Kazakhstan puts LGBT community in crosshairs to mollify conservatives

The authorities want to placate the conservative but ostensibly secular-leaning middle by demonstratively alienating both the progressive and ultra-orthodox Islamic fringes.

Kazakhstan suffers from one of the highest rates of underage suicide in the world. Almost 350 people endure some form of domestic violence daily. Seven children were killed because of such abuse in 2023. The amount of synthetic drugs in circulation – much of it aimed at the youth market – is soaring vertiginously.

So, of course, Kazakhstan’s Union of Parents, a highly vocal public association of morality mavens, has decided that the primary danger confronting the nation’s children is what they term “LGBT propaganda.”

Earlier this year, the group posted a petition on a government portal titled "We are against open and covert LGBT propaganda in Kazakhstan." Their aim is to press lawmakers into instituting fines for anyone deemed to be actively promoting "non-traditional" relationships.

This is no isolated effort by marginal curtain-twitchers. The e-petition quickly racked up the 50,000 signatures needed to force official consideration of the proposal. Two working group discussions involving supporters and opponents of this proposal, as well as government officials, have already taken place.

In a development that has Kazakh LGBT advocates worried, representatives from the Justice Ministry, the Interior Ministry, and the Foreign Ministry who spoke at the working group meeting this week all spoke in favour of the “propaganda” ban.

According to a report on the meeting carried by Bes.Media, a news outlet, the speaker from the Interior Ministry even suggested broadening the proposed prohibition. “It is not only LGBT propaganda that should be curbed. The same should apply to the promotion of open sexual relations in the whole country and society. The number of crimes perpetrated against underage children is growing,” the ministry representative was reported as saying.

The not-so-vague and poisonous implication here is that activists fighting for greater acceptance of people in same-sex relationships are running cover for paedophiles.

This has generated an appalled reaction from LGBT activists.

“We are outraged by this,” Zhanar Sekerbayeva, a co-founder of the Feminita movement, told The Village. “When they cited research, we asked them to provide it to us, to share links to these studies, because the [supposed] data they talked about bears no relation to reality.”

A Foreign Ministry spokesperson dismissed the suggestion that any community in Kazakhstan would face discrimination and noted that LGBT propaganda laws have, after all, been implemented in other countries. Those countries happen to include neighbours Russia and Kyrgyzstan, a fact that will offer little comfort.

Russia has taken its battle for conservative values to often-absurd lengths. This week, deputies in the State Duma demanded that Sberbank, the country’s main bank, stop issuing debit cards to children bearing the image of a “rainbow unicorn” since this could be perceived as promoting the “LGBT movement.”

There is no discounting the prospect of similar appeals becoming commonplace in Kazakhstan should the Kazakhstan’s Union of Parents get its way, since their petition explicitly alludes to “covert LGBT propaganda,” a rubric that could be applied in an entirely arbitrary manner.

This conservative turn is a symptom of the authorities feeling like they are fighting a war on two fronts. All the regimes in Central Asia, incidentally, perceive themselves to be in a similar predicament.

In March, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev delivered a speech to a national kurultai, a traditional consultative assembly, in which he insisted that Kazakhstan would not “follow the lead of those who, operating under the influence of Western and other trends, promote values that are alien to our culture.”

“We must firmly and consistently cultivate traditional family values," he said.

In the next breath, though, Tokayev pledged that the government would “counter religious extremism and archaism.” “In recent years, many people in our country have started to wrap themselves in black robes,” he said. “Dressing all in black goes against the worldview of our people; it is a thoughtless aping of foreign norms and is caused by religious fanaticism.”

The response to these perceived twin threats across the region has been to chip away at the value of personal sovereignty. By outlawing an amorphously defined concept of LGBT propaganda, the Kazakh government would, in effect, be denying LGBT individuals the freedom to express their identity, thereby depriving them of the right to equality in dignity as enshrined in the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Compelling pious Muslims to shed attributes attesting to the depth and flavour of their faith is a not dissimilar form of assault on personal sovereignty.

The Kazakh authorities want to placate and shore up the conservative but ostensibly secular-leaning middle, which they evidently believe constitutes the largest chunk of the population, by demonstratively alienating both the progressive and ultra-orthodox Islamic fringes. If this is to be done by trampling some core rights, then so be it, they believe.