Police detained dozens of opposition protesters in Kazakhstan's largest city on Saturday after the exiled nemesis of long-time leader Nursultan Nazarbayev called for rallies across the country. An AFP correspondent saw a mixture of plainclothes police wearing black and officers in uniform detain at least 30 protesters, some of whom were elderly, and place them in police vans in the former capital Almaty as they gathered for a planned demonstration. The rare opposition protest ostensibly backing educational reforms was called for on social media by Mukhtar Ablyazov, an exiled oligarch who is 77-year-old Nazarbayev's most significant political opponent.
Nazarbayev has ruled Kazakhstan for nearly three decades, tolerating almost no opposition at home. A court in the country ruled that Ablyazov's Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan movement was an extremist group earlier this year. The attempts to hold opposition protests come at a sensitive time in the oil-rich Central Asian country amid mounting speculation that Nazarbayev will not stand again when his present presidential term ends in 2020.
The head of the Almaty-based Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights monitor Yevgeny Zhovtis told AFP that "the majority of the detained have now been released" without charge. "But some are still at police stations," he said, noting that one of his colleagues at the rights group was among those detained and then released.
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