Amateur video uploaded by OSCE KZ to Youtube of Zhanaozen shootings.

Elena Kostyuchenko is the young investigative reporter with the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta who traveled to the city of Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan scene of workers' unrest and the shooting deaths of 14 people in December during riots on Independence Day. She wrote a series of articles about the events for Novaya Gazeta.

From the beginning, when independent Kazakh bloggers and activists and then Russian reporters began saying there were many more killed than the initial 10 claimed by authorities, networked naysayers ranging from the Kazakh authorities to Western correspondents to regime sympathizers began discounting the higher death tolls reported and impugning the work of Russian journalists, particularly Kostyuchenko.

Most vocal in this hatchet-job was Registan, in articles by Joshua Foust and comments by others, such as Alima Bissenova, who echoed him and fueled further doubts about Elena's and other's reporting using their country knowledge (i.e. suggesting that doctors wouldn't operate on makeshift tables even in an emergency, or that there might not be crematoria in Kazakhstan's towns).

The Exile took up a furious rebuttal of the Foust debunking, making some errors on the way, and that incited another round of disconcerting disparagement of Kostyuchenko and troubling defense of Foust by Michael Hancock-Parmer on Registan.

I took up a thorough defense of Kostyuchenko's work, which I thought credibly pointed to reliable information that indicated a greater death toll and a more serious situation in Zhanaozen than officials admitted.

Hancock-Parmer's mistreatement then triggered another round of outrage from The Exiled in defense of Kostyuchenko, but in the blogosphere frenzy, the story of people killed in a remote area of Kazakhstan was getting lost.

I then approached Kostyuchenko directly and asked her a number of questions based on the elements of her three-party series in Novaya Gazeta which were engendering the most questions. She replied right away that she would be happy to answer my questions, but she was very busy and said she would take awhile. (Some of my questions might seem to veer off to tangents, but it was intended to see what clues we could find to the reliability of the main eyewitness).

In the meantime, another helpful interview with Kostyuchenko came out on Campaign Kazakhstan which deals with the overall story of the riots and the history of the striking workers. Her answers to my questions, intended to bring out some of the human rights fact-finding aspects of the story, are an important supplement from Elena.

Note: Kazakhstan's prosecutor has released a report today indicating only 14 in the death total now, and 67 wounded; two said to have died in relationship to the rioting are now declared as not associated.

CAF:  Elena, with Zhanaozen closed to independent journalists and the official death count listed originally as 16, and now only as 14, all attention has been on your courageous December 2011 reports in Novaya Gazeta. Some have viewed the story of “Korkel,” an eyewitness who saw bodies in the morque and others as just “anecdotes” you gathered that may not be reliable. Some say that there really is no serious indication of any more than 16 dead; others believe there are considerably more. Some Kazakh opposition and bloggers are now giving a figure of 46. I’m told by reliable monitors that this figure is gaining credence. Any comments?

EK:  I do not have complete information about the number of people killed. I put into my article all the total information known to me from Korkel (23 plus 41) and the surgeon (22 plus 1). I also spoke a great deal with the relatives of those killed, but those are individual cases. I tried to compile a list, but two-and-a-half days in a city occupied by OMON [riot police] under a state of emergency is too short a time for this work. I have eight confirmed names in my list.

CAF: Do you believe Korkel is a reliable witness and have you found any further information verifying her account? Has she suffered any retaliations and is she willing to talk to any other reporters?

EK:  Yes, I consider Korkel to be a fairly reliable source, that is, because:

* she is not an interested party and does not live in Zhanaozen
* she is a girl from a village, very simple
* she retold what she had seen with details that would be difficult to make up, she easily provided the names of the officials at the hospital and the morgue who were around her. Many of the secondary details were confirmed in further questioning of the officials at the hospital. For example, that day at the morgue, there really wasn’t any cold water, only the hot water was running.

As far as I know, she is not in danger, since this name is a pseudonym in my article. I gave her contacts to [a human rights researcher] who traveled to Zhanaozen before New Year’s. But Korkel’s sister told that person that they would not speak with her. Korkel’s sister provided commentary on [the Internet TV station] K+ on the first day of the events, and then was summoned to the police for that.

According to the human rights researcher, Zhanaozen is even more silenced. The people detained from December 16-19, the wounded, the relatives of those killed, are all being summoned to the Interior Ministry [police], where prosecutors have them sign a non-disclosure statement before they are interrogated, and inform them that if they talk to journalists, a criminal case will be opened against them. As far as I know, one such criminal case was already opened against a woman who also gave commentary to K+ [Internet TV channel]. The two women who filmed the video of the shooting from the balcony of their home (which you have seen on Youtube) were forced to leave town, fearing persecution.

Another reason for the growing silence is the compensations – which are fairly significant by local standards. The families of the wounded and the dead hope to receive them.

CAF: Korkel says she went in a van from the scene that took the dead and wounded to the hospital. (She doesn’t say what happened to the child with her – how old was she and did she return to her mother)?

EK:  Korkel’s niece is 14 years old. As far as I understood, she went to the hospital in the van, then she was picked up from there. I didn’t probe into that issue in detail, there was little time for us to talk.

CAF: Korkel says she counted 21 dead people at first, including children and young people. Does this mean either rioters or police shot some of the children in the assembly? Three were said to be from a store that was set on fire. Any more details?

EK:  Yes, a boy and two girls were killed by bullets. One of these two girls had a head wound, a surgeon tried to save her.  I spoke with the surgeon about her (this is one more cross-referenced confirmation of the information)

Three burned bodies were found in the Sulpak store, which was burned down. This information was later confirmed to me by the police.

CAF:  Is it possible Korkel made a mistake in counting the rest of the people in the morgue? Was this the official morgue of the hospital? You noted that it closed at 9 pm, and then “43 were brought in”.  Did Korkel see and count each of these 43, or is it possible that she mixed up dead and wounded?

EK:  Yes, this was the official morgue at the hospital. It is a separate building, therefore Korkel could hardly have mixed up the dead and the wounded – only the dead are brought here. As far as I understand, Korkel consecutivaly helped out first in the receiving department, then in the morgue. She recounted the bodies several times throughout the night, and her last count was made at 9:00 am on December 17.

CAF:  Doctors also said they operated on 22 people who perished on makeshift operating tables made from wooden tables in the hospital, and there is also a story that the bodies were burned. Does the hospital have a crematorium or were they burned in an ordinary furnace or how?

EK:   There is something like a crematorium in this hospital, but I did not hear anything about the burning of bodies during my trip to Zhanaozen. I think that the 22 are likely among the 43 who were brought to the morgue from 9 pm to 9 am the next day, that is, these were the people they operated on and tried to save. The first bodies were brought to the morgue right from the square. But it is impossible to say.

CAF:  Is it possible that some of the people thought dead have in fact escaped and gone into hiding to avoid police retaliation?

EK:  I haven’t heard that, but it is hardly possible. There is nowhere to run to there. It is surrounded by the steppes for many kilometers and there’s only a few villages. Everybody stands out.

CAF:  Much attention has been placed on the nature of these rioters. In various accounts, people say they are striking workers themselves; the prosecutor says they are uniformed oil workers; others say they are “hired” or provocateurs from outside the community. What is your best estimate of who these people were, and are they the only perpetrators of violence?

EK:   The pogroms were instigated by Zhanaozen youths, 16-20 years of age, unemployed, poorly educated, nationalist in their beliefs. They found the seven-months-long strike of the oil workers on the square to be humiliating. Some of them were children of oil workers. The oil workers knew that a rebellion was brewing among the youth, and warned the akim [local authority] about it. After  the pogroms started, several oil workers joined them. But the main mass of strikers did not take part in the pogroms.

CAF:  What would be required to find the true death count in Zhanaozen? Is it possible to contact eyewitnesses safely? Would any local police or other officials be willing and able to safely talk off the record? Would it be possible for any reporters to travel to the region?

EK:  One must work closely with officials from the hospital and the morgue, and talk with the guards at the cemetary (I am supposing they exist; I was not there). You would have to describe the fresh graves, and travel around to all the neighbouring villages. This is work that would take several weeks. The prosecutor’s office is working in the city now, the OMON [riot police] are patrolling the ci
ty, and the state of emergency is still in place. Anyone planning to go there has to keep that in mind. They must also take into account that any foreigner, even one who speaks Russia, is going to stick out.