About the neighbors

It's raining and the weather has been crazy this week, going from sun to rain to snow and then back to sun in a matter of hours. People huddle in coffee shops or under their umbrellas as they go about their days. It's calm and quite in the streets of Almaty... impossible to guess that less than 200 kilometers away people are getting shot as they go about deposing their government. The media has of course reported the events, but not in a particularly forthcoming manner. Within hours of the beginning of the events in Kyrgyzstan, the Kyrgyz government shut down access to the Internet, locking down Twitter, Youtube and all social networking sites. Twitter still functioned because it could be used via sms, but most activists had more important things to do than send too many Twitter updates. Several LJ bloggers posted minute-by-minute updates that they had received from friends or family or via Twitter. Neweurasia.net and Globalvoices posted several articles and updates, but the majority of the updates were very similar. Youtube videos and grizzly photographs got posted in various locations and then reposted and linked. None of this activity seemed to be of much use to people actually in Bishkek, but was used to calm down and inform the onlookers who cared for personal, professional or simply curiosity reasons. As one of the Kazakh activists in charge of the upcoming BarCampKZ had mentioned to me - organizing in protests of this kind via social media can be very dangerous for your health and only those that feel relatively safe have the luxury of updating the world on the local situation. There is more here, but I do not have the data and speculation is for later... I do think social media use is far from straight forward or clearly beneficial in the case of uprisings or revolutions. This revolution, by the way, still doesn't have a color... I guess the West has lost its taste for color assignments.

There is a headline in one of the 'lightly oppositional' newspapers today. It reads: 'The Kyrgyz have sorted out who is the head of the household!' With a subtitle reading: 'The neighbors got their freedom and citizens of Kazazakhstan got Internet blocking.' Indeed several sites, including youtube and respublika-kz.info (this last one by the way is a curious site, where the content is generally available from Kazakhstan but the comments area is always blocked), got blocked about a day after the events in Bishkek started. The reaction was generally fairly tepid - certainly people commented and sighed, but with an expectation. Everyone had the explanation - the government is scared we might do something similar - and had a good laugh on that account. Some LJ bloggers complained that running youtube through a proxy slows down already slow access to the site and several others pointed out that maybe this will motivate finally, the development of kaztube instead? In general, however, most people responded by pounding Kazakhtelecom with confused phone calls. less than 48 hours later, both sites were accessible again and there had been no official statement from any of the agencies. It is tempting to think that the citizen response and the media stories had an effect, but I've been here in Kazakhstan long enough to come up with a cynical and oddly somewhat more believable story - likely some high ranking official wanted to watch something on youtube and found it blocked, got annoyed and called kazakhtelecom with a complaint... when the NECESSARY people complain, policies get changed very quickly.