In conservative, authoritarian Almaty, a small techno event aims to create a safe space for activists and the LGBT community<\/p>\n
It is a rainy spring night in Almaty, and in a small back-alley club a young DJ is playing dark British techno while wearing a T-shirt that could easily land him in jail. I\u2019m in a crowd of about 200 at ZVUK, which for the past three years has been a remarkable outlier on the limited clubbing scene of Kazakhstan\u2019s deeply conservative commercial capital.<\/p>\n
My visit to the city coincided with rare political ructions in a country where little dissent had been tolerated during 30 years of autocratic rule by President Nursultan Nazarbayev<\/a>. His sudden resignation in March and stage-managed elections in June had led to two protesters being jailed for 15 days for holding up a banner at the Almaty marathon that read: \u201cYou cannot run away from the truth.\u201d Days later another man was arrested for holding a banner bearing a line from the constitution: \u201cThe only source of state power is the people.\u201d Protests, which reignited after Nazarbayev\u2019s chosen successor was \u201celected\u201d in June<\/a>, have been met with more violence and arrests by the security forces.<\/p>\n