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Kazakh PM 'Rejects' Blog Comments


Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Masimov
Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Masimov
Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Masimov is known as the country's top blogger.

He launched his personal blog last month as an online forum for citizens to raise their concerns, and ordered his ministers to do the same. Since the launch, his blog has received thousands of comments, many of them critical of the government. So far so good.

But the spirit of openness appears to have ended, as messages from ordinary citizens are being censored.

Readers in the northern city of Stepnogorsk contacted RFE/RL's Kazakh Service to say that they had left comments on the blog, which appeared but then were seemingly removed. They had been complaining about problems with their drinking water.

And starting 10 days ago, two independent websites (zonakz.net and respublika-kz.info) went down and are still unavailable in apparent denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The government has refused to launch investigations into the cases.

Meanwhile, a draft Internet law is being discussed in the parliament.

The law would impose stricter control over traffic, including chat rooms, as well as monitoring individual bloggers. None of which bodes well for Kazakh Internet freedom.

-- Kazakh Service

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Written by RFE/RL editors and correspondents, Transmission serves up news, comment, and the odd silly dictator story. While our primary concern is with foreign policy, Transmission is also a place for the ideas -- some serious, some irreverent -- that bubble up from our bureaus. The name recognizes RFE/RL's role as a surrogate broadcaster to places without free media. You can write us at transmission+rferl.org

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