Translation of Klavdia Razina‘s post (RUS).

For previous posts in the series, click here, here and here.

Bareta Yergalieva:
I’ve listened to each one of you carefully. The fact that we are defenseless now is our own fault as a nation. I choose my words carefully, considering I am a veteran of Kazakhstan’s human rights movement.

Since 1989, I’ve been a human rights activist and I would like to point out the following. In those distant years, a tiny handful of people first stood up for human rights after the December Events. Then, in the harshest conditions, when no one would dare support us, we worked day in and day out, doing everything in our power to free the unjustly sentenced “Decembrists.”

Yes, victory was ours, but we are still unable to reach a point where the events would be given an appropriate political treatment. I mean to say that with years, a different breed of human rights activist has emerged. Unfortunately, as I have said to [Yevgenii] Zhovtis on many occasions, there is a generational gap between the two groups.

This, I believe, to some extent ruined Kazakhstan’s entire human rights movement. We had a good, strong start. If we had tried harder, motivated one another more, we would have marched as one family and, perhaps, avoided what we have in this country right now. But our opinion has ceased to matter. Even if we weren’t feared, we would at least be listened to.

What do we have today? We have no rights, the businessmen have no rights, the ministers have no rights, and the MPs have no rights. Worst of all, employees of law enforcement agencies, the Ministry of Defense and their family members have no rights. They are powerless. People are scared to talk about them, or don’t say anything at all.

I believe that because we failed to develop mutual cooperation between the two generations of human rights activists, we are all to blame. We simply don’t have a functioning civil society. Because we don’t have that, we also lack control over the state.

I would like to remind you of those distant Soviet years, when we had such a thing as control. The people have to exert influence over the state apparatus and the economy.