Lying under the name of "Stability"

Yerzhan Yesimkhanow, lawyer (Almaty, Kazakhstan)

For the past thirty years, we have been successfully sold the same story. The story that the main thing is peace and stability, and everything else will wait.

Is there rampant corruption in the country, and any serious problem is solved for money? But the world. Is the population rapidly becoming impoverished in the country? But stability. Every year tens of thousands of the smartest, most educated and active flee from the country? But they don't shoot. Education in the country has become a fiction? But the peaceful sky overhead. Does ecology kill in cities and towns? But we don't wake up from explosions.

For thirty years, stability and peace justified everything. They were waved in all directions as the main achievement of independence. And then suddenly it turned out that our stability and our world is a fiction. And they exist only because they haven’t tackled us properly. And as soon as they started working on us, this whole scheme called "stability in exchange for rights" fell down like a house of cards. Because, as it turned out last week, it doesn't work that way.

There is no stability in exchange for corruption. Stability in exchange for corruption leads to the fact that the largest terrorist attack in the modern history of not only Kazakhstan, but the whole world is being prepared under the nose of the special services. There is no stability in exchange for poverty. Stability in exchange for poverty leads to the fact that residents of neighboring houses rush into shops after the bandits, sweeping away the remaining equipment and jewelry from the shelves.

Stability in exchange for something else turned out to be a circus with horses. A scheme that allowed, as in the fairy tale about three pigs, to build a straw house instead of a stone one all these years, and hide the difference between straw and stone in offshores. Until the gray wolf came.

Real stability and real peace will be only when we understand one simple thing - there is no stability in exchange for rights. STABILITY IS A RIGHT. And it only works this way, and nothing else.

Stability is when there is a middle class in a country. Not a rich minority and a rapidly impoverished majority - but a normal, self-confident middle class. And it will be when there are property guarantees and a fair trial in the country. When business can be done without looking back at officials. And such a middle class will never go to rake jewelry out of destroyed stores. Not because he is so rich - but because it is a terrible shame to take someone else's.

Stability is when civil servants in a country stop talking to people from top to bottom. When they stop doing meaningless unsubscriptions. When they stop believing that people in the country are such ridiculous creatures who, with their fuss, distract them, civil servants, from real state affairs. Because every such conversation from top to bottom over these thirty years has added drop by drop to irritation and anger. And this irritation and anger last week poured on the heads of civil servants in full measure - cruelly and incorrectly, as it was in my homeland, in Taldykorgan.

Stability is the ability to speak freely. Media not intimidated to death, capable only of reposting from Instagram stars. Not those rallies where there are one hundred policemen for every ten protesters. Free speech, free discussion of problems, and most importantly - free criticism of the state and its initiatives. This is what we do not like very much, but all this is also stability.

And when all this is there, not a single normal person would think of supporting terrorists and militants and smashing windows after them. Not a single normal person would think of hitting civil servants. And certainly not a single normal person would ever think of stealing and robbing. Because he will know that he will be able to speak freely anyway. Freely convey your opinion to a civil servant and so on. Free to earn and so.

Our president is announcing important political reforms. Perhaps, among them there will be new ones, and high-quality ones, and radical ones. But be that as it may, all this may again turn out to be fiction, if we are repeatedly offered stability and peace in exchange for something else. And this is very easy for us, frightened by the events of the past week, to sell.

Original is here