave the country.

The majority of diaspora Kazaks settle in South Kazakstan because it has mild climate and fertile land. They are mainly concentrated in two districts, Makhtaaral and Saryagash, and the towns of Turkestan and Shymkent.

Official figures suggest that around 24,500 families – just under 96,250 people – have moved to the region since the republic opened its borders to the diaspora after gaining independence. However, only slightly more than 70,400 of them have been granted citizenship.

The central authorities acknowledge there have been difficulties with the processing of citizenship applications, dispatching top officials to the region in November 2003 to help address the problem.

The latter will have their job cut out to make the system fairer, as some local officials no longer bother to hide their distaste for non-Kazaks. “We invited Kazaks back to their motherland, not Turkmens, Tajiks or Uzbeks,” sniffed one.

Olga Dosybieva is an independent journalist in Kazakstan.