Pressure on Radio Liberty’s Kazakh service – step in wrong direction

By refusing accreditation to 36 reporters of the US-funded Radio Liberty’s Kazakh service, the government has shown it has a serious grudge against it.

It is not clear what the end goal is: to pressure Azattyq to ‘tone down’ its reporting or to push it out of the country altogether.

Either way, President Tokayev’s administration is doing a disservice to itself and the Kazakh public.

Qasym Amazhol, the head of Azattyq’s Kazakhstan Bureau said the Foreign Ministry gave two reasons for turning down the 36 staffers’ accreditation requests last week.

The first reason was that several Azattyq reporters continued to work for some time despite having no accreditation, Amazhol told Exclusive.kz on Monday.

He said the journalists were still working because they had applied for accreditation and were waiting for a decision – working while awaiting accreditation has always been allowed before.

The second reason given by the Ministry was linked to a December court ruling that found Azattyq guilty of spreading ‘false information’.

The case was filed by lawyer Turabayev after Azattyq described the Collective Security Treaty Organization as “a Russia-led organization”. The lawyer claimed it was an incorrect description because the CSTO is a collective body.    

Amanzhol said the case was “fabricated”.

“Formally the CSTO is a collective organization, but Russia’s influence within it is huge, the headquarters is in Moscow, the official language is Russian, and Russia has the largest contingent of troops,” he said.                                                   

Amanzhol said they disagreed with the court’s “unfair” decision, but paid the fine ordered by it.

The Bureau is appealing against the Foreign Ministry’s refusal of the accreditation, he said.

All the 36 affected journalists are Kazakh citizens. By national law they can still carry out journalistic activity but won’t be able to attend official media events.

In another development last week, two MPs proposed an addition to the media bill under consideration in parliament that would allow the government to ban a foreign media organization from operating in the country if its activities are seen as a threat to national security. 

One of the initiators of the new clause, MP Nikita Shatalov told Azattyq that the change was aimed at “elevating” the regulations on foreign media organizations’ work in the country to the level of law – so there is “a legal framework to work within”.

He said the law would be applied only “in emergency situations”, in response to actions “that can definitely do harm to the Kazakh public and state” — “first of all calls for changing the constitutional order, violating Kazakhstan’s national laws and so on”.

Shatalov denied any link between the proposed legal change and the government’s issues with Azattyq.

“We do not create laws for individual media organizations,” he said. “We are not against Azattyq.”

Known opposition journalist and MP Yermurat Bapi warned on Monday against “jumping to conclusions” about the proposed addendum.

“There might have been some misunderstanding about it,” Bapi said. “We are not at a point of voting for it yet”.

According to Amanzhol, Azattyq has been experiencing official pressure since the end of 2022, following its publication of investigative reports about President Tokayev’s family’s alleged properties and businesses.

Since around that time, access to Azattyq’s website in Kazakhstan has become unreliable, he said.

Azattyq is the only media outlet inside Kazakhstan that can boast a network of reporters across the country, reporting both in Kazakh and Russian, and independently from official control.

Radio Liberty is funded by the US Congress. However, the US government does not interfere with its editorial policies – some officials and others might not believe this, but everyone in professional journalistic circles knows it to be true.

The staff of Radio Liberty’s language services are provided training with an emphasis on accuracy and objectivity. Other than that, there is no editorial oversight as such.

Given the self-censorship practiced by Kazakh media outlets (we are not talking about those fully or partially funded by the government), Azattyq’s reporting does stand out and may seem to some to be ‘bent on’ being negative and critical about the Kazakh government.

“To tell the truth, I do not always agree with Azattyq reporters, which is a natural thing,” public activist Mukhtar Tayzhan said in a Facebook post on Monday.

“The most important thing is freedom of speech. If Azattyq gets closed down, there will definitely be less openness in the country,” he said.

Without Azattyq, the country’s media landscape will look eerily deserted.

Continued pressure on the outlet will only make the Kazakh government look weak and worse than the Nazarbayev government, under which Azattyq experienced no such problems.   

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