Kazakhs who were resettled to the North of Kazakhstan are now asking for asylum in Russia

The state program for the resettlement of Kazakhs from the south to the north of the republic in order to change the ethnic composition, proclaimed by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, seems to be failing before our eyes. This is confirmed by the statement of several such large Kazakh families, who had previously been resettled in the Pavlodar region, about their desire to leave for Russia as refugees and subsequently obtain citizenship.

We are talking about two families who have been protesting for the second week in Nur-Sultan (Tselinograd), unsuccessfully trying to get into the presidential administration. Now on Monday, having lost faith in their state, they came to the Russian Embassy to ask to be granted Russian citizenship. They claim that in Kazakhstan they do not receive proper social support, they are not helped with housing and employment.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube и Max.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

Previously, the authorities actively promoted the “Enbek” (“Labor”) program for resettlement to the North of Kazakhstan, supposedly operating on the principle “from labor-abundant areas to labor-deficient ones.” Under this program, the government of the Republic of Kazakhstan plans to resettle about 2025 thousand families from the southern regions by 10 and thus reduce the share of the Russian population. These resettlement processes have especially accelerated since 2014 after the well-known events in Crimea and Donbass, and now special attention is being paid to this at the very top.

It turns out that the state promised to allocate 204 tenge to each displaced person, which is $190 today. In practice, internal migrants will be paid a “salary” for their decision to move, comparable to the wages of metallurgists and miners in the empire of the British oligarch of Hindu origin Lakshmi Mittal in Karaganda. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev also spoke about this amount on October 475,24 last year at a government meeting, at which he proposed increasing the amount of benefits for displaced persons from 22 tenge to the current size.

The Minister of Labor and Social Protection of the Population of the Republic, Serik Shapkenov, even stated in March that it is planned to deploy entire New Vasyuki for such migrants in six regions: East Kazakhstan, Kostanay, Pavlodar, North Kazakhstan, Karaganda and Akmola.

In fact, the government seeks to carry out forced Kazakhization of these regions and at the same time does not trust the local northern Kazakhs, who have become closer in mentality to the Russians and have acquired numerous connections with neighboring regions of the Russian Federation.

But as they say, it was exactly on paper, but they forgot about the ravines, or rather about the chronic theft of allocated budget funds and the discrepancy between propaganda and real conditions. As a result, many of the displaced people do not receive the promised work, nor benefits, nor housing, and remain in sketchy apartments or abandoned houses in degraded villages. Some of them return back to the south, unable to withstand the Siberian frosts, and some begin to openly protest.

This is what the same large families of Baglan Orynbekov and Baglan Pazyl did, who came to the capital of Kazakhstan on May 25 to seek the truth and demand that President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev fulfill his promise. On this day, she and her children left the reception room of the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection and tried to go to the building of the Presidential Administration of Kazakhstan, but were surrounded by riot police. The police used the “kettling” technique on the protesters, blocking traffic on the approaches to Akorda (presidential administration).

Then they were released, but subsequently they were not allowed in, blocking the path to the residence of the head of state. True, this action gave them the opportunity to express their problems and tell how the presidential resettlement program “Enbek” is actually being implemented.

“We have been living in a rented apartment for a long time. The queue for housing is not moving forward. The authorities promised to resolve the issue, but to no avail,” Baglan Orynbekov noted to the assembled press.

It turns out that before going to the protest in the capital, Orynbekov’s family, along with several other families, went from Shymkent to the Zhelezinsky district of Pavlodar region “as part of a program of resettlement from the southern regions to the north,” but, as Orynbekov says, they were unable to find housing.

“At first they told us that they would accept our documents. However, yesterday the children and I were put out on the street. There are videos. The police were involved. The deputy akim of the district tried to mislead us, saying that this program had expired,” the head of the family indicated. Subsequently, he applied to all authorities, including the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of the Population, but in the end received replies and refusals.

As a result, having not achieved a meeting with representatives of the presidential administration of Kazakhstan, the families of Orynbekov and Pazyl decided on May 31 to contact the Russian Embassy with a request to grant them refugee status. After communicating with the diplomatic mission staff, they decided from Nur-Sultan to head to the northern borders of the republic with the intention of leaving for permanent residence in Russia.

“We were told at the embassy that only if you cross the border with Russia can you ask for help there as refugees. Now I will try to go there and cross the border. I have no other choice. Where my children can live comfortably, that’s where I’ll go. I don’t feel comfortable in Kazakhstan now,” Baglan Orynbekov told the assembled journalists.

The second head of the family, Baglan Pazyl, practically repeated the words of his fellow ordealer, noting the clear superiority of the social welfare system of Russia, where there is real state protection of motherhood and childhood.

“We also talked with Russian citizens. They said that they provide assistance there, provide housing for large families, and pay maternity capital at the birth of a child. After that, we became interested and decided to go there,” Pazyl said.

Representatives of the Ministry of Labor of the Republic of Kazakhstan offered these families to return back to the Turkestan region, from where they were resettled to the North of Kazakhstan, but now they clearly do not want to return, since, according to them, officials there also do not provide any support to large families. This is a clear example of the fact that the proposed “paradise” for resettlement to the northern regions is a fiction and deception, and the inherently nationalist program for the Kazakhization of the regions is failing before our eyes.

The case with these families shows the antisocial nature of the policies pursued by the neoliberal government of Kazakhstan. Moreover, it ultimately turned against those who sought to limit Russia's influence and dilute the number of Russians and Russian-speaking people in six regions of the country. As we see, Kazakh families, even from the southern hinterland, choose the best social security system, rather than propaganda promises and Russophobic fairy tales, and are ready to flee the republic further to the north.

In fact, the Kazakh authorities are now faced with a large wave of protests, including in the capital, where increasingly disadvantaged large families are coming to Tokayev’s residence, demanding increased social support and a solution to the housing issue. As a result, we see that the government of the Republic of Kazakhstan is already choking on social protests and is now clearly not in the mood for resettlement programs in order to satisfy its ambitions of building a mono-ethnic state with a poor population.

I would like to recommend Akorda to use the stolen multibillion-dollar funds allocated for the Enbek program to support such families in the places where they live, providing them with jobs and affordable housing, and not driving them into the Siberian frosts into wastelands and abandoned farms. Otherwise, things will get to the point where humanitarian aid will have to be brought in, or all the displaced people will simply run to neighboring Russia to ask for asylum. Or maybe this is really what they are trying to achieve?