Do Kazakhstanis care about their kin in Xinjiang?
For over 100 days, small groups of people, many of them women, have been picketing the Chinese Consulate in Almaty, Kazakhstans largest city, seeking information about family members who have disappeared in Xinjiang, just over the border in China. We will not stop until they release our relatives, one of them shouted on the 100th day of their protest, on 18 May. Even if we are shot, even if we are chopped up, even if we are killed.  These protests have highlighted how both ethnic Kazakh Chinese citizens, and Kazakhstani citizens, have been swept up in Chinas forced re-education programme that predominantly targets Uyghurs in the northwest of the country. Individual stories reveal that families have been separated and children have been left without parents. Testimonies of Kazakhs who have experienced the so-called re-education camps in China, and accounts of their escape from Xinjiang to Kazakhstan, have been shared widely. Yet while some Kazakhstanis have expressed solidarity with the picketers by sending money for food and transport, the protest has not aroused a strong public outcry. Despite evidence of strong currents of anti-China sentiment in Kazakhstani society, the plight of ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang has failed to strike a chord, due, it would appear, to a combination of restrictions on civil society, and resentment against Kazakh diaspora returnees. Insufficient integration  Since 1992, Kazakhstan has actively sponsored the return of ethnic Kazakhs from neighbouring countries through a series of laws and regulations, which became informally known as the Oralman Programme, named for the Kazakh word for returnees. More than a million ethnic Kazakhs have migrated to Kazakhstan since the start of this programme, contributing to the demographic and economic growth in the country. However, a sustainable integration programme has not evolved. Populist statements by the government on embracing blood-kin ties have not been supported with coordinated long-term policy initiatives. Nuriddin Sultanmuratov, political analyst at the Tsentr Aziya journal, has argued that repatriation has become a big dilemma for Kazakhstan. Some Kazakhstanis have questioned why Oralman Programme participants receive special benefits when the rest of the population is in dire need of financial support. Initially, the government allocated a number of returnees to each region of the country, but this distribution system failed to consider regional workforce needs. In 2011, ethnic returnees were blamed as outsiders who provoked the massacre that concluded an oil workers' strike in Zhanaozen. In the wake of events there, the government froze the repatriation programme until 2014, when it resumed sending returnees to regions in need of new workers, this time taking labour needs into consideration.