Situation of the Uyghur Diaspora in Kazakhstan

According to the data from Kazakhstan Ethnographic map made by the Centre of interethnic relations research of the Ministry of Culture of Kazakhstan, there are 231.4 thousand people of Uyghur origin, which constitutes 15% of the population of Kazakhstan.
There are 42 Professors, 4 academicians, 200 PhDs (candidates of science), 5 national artists and 20 “Honoured statesman of RK” among the representatives of Uyghur ethnic group. 393 Uyghur representatives work for the State Service, 13 of which are Political figures. The Uyghurs are also present in Majilis of the Parliament (Lower chamber), regional, municipal and district maslihats (local Parliament).
The public association “The Republican Cultural Centre of Kazakhstani Uyghurs” acts as a front office of the Uyghur ethnicity and is officially registered. The Chairman is Akhmetzhan Shardinov.
Most of the work done by the Uyghurs’ Centre is supervised by the Board of Directors (35 member). The Centre has created 11 Councils on education, gender issues, youth policy, medicine, sport, Patriotic education, Mashrap (Cultural Heritage) and of scientists, elders, artists. There are official branches of the Centre situated in 9 oblasts of Kazakhstan.
The national Uyghur mass media is mostly situated in the locations of Uyghurs. There are 11 printed media published in Almaty and Almaty district, namely “Uyghur avazi”, “Ieni zaman”, “Yash Avlad”, “Ana mektep-muktap”, “Ieni hayat”, “Khush keipiyat”, “Information bulletin of the National Uyghurs’ Association”. Kazakh radio broadcasts a daily 15 min programme in the Uyghur language.
Kazakhstan is particularly proud of the only one State Uyghur Drama Theatre of Musical Comedy named after Kozhamiyarov on the territory of Commonwealth of Independent States.
There is Faculty on Uyghur studies in the Institute of Oriental Studies of RK Science Academy as well as the Uyghur writers Department in Writers Union of Kazakhstan.
There are 3 purely Uyghur and 3 mixed Uyghur schools in Almaty city with 2114 pupils, in Panfilovsk, Uyghur and Talgar districts of Almaty oblasts 11 schools function in Uyghur language and another 47 Uyghur mixed schools contain 12841 pupils. In total, 14955 pupils study completely in the Uyghur language.
18 Uyghur Schools are connected to distance teaching through satellite. 24 Schools have obtained multimedia classrooms and interactive boards.
The Government of Kazakhstan allocated the budget of 12,810,380 tenge for 2008-2009 on textbooks and educational literature in the Uyghur language and 13,705,000 tenge for 2009-2010.
According to the order of the Minister of Foreign Affairs the students from the Uyghur, Tajic and Uzbek schools can independently decide whether to sit up for the National Unified Exams (NUE) or not. Following the results of 2009 out of 984 graduates of the Uyghur schools in the Almaty oblast 103 are willing to sit for the NUE, out of which 60 will do so in the Kazakh language and 43 in the Russian language.
South Kazakhstan oblast commenced putting into practice the multilingual and bilingual education in the Uzbek schools, holding seminars the with OSCE representatives. 





Situation of the Russian Diaspora in Kazakhstan

According to the Statistics Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan as of 2008 year-end there were about 3,9 million Kazakhstani of Russian origin which constitutes 25,5% of the total population of Kazakhstan.
Overwhelming majority of representatives of the Russian ethnic group profess Russian Orthodoxy, which is the second largest denomination in Kazakhstan after Islam and is represented by the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian Orthodox Christmas is a bank holiday and is celebrated throughout the country.
40% of the Kazakhstani Russians are below the age of 29 years and 19% are over the age of 60 years. 78% of the Kazakhstani Russians live in towns.
Approximately 15% of the Kazakhstani Russians are employed in manufacturing, 13%, - in agriculture, 12% - in trade, 11% - in transport and communications, 7% in health care and 6% - in education.
There are more than 330 thousand of the Kazakhstani Russians living in the North Kazakhstan oblast, 553 thousand in Karagandy oblast, 296 thousand in Pavlodar oblast, 278 thousand in Astana oblast, 620 thousand in the East Kazakhstan oblast, 150 thousand in the Western Kazakhstan oblast, about 94 thousand in Aktobe, 306 thousand in Almaty, 33 thousand in Atyrau, 150 thousand in Zhambyl, 13 Thousands in Qyzylorda, 39 thousand in Mangistau, and more than 151 thousand in the South Kazakhstan oblast.
In Kazakhstan there is a wide network of about 100 Russian organisations and cultural centres. These are the Russian, the Slavic and the Cossack associations, which operate both on national and regional levels.
According to the Article 7 of the Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan the status of the Russian language is defined as follows: “In the state institutions and the local administration bodies the Russian language is officially used along with the Kazakh language (national language)”.
From the legal aspect, the constitutional definition of the Russian language as ‘the officially used language’ does not imply its status as the official (national) language of Kazakhstan (official language is the language that is, by decision of public authorities, recognised as compulsory for internal and interstate communication in public areas).
The priorities and the key trends of the Kazakh authorities’ language policy are reflected in the 1996 “Language Policy Concept of the Republic of Kazakhstan”, according to which the Russian language plays a long-term role of “one of the main sources of information in different areas of science, technology and communication with foreign countries”.
According to the official statistics, 84,6% of the population of Kazakhstan can speak Russian, including 92,5% of urban and 74,9% of rural population.
The Russian language is used as a medium of instruction in more than 40% of secondary schools in Kazakhstan.
Currently, there are 6 branches of the Russian national universities operating in Kazakhstan, among which the most popular is the Astana branch of the Lomonosov Moscow State University.
The Russian classics and contemporary works of the Russian writers are in ongoing repertoire of the 14 Russian theaters of Kazakhstan.
Out of 2940 of different types of Kazakhstani mass media 955 (34%) are Russian speaking media, 1068 (35%) use both the Kazakh and the Russian languages, and 362 (13%) present information in Kazakh, Russian and other foreign languages or languages of the Kazakhstani ethnic minorities.
The representatives of the Russian ethnic group are widely employed in government.
There are 21 Russian Members in the Kazakh Parliament, including 4 Senators and 17 Members of Majilis (lower chamber of Parliament). More than 10 thousand of the Kazakhstani Russians work in public service, more than 200 of which hold political and high official posts on national and regional governmental levels.
The Assembly of Peoples of Kazakhstan, created by the personal initiative of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, and which serves as the primary instrument of implementing the governmental policy in inter-ethnic area, contains 58 Kazakhstani Russians, 6 of which are in the Board of the Assembly.