This is why the western mainstream media coverage of the recent crisis in Kazakhstan has been so biased.
Jeremy Kuzmarov
Covert Action Magazine
On January 2nd, protests erupted in the city of Zhanaozen in western Kazakhstan that have since spread across the country. Over 160 people have been killed, including at least 18 police officers, with hundreds more wounded.
The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets depicted the violence as a result of the doubling of fuel prices and unhappiness with political authoritarianism and corruption.
Kazakhstan’s president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, has been widely condemned for carrying out large-scale human rights abuses, with Russian backing. Secretary of State Antony Blinken referred to Russia as an occupying power.
Russia has indeed sent troops into Kazakhstan in support of Tokayev. On January 5th, Tokayev invoked article four of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a Russia-led alliance of former Soviet states that includes Belarus, Tajikistan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan, which agreed to provide Kazakhstan with military assistance and defense. […]
The media almost universally failed to report that political organizations in Kazakhstan in 2020 received $3.8 million from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, which promotes regime change against pro-Russian leaders in Eastern Europe and Central Asia under the guise of advancing democracy and human rights, and more than $1.2 million from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). (data for 2021 is not yet publicly available)
Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev
In most media coverage, including even in alternative media, Tokyaev is depicted as the bad guy, with Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, Tokayev’s statement about criminals and murderers leading the protests is actually true.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported that two police officers in Almaty were found beheaded and that government buildings were stormed and set ablaze.
RT News reported that protesters were driving away military vehicles, disarming soldiers, burning cars and had set on fire the mayor’s office in Almaty, the country’s largest city.
Lest one think RT News is biased since it is pro-Russian, The New York Times also featured a photograph of a burning police car on January 7.[1]
Pepe Escobar wrote in Strategic Culture about the protesters provoking “total anarchy, robbery, looting, hundreds of vehicles destroyed, attacks with assault rifles, ATMs and even the Duty Free at Almaty airport [being] completely plundered.” This assessment dovetailed with that of Galym Ageleulov, a human rights activist in Almaty who participated in the protests. He described the crowd as “an unruly mob of…thugs…clearly organized by crime group marauders.”
Regime Change
The media almost universally failed to report that political organizations in Kazakhstan in 2020 received $3.8 million from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, which promotes regime change against pro-Russian leaders in Eastern Europe and Central Asia under the guise of advancing democracy and human rights, and more than $1.2 million from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). (data for 2021 is not yet publicly available)
The NED was founded in the 1980s by the Reagan administration to carry out functions previously adopted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).[2] It has been involved in supporting “color revolutions,” or regime-change operations, throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia directed against pro-Russian leaders like Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia in the 2003 “Rose Revolution” and Viktor Yanukovych who was ousted in Ukraine in February 2014.
In 2018-2019, the NED spent almost three million dollars in Belarus, which was targeted in a color revolution directed against Socialist Alexander Lukashenko, a close Russian ally who sustained considerable popular support because of the strength of his country’s social programs…
Continue this story at Covert Action Magazine
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