ASTANA (TCA) — Authorities in Kazakhstan have accused a detained businessman of funding recent mass antigovernment protests against land privatization as part of a plot to seize power, RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service reported.
Businessman Toktar Toleshov from the South Kazakhstan region was arrested in January on suspicion of financing criminal groups and illegal drugs possession.
Kazakhstan’s National Security Service (KNB) said on June 6 that Toleshov’s “plan included destabilizing the situation in the country by creating flash points, organizing protests and mass unrest.”
KNB spokesman Ruslan Karasev told reporters that several people, including a former deputy prosecutor-general and two high-ranking military officers, have been detained over the weekend on suspicion of being Toleshov’s accomplices.
Karasev said there are evidences that protests against the land reform that took place in several Kazakh cities had been masterminded and financed by Toleshov as early as in December 2015.
Toleshov ran the Kazakh office of a Russia-based organization, the Center for the Analysis of Terrorist Threats.
Thousands protested across Kazakhstan in April and May against the government’s plans to privatize agricultural lands.
Hundreds of activists were detained for taking part or calling for unsanctioned protests. The majority of them were released, but some were fined or sent to prison for 10 to 15 days.
The Kazakh government set up the commission to review the land-reform plans, and invited some opposition figures to join it, after opposition activists called for rallies to be held across the country to protest proposed changes to the Land Code that would allow farmland to be sold and would allow foreign investors to lease land for agricultural use for up to 25 years.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev on May 5 ordered to postpone the implementation of the controversial legislation until 2017.
