“I’m no longer editor-in-chief at Ak Zhaik,” Azamat Maitanov said meekly, his heavy heart evident, during a phone interview on 10 January. Maitanov had already been under pressure from the Kazakhstani authorities for the past year over his stewardship of the newspaper, based in the west of the country, and he was looking to a break visiting family abroad for the holidays. In December, he left his hometown of Atyrau, in the Caspian region. He doesn’t know when it will be safe for him to go back.
Protests that started over a fuel price increase in the western regions of Kazakhstan were picked up in towns and cities across the country, but later turned into urban violence in the city of Almaty, home to two million residents. The clashes between rioters, looters and law enforcement on 5 and 6 January represented the most violent and deadly events in the history of Kazakhstan.
Ak Zhaik had been at the frontline of the protest. The newspaper’s correspondents monitored the situation in Atyrau, as well as in the nearby giant oil field of Tengiz, and the Soviet-era monotowns that were built to house oil workers at the mouth of the Ural river (in Kazakh, “Ak Zhaiyk”).
