BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan ¨C It came as no big surprise when a crumbling oil town in western Kazakhstan stirred in protest last Sunday, 10 years after security forces there killed more than a dozen workers who had gone on strike over pay and poor conditions.
But it remains a mystery how peaceful protests over a rise in fuel prices last weekend in Zhanaozen, a grimy, Soviet-era settlement near the Caspian Sea, suddenly spread more than 1,000 miles across the full length of Central Asia¡¯s largest country, turning the biggest and most prosperous Kazakh city into a war zone littered with dead bodies, burned buildings and incinerated cars.
The violence this week in Almaty, Kazakhstan¡¯s former capital and still its business and cultural hub, shocked just about everyone ¡ª not only its leader, who, fortified by Russian troops, Friday ordered security forces to ¡°fire without warning¡± to restore order, but also government critics who have long bridled at repression and rampant corruption in the oil-rich nation.
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