Murderous violence erupts in Kazakhstan

Several villages in southern Kazakhstan experienced an eruption of violence overnight from Friday to Saturday. DRWikipédia 维基 百科

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Several villages in southern Kazakhstan experienced an eruption of violence overnight from Friday to Saturday. The toll is heavy: 8 dead and a hundred injured according to Kazakh authorities. These evoke an "internal conflict", reluctant to speak of inter-ethnic clashes. However, it was in the village of Massanchi, populated 90% by Dounganes, a Chinese ethnic Muslim minority who arrived in Central Asia in the 19th century, that this violence occurred, before spreading to 5 neighboring localities. A caution of the authorities of this country of 18 million inhabitants due to the sensitivity of the ethnic question, as in all post-Soviet Central Asia.

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With our regional correspondent, Régis Genté

Houses and shops with blackened facades, carcasses of cars, men prowling armed with sticks, such were the images appeared on Saturday morning on the Kazakh social networks. Real chaos scenes. The police only managed to restore calm in the early hours of the morning.

It all started in the village of Massanchi, populated by 7,000 Dounganes. Perhaps because of a police check that would have gone wrong, unless it was a case of insults against an old man.

The fact remains that around 300 Kazakhs from neighboring villages gathered there to carry out acts described by witnesses as "ethnic" violence.

Words that the authorities avoid saying, the country having experienced several outbreaks of violence of this nature in recent years, non-deadly until then.

The ethnic question is very sensitive in Kazakhstan, whose population is made up of dozens of ethnic groups, the result of both its geography, the country being located in the heart of the Eurasian continent, and its history, millions of citizens from all over USSR having been deported there under Stalin.

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