Kazakstan: One Law for the Rich

A decision to compensate well-off residents of Almaty, Kazakstan’s largest city, when their properties are demolished has provoked accusations of preferential treatment. People living in run-down areas of the city received nothing when their houses were knocked down last year.



Some 2,000 buildings on the slopes of the mountains that form the city’s backdrop are likely be demolished, including luxury homes that dot the Butakovka, Chimbulak, Medeu, and Bolshaya and Malaya Almatinka gorges. City authorities say the majority of owners are likely to receive compensation.



The Kazak government established a commission last month to look into demolishing buildings located in nature conservation zones on the outskirts of the city. The commission - set up to address concerns that the buildings could be causing environmental damage - will determine whether they were built before or after the area was given national park status, and will then decide who receives compensation. Owners who built their homes after the cut-off date will not qualify.



Prime Minister Karim Masimov told a meeting of the commission on September 21 that it was time to take decisive but fair action on buildings that flouted nature conservation legislation.



“We will insist that the law is equal for everyone - there are no big or little people here,” said the prime minister, according to the Khabar news agency.



Almaty’s mayor Imangali Tasmagambetov told a September 28 press conference that up to four billion US dollars could be set aside to compensate people who lost their homes. He insisted, however, that there would be “no dealing” with those who put up homes once the conservation zones were created.



But when the prosecutor general’s office confirmed on October 9 that compensation would indeed be paid to those who bought land plots and real estate in the designated zone prior to its special status, it made it clear this would account for 90 per cent of the properties which will be subject to demolition orders.



The generous and comprehensive deal that seems to be on offer contrasts sharply with how people in less affluent parts of the city have been treated when they have been told to leave their homes. Critics of the offer say it is manifestly unfair for taxpayers’ money to be used to compensate wealthy home-owners when the residents of Shanyrak and Bakay got nothing for their demolished homes.



These settlements appeared on the fringes of the city in the Nineties, as people arrived from other regions as well as from the Kazak diaspora seeking work in the country’s commercial centre. At the time, the areas they settled were administratively part of the rural region surrounding Almaty, but in 1999 the city government acquired these areas, and residents of Bakay and Shanyrak found themselves dealing with officials who wanted the land for redevelopment and refused to admit that they had any right to live there.



Demolition orders followed for homes in Bakay and Shanyrak, and by last year the dispute had escalated into a stand-off, with sporadic battles between locals and the police who were drafted in to protect demolition squads.



More than 100 homes were torn down, and there was no talk of compensation.



A former resident of Shanyrak told IWPR how angry he was at the stark difference between the deal the mountain villa owners are getting and the way people like him were treated.



“We were literally chucked out into the street and they demolished our home and other structures,” said the man, who did not want to be named. “Nobody even mentioned compensation. We wouldn’t have said no to it, even a small amount. And now you have billions of dollars going to a few hundred, maybe a thousand families. How is that fair?”



This man said some of his former neighbours were homeless, while he had found shelter with relatives outside Almaty.



“Some of the former residents are completely homeless. We don’t know what to do – it’s impossible to get either a residence permit or a stable job,” he said.



Seytkazy Mataev, chairman of the Union of Journalists of Kazakhstan, said there should be no double standards – if the people of Shanyrak and Bakay received no compensation, then neither should the owners of the elite housing conveniently close to the Chimbulak ski centre and the Medeo ice rink.



“I think it’s wrong to pay such sums out of the taxpayer’s pocket,” said Mataev. “Why should we be paying for them to break the law? It’s forbidden to build in that special protection zone. That’s not what happened in Bakay and Shanyrak – there it was demolition and no compensation.”



Political scientist Mikhail Sytnik advances the theory that some of the luxury home owners may themselves have lobbied for the environmental review, with the idea of obtaining compensation to cushion an expected crash in property prices.



He believes that the government commission will conclude that the houses did breach environmental regulations, but that “it isn’t the villa owners who are to blame but the officials who issued the permits ten or 15 years ago”.



Whatever the politics behind the compensation offer, the environmental concerns seem real enough.



Local environmentalists say Almaty is at risk from mudslides as the mountain slopes are disturbed. They also argue that annual average temperatures have risen, citing unusually mild weather that lasted through January in these normally snowbound mountain areas. The warming will, if it persists, lead to flooding and landslides, they say.



Almaty is a city at bursting point, with a population of at least 1.5 million living in an area with infrastructure designed for 400,000. A construction boom in recent years has seen property prices soar and spare land gobbled up.



In April this year, President Nursultan Nazarbaev suggested that pressure on the city centre could be alleviated by prohibiting further construction there and instead creating satellite towns around the city.



However, such urban planning schemes are likely to bring problems of their own – the evictions in Bakay and Shanyrak were prompted by similar visions of a decentralised city in which high-quality housing schemes will replace older residential areas.



Yaroslav Razumov is an IWPR contributor in Almaty.