On January 17, a court in Kaskelen, a city east of Almaty, found six police officers guilty of abuse of power and the torture of dozens of foreigners – including Kyrgyz jazz musician Vikram Ruzakhunov – during the hectic and deadly Qandy Qantar, Kazakhstan’s bloody January 2022.
In early January 2022 protests in Zhanaozen over a hike in gas prices spread across Kazakhstan, unleashing a wave of chaos and violence that was most acute in the country’s largest city, Almaty.
In a series of remarks made between January 5 and 10, 2022, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev reverted to a familiar set of scripts: The unrest was an orchestrated conspiracy and the violence was perpetrated by “20,000 bandits” and foreign fighters.
And so, Kazakh law enforcement went out and found some foreigners.
On January 9, Kazakh television station Khabar 24 showed a video of man, with a puffy, cut, and bruised face, confessing to having taken $200 and a plane ticket to travel to Kazakhstan to protest. In the video, the man says he is unemployed.
But it was blatant disinformation. The man in the video was immediately recognized in neighboring Kyrgyzstan as the well-known jazz pianist Vikran Ruzakhunov, who frequently traveled to Almaty to play shows. His fame was his good fortune: Ruzakhunov was released and returned to Kyrgyzstan on January 10.
In an interview with Vlast.kz in September 2023 he recounted that after he returned to Bishkek he was advised to keep his mouth shut. As a result of the torture he experienced, Ruzakhunov had broken ribs, damaged lungs, and a concussion. “But after I went through all this, all this pain, I rethought what had happened and began giving interviews,” he said.
And he began pursuing justice.
Criminal cases related to the torture he, and others, experienced were opened in February 2022 but made little progress at first. In May 2022, one of Ruzakhunov’s lawyers told Orda.kz that her client was afraid to go back to Almaty, even to participate in the investigation. It was temporarily suspended for a lack of suspects. By September 2022, however, Ruzakhunov did go back – and he identified 10 police officers who beat him.
Ultimately, six police officers – Bauyrzhan Sopakov, Arman Shoibekov, Berik Abilbekov, Olzhas Aidarkhanov, Serik Turpanov, and Nursultan Khamitov – were put on trial in relation to the torture of 44 recognized victims. The victims were Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Tajik citizens who were detained on their way out of Almaty when the KNB Border Service set up a checkpoint on the Almaty-Bishkek highway near the village of Targap. According to the indictment, 99 people were detained at the checkpoint and taken to a detention facility in the village of Koshmambet.
Although the six officers were convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, victims and activists are not completely satisfied.
After the verdict, Ruzakhunov commented, “This trial is only a small step towards justice, and, unfortunately, it has once again shown that the fight for human rights in Kazakhstan continues in the face of constant resistance from the system. Bloody January remains a wound that does not heal.”
Dozens of police officers gathered outside the court on the day of the verdict, creating an atmosphere that Ruzakhunov characterized as “intimidation.”
Aina Shormanbanbaeva, president of the International Legal Initiative Public Foundation, who defended the interests of the 23 Uzbek victims, noted that only three of her clients were able to travel to Kazakhstan to participate in the investigation – the remainder were deported from Kazakhstan and subject to a 5-year entry ban.
Shormanbanbaeva said that at least 98 people were subject to torture at Koshmambet, but only 44 were officially recognized as victims.
It wasn’t just foreigners who were tortured amid the chaos of Qandy Qantar. As Alva Omarova, a pseudonymous researcher with International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR), wrote in a commentary earlier this month, “While hundreds of complaints about torture were filed after Bloody January, most of them have not made it to court for the same reason, resulting in widespread impunity for perpetrators and the lack of adequate compensation for victims.”
The defendants, and their supporters, were also left unsatisfied by the verdict. The six police officers did not admit guilt and claimed that they were following orders during a state of emergency.
The mother of one defendant told RFE/RL, “The trial of citizens who defended the country is an injustice. There is no justice in Kazakhstan.”
