ALMATY -- It is the return of a routine in Kazakhstan.
With an opposition protest called for next week, authorities have been calling in activists for questioning and in several cases arresting them in an apparent effort to stop people from going out on the streets.
If previous planned demonstrations are anything to go by, the number of people willing to do that and endure time in administrative detention will be small anyway.
But Kazakhstan's police state leaves nothing to chance, even parking its patrol cars outside the houses of suspected troublemakers on politically important dates.
Just three years ago, officials close to President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev were hailing the passage of a law on public demonstrations that they said would help change the country's political culture.
Rights groups were skeptical at the time, and their criticisms of the law have been justified by the reemergence of a policy of near-zero tolerance regarding freedom of assembly.
If anything, having survived the country's bloodiest independence-era unrest in January 2022, the Kazakh regime seems more terrified than ever at the prospect of protests.
'A Court Hearing Cannot Be Considered A Rally'
Of the dozen or so activists that have been detained in the past few days, none has a record of violence against the state, although some have been victims of the opposite.
Activist Darhan Ualiev was among the tens of thousands across Kazakhstan who took to the streets early last year.
He was subsequently arrested and spent nine months in jail before being released late last year.
His claims that he was tortured in police detention were thrown out by authorities, despite what his lawyer Zhanar Balgabaeva called strong bodily evidence of her client having been badly mistreated.
On October 18, a court in Almaty sentenced him and activist Nurtai Shegebekuly to 15 days in administrative detention, a stint that will ensure that neither can participate in the protest called for October 25 by French-based opposition leader Mukhtar Ablyazov.
Ostensibly, their arrests are connected to what the judge deemed was their participation in an illegal rally outside a courthouse last month, where several defendants convicted in relation to the events of the January uprising were having their appeals heard.
Balgabaeva told RFE/RL's Kazakh Service that Ualiev told the court he did not participate in the rally and that "attending a court hearing cannot be considered a rally."
Three other activists -- Mereke Nugymanov, Marat Temirbekov, and Seilkhan Tusbekov -- received the same punishment on the same day.
Their apparent crime was taking part in a race to bring attention to the plight of Marat Zhylanbaev, a marathon runner and the leader of Alga Kazakhstan! -- an unregistered opposition group that is associated with Ablyazov's banned Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK) movement.
Kazakh officials do not recognize any distinction between the two groups and have since May been holding Zhylanbaev on charges of participating in banned organizations and financing extremist organizations.
RFE/RL's Kazakh Service has thus far learned of seven activists sentenced to administrative detention ahead of the October 25 protest, with several others being held and expected to be sentenced in the coming days.
Deputy Interior Minister Igor Lepekh confirmed this week that authorities would "not allow" the DCK to hold rallies and that the police presence would be beefed up for October 25 state holiday.
Ablyazov is a former bank chairman and energy minister convicted of multiple crimes in Kazakhstan -- including murder and theft of billions of dollars in bank funds -- all of which he says are fabrications.
The businessman has regularly called for Kazakhs to take to the streets in the past, although this is the first time he has issued such a call in 2023.
New Law, Old Hat
Neither the DCK nor its like-minded affiliates are recognized as extremist groups internationally, and the movement was determined to be "peaceful" in a 2021 European Parliament resolution on human rights in Kazakhstan.
At any rate, it is not just these formally outlawed groups that find themselves unable to hold rallies in Kazakhstan.
The law on public demonstrations passed in 2020 retained many restrictions that were criticized by rights groups, including a prohibition on spontaneous rallies and on demonstrations taking place on consecutive days.
But authorities stressed that there was still a fundamental shift in emphasis in the new law.
Instead of waiting on a permit from city authorities to hold a demonstration, the new law allows organizers to merely "notify" authorities of their intent to hold a rally in an area designated by the government ahead of time.
But it turned out that city officials can still find any number of pretexts to block public demonstrations.
Madina Kuketaeva, an activist opposed to plans to build a nuclear power plant in Kazakhstan, told RFE/RL that she and her colleagues have sent 12 notifications to Almaty authorities about would-be rallies against the proposal.
But authorities found a way to squash each and every bid, she said, even as the government prepares to hold a national referendum on the contentious subject.
Bekzat Maqsutuly, an activist known for his criticism of allowing visa-free travel to Chinese citizens, was sentenced in May to 15 days of administrative detention after he announced plans to hold a demonstration against the visa agreement between Beijing and Astana.
And while Kazakh authorities surprisingly allowed activists to hold a large rally against Moscow's war in Ukraine in the early days after the full-scale invasion, organizers say they were rebuffed in their attempts to hold follow-up demostrations.
This is a far cry from the beginning of Toqaev's presidency in 2019, when he signaled a softer policy on public demonstrations as compared to his long-ruling, authoritarian predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbaev.
Although his election victory that year was marred by mass arrests in response to unusually large protests, just weeks later officials in both Astana and Almaty granted their first permits for political protests in over a decade.
The thaw didn't last for long, though.
When speaking last year about the January 2022 events in which 238 people died, nearly all civilians, Toqaev lashed out against unnamed civic and opposition groups that he said "fueled protest sentiments" as the initially peaceful demonstrations swept the country.
"When the situation returned to normal, they again flocked to the squares and streets, as if they really cared about justice and the well-being of their fellow citizens," said Toqaev, who issued a "shoot to kill" order as the unrest turned violent.
