Abay Oblast in Kazakhstan goes to blazes. Photo: Turar
Kazangapov, Reuters
“You understand, 14 people were killed!” he shouted as
the vice minister of emergencies, Marat Kul’dykov, tried to report on the tragedy
at a Cabinet meeting. “I met with the families.” One youth was orphaned, he
said, as the ministers stared glumly at each other. The akim of Abay Oblast was
slow to respond, Tokayev continued. And “why was the [fire] forecast wrong?” Tokayev
spoke in Russian, rather than Kazakh, perhaps to appeal to an international
audience. He released a video of the meeting. The new emergencies minister,
Sharym Sharipkhanov, said quenching the fires might take several days.
Tokayev has reason to worry about public perceptions of
government incompetence. In 2021, a house fire killing five children touched
off a national protest that forced then-President and -dictator Nursultan
Nazarbayev into a comfortable retirement. When the government jacked up fuel
prices in January 2022, riots broke out, killing more than 200.
Kazakhstani officials did not comment on whether
climate change might have precipitated the fires. After dragging its feet, Kazakhstan signed
the Paris Agreement in 2016 to reduce carbon emissions, proposing a 15% cut by
2030. Of course, Kazakhstan’s own carbon emissions spread across the globe and
so would not have directly led to the forest fires.
Aside from Reuters, the Western media hardly noted the
tragedy. And not for the first time. When Nazarbayev was forced out of power in
2021, major U.S. newspapers attributed it to a conflict between Kazakhs and ethnic
Russians that in reality had ended 20 years before. The real reason for the
ouster was public outrage at the fact that the two parents of the children who had
died in the blazes were not home because both had to work fulltime to survive.
By and large, the few Western journalists who speak Russian don’t give a darn
about Central Asia. – Leon Taylor, Baltimore tayloralmaty@gmail.com
References
Olzhas Auyezov.
Kazakhstan mourns 14 forestry workers killed in wildfire. Reuters.
June 12, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/kazakhstan-mourns-14-forestry-workers-killed-wildfire-2023-06-12/
Al Jazeera. Fourteen people killed in Kazakhstan forest
fires. June 10, 2023. Fourteen
people killed in Kazakhstan forest fires | News | Al Jazeera
It's startling to realize how inaccurate the news often is. The "real" news, I mean.
ReplyDeleteYes, that's a good point. Russian-speaking journalists who report for the English-language media have a big beat, and they understandably devote most of their time to Putin's War. If something breaks in the boondocks, they may write it up as a brief with a phone call to a Moscow think tank that knows little more than they do. Not much follow-up or on-the-spot reporting. Central Asian coverage relies on stringers who are weak in either Russian or English. They need better editors than are at hand. The few experienced English-speaking stringers in Kazakhstan, in Almaty and Astana, form a mutual admiration society and don't compete to break big stories. These are typical problems in isolated areas of the world. And in general, journalists lack analytical skills -- that's why they went into journalism in the first place -- and parrot what "experts" tell them. Central Asia does have native reporters with courage, but their lack of English inhibits their work.
DeleteMakes sense and matches what I see. The parroting, as you note, that I observed in reporting on the computer industry some years ago was flabbergasting. Endless repeating of the operating system performing "the household chores" of the computer, which was never a very good characterization and clearly was not understood as it was repeated. I'll bet that the same is happening in reporting on AI today.
Delete