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KAZAKHSTAN: Special report on ethnic Kazakhs and the struggle to return
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]
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© IRIN
Ethnic Kazakhs building a house in Baibesik
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ALMATY, 2 Sep 2003 (IRIN) - Standing outside his simple, roughly constructed home with his wife and three children, Bakhtyar Kelmanov, an ethnic Kazakh from Nukus, Uzbekistan, couldn't be happier. "As soon as I get citizenship, I'll have more opportunities here," the 28-year-old told IRIN, in the knowledge that his mud-brick house could well hold the key to a more prosperous future in Kazakhstan - a country his family had fled over 50 years earlier.
While such stories are not unusual in Kazakhstan, the struggle for many ethnic Kazakhs like him remains fraught with challenges. Officially, 277,000 have returned since 1991, but millions more remain scattered among the country's Central Asian neighbours, as well as China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and Turkey.
According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), there are well over 2 million ethnic Kazakhs outside the country, while the World Association of Kazakhs estimates their numbers closer to 5 million.
A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Whatever the exact figure, the story of their plight remains largely untold. Under Stalinist Russia, in the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of Kazakhs fled political turmoil, repression, forced collectivisation, and a hunger crisis that killed a large part of the Kazakh population. According to official census figures, the population dropped from 3.63 million in 1926 to 2.31 million in 1939.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Kazakh government, in a bid to compensate for past injustices, enacted a special law allowing for the return of the expatriate Kazakhs and their descendents. That law has remained on the statute book to this day.
The law established the legal status of 'oralman' - meaning returnee. Exiled ethnic Kazakhs awarded this status have the right to be transported to Kazakhstan free of charge, receive a house or flat, receive social assistance like other Kazakh citizens and to have access to a simplified procedure in obtaining citizenship, as well as assistance in finding employment.
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| Bakhtyar Kemanov outside his home in Almaty |
THE QUOTA SYSTEM
To manage this return process, the government established an annual immigration quota for oralmans, allocating them to one of the country's 14 provinces. However, recent statistics show a widening gap between the actual ethnic immigration and the quota for government-assisted returns. In 2001, 9,105 families returned - over 15 times the government quota.
The government increased the quota to 2,655 families for 2002, but did not do so before 16 September of that year. Yet, according to recent government figures, 10,377 oralman families immigrated in that year alone. Given this predicament, the government has revised its quotas upwards. The current quota for 2003 is 5,000 families, followed by 10,000 in 2004, and 15,000 in 2005.
However, of the 67,882 families that had returned as of 1 August, only 23,000 had come under the quota system, Mukhit Izbanov, the acting head of the Kazakh migration agency told IRIN from the Kazakh capital Astana, indicating that the actual number of returnees was far more than the government officially conceded.
Meanwhile, Kayrat Bodaukhan, director of Avsar, an NGO dedicated to helping ethnic Kazakhs in the commercial capital, Almaty, said that such quotas were unrealistic and should be scrapped. "The quota is going up, but it's still not enough to meet the needs of those ethnic Kazakhs who want to return," the 40-year-old economist told IRIN.
CHALLENGES FOR INTEGRATION
A returnee from Mongolia himself, Bodaukhan said he believed that integration for oralmans arriving outside the quota system could prove impossible. Of the 10,000 ethnic Kazakh returnees he estimated to be living in Almaty, only 2,500 have officially entered under the quota system and were properly registered with the authorities, a fact seriously impeding the successful integration of the unofficial returnees.
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Kayrat Bodaukhan, director of Avsar says the quota system should be scrapped
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Such returnees cannot easily register; their unofficial status limits their access to employment, as well as to housing, education and health services. Bodaukhan estimates that 400,000 returnees lack proper documentation authorising them to live and work in the country, while many more remain stateless.
Registration, critical for citizenship, requires proof of permanent residency, economically not feasible for most returnees. And while there is no ethnic discrimination against ethnic Kazakhs, those not properly documented are left vulnerable to abuse - generally at the hands of unscrupulous employers.
"At any moment, they can be arrested for being illegal," Bodaukhan claimed, describing their status as placing them in a kind of legal limbo.
Commenting on their dilemma, Michael Tschanz, the IOM chief of mission in Almaty, told IRIN that ideologically everyone in Kazakhstan was ready to receive them, but not having citizenship prevented them from integrating successfully.
Today, that issue has been resolved, in most cases. Whereas only about 10 percent of all returnees had citizenship in 1999, around 60 percent had been granted citizenship by 2002, one government official reportedly said. Nonetheless, the problems of the quota system remain unchanged. "There is a limited quota, so it's not clear who should get housing and who shouldn't," Tschanz said.
Indeed, some returnees argue that the actual criteria for receiving housing is marred by corruption, with some officials asking for bribes from applicants for housing assistance - thereby defeating the purpose of its very existence. "Why should I be paying a bribe if I genuinely need the help?" one disgruntled returnee asked IRIN.
Continued
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