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KAZAKHSTAN: The challenge of sustaining returnees - OCHA IRIN

Saturday 12 March 2005


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KAZAKHSTAN: The challenge of sustaining returnees

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Kazakhs from China working in their shop- a sustainable way of staying in the host country

ALMATY, 25 Feb 2005 (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 Kelmanov told IRIN, knowing that his mud-brick house could hold the key to a more prosperous future in Kazakhstan - a country his family fled over half a century ago.

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, including China and Russia.

In the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of local people fled to neighbouring countries to escape the political turmoil, repression and forced collectivisation that Stalin imposed on Kazakhstan. The result was a famine that killed off a large part of the population. According to official census figures, Kazakhstan's population fell from 3.63 million in 1926 to 2.31 million in 1939.

In a bid to compensate for past injustices, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the government enacted a special law allowing for the return of expatriate Kazakhs and their descendents - a law still in force today.

Despite plans this year by the Kazakh government to increase the annual quota of ethnic Kazakhs returning to the country, a more comprehensive strategy will be needed to ensure that their return is sustainable.

"The issue is not the number, but the way this quota is managed," Michael Tschanz, chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Kazakhstan, told IRIN in the commercial capital, Almaty. "For the last year, there has been a complete absence of legal criteria to determine who should be included in the quota and who should not."

Problems with the quota system

On 30 November 2004, Zhazbek Abdiyev, chairman of the Kazakh migration committee and social security ministry, formally announced that the government would increase the state quota from 10,000 to 15,000 families annually over the next two years.

This ethnic Kazakh child is part of the two million Kazakhs living outside their home country.
Credit: IRIN

"The quota aims to help the organised return of those who cannot return to their homeland because of poor financial status or old age," the Russian Itar-Tass news agency reported Abdiyev as saying.

However, the effort has much larger implications for Central Asia's biggest, yet least densely populated nation. Astana, the federal capital of Kazakhstan since 1997, hopes to boost the landlocked country's population from 15 million to 20 million by 2015.

With well over two million ethnic Kazakhs outside the country, according to IOM - five million according to the World Association of Kazakhs, that goal is not necessarily out of reach.

The law established the legal status of "oralman" - meaning returnee, or simply, Kazakh ethnic immigrant. Exiled ethnic Kazakhs granted this status had the right to be transported to Kazakhstan free of charge, receive a house or flat, social assistance like other Kazakh citizens and have access to a simplified procedure in obtaining citizenship, as well as assistance in finding employment.

Over the past 12 years, more than 59,000 families, amounting to a total of 300,000 people, have returned to their homeland under the national Oralman programme. Most have come from Mongolia, Uzbekistan, China, Russia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Turkey, the Itar-Tass report explained.

Stateless returnees

Nevertheless, the programme has also been fraught with problems and many of the Oralman today remain stateless, activists complain. According to a recent UN report, at the end of 2002, the total number of ethnic Kazakhs arriving in the country with the intention of settling stood at 250,000, while at the same time 80,000 remained stateless.

Oralman children.
Credit: IRIN

Moreover, without legal status to work in the country, the ability of the returnees to sustain themselves - much less successfully integrate into Kazakh society - has proven a challenge.

Even so, it is the quota issue - allocating returnees to one of the country's 14 provinces - that has proven the most controversial. Recent statistics suggest a widening gap between the actual ethnic immigration and the quota for government-assisted returnees. In 2001, 9,105 families returned - over 15 times the government quota.

While Astana increased the quota to 2,655 families for 2002, it failed to do so before 16 September of that year, while - according to government figures - 10,377 Oralman families immigrated in that year alone. The government responded by subsequently increasing the quotas to 5,000 families in 2003, 10,000 in 2004 and 15,000 in 2005.

Kayrat Bodaukhan, director of Avsar, an NGO dedicated to helping ethnic Kazakhs in Almaty, however, believed that the quotas should be scrapped altogether.

"The quota is going up, but it's still not enough to meet the needs of those ethnic Kazakhs who want to return," the 41-year-old economist told IRIN.

Only a quarter of the estimated 10,000 ethnic Kazakh returnees living in Almaty arrived under the quota system, Bodaukhan charged, a fact seriously impeding their successful integration.

Unable to register easily, those returnees without proper documentation faced a barrage of problems, including access to employment, housing, education and health services, he claimed.

In fact, according to IOM's Tschanz, the quota's lack of legal criteria had created three categories of migrants: those included in the quota, those excluded, and those waiting or fighting for years to be included.

New chance to get it right

The change of leadership of the Committee for Migration and Demography under the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection was a new opportunity to organise the quota system and introduce objective criteria for including immigrants into the quota, including social vulnerability, date of application, criteria of professional qualification or a combination, he added.

This Oralman family returned under the national Oralman programme, under which 300,000 people have returned home.
Credit: IRIN

In an effort to mitigate some of the problems, two years earlier IOM helped establish a central database of the Oralman population.

"Unfortunately, this seemed to be a low priority of the agency under its former management," Tschanz said. "Very little data has been entered in the database and the database was not used as a management tool. This may change under the new management."

According to the IOM official, if energy-rich Kazakhstan wanted to remain a multi-ethnic country, it could choose to have more than a mono-ethnic immigration policy.

"The current immigration policy for ethnic Kazakhs could be complimented with an immigration policy based on professional criteria, taking into consideration the needs of a growing economy," he said. "Additionally, residence permits and citizenship should be more accessible for family members of Kazakh citizens and Oralman, to protect the concerned families.

"Opening up additional legal migration options would help reduce irregular migration - including irregular labour migration - and the problems connected with it, including human trafficking," he maintained.

[ENDS]

Other recent KAZAKHSTAN reports:

Afghan refugees seek third-country resettlement, 10/Mar/05

Syrdarya floods, hundreds evacuated in south, 2/Mar/05

Syrdarya flooding risk high in south, 8/Feb/05

Travellers report border corruption, 2/Feb/05

Special report on ethnic Germans, 1/Feb/05

Other recent Refugees IDPs reports:

KAZAKHSTAN: Afghan refugees seek third-country resettlement, 10/Mar/05

UZBEKISTAN: Focus on southern labour migration, 9/Mar/05

PAKISTAN: Afghan census concludes, 8/Mar/05

AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN: UNHCR Voluntary repatriation programme resumes, 8/Mar/05

AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN: Census extended, 1/Mar/05

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