LiveJournal Banned in Kazakhstan, Reportedly for Political Reasons

Today citizens of Kazakhstan and even the adjacent Kirgizia for some reason have not managed to access LiveJournal blogging platform entirely. Since both countries are still very much influenced by Russia and Russian culture, LiveJournal is also a very popular blogging platform there same as it is here in Russia so this is an important event for bloggers from the two countries.

There have not been any official comments on the situation yet but users of various ISPs in Kazakhstan report they are unable to access LiveJournal website at all. The same happens in the neighboring Kirghizia since the country shares international channels with Kazakhstan.

But while Kazakhstan internet providers refuse to comment on the situation, the Russian company SUP (LiveJournal owner) confirms that its bloggers in the country have started to experience difficulties on Tuesday this week yet the company is still unable to receive any explanation either from Kazakhstan companies or authorities. Of course there can be a simple reason for this somewhere in the technical field - yet usually it is unlikely for a downtime caused by some server issues to last for as long as a few days.

Kazakhstan bloggers share the opinion that LiveJournal is banned because of one blog belonging to Rakhat Aliyev, the disgraced ex-son-in-law of the president of the country Nursultan Nazarbayev. Currently Rakhat Aliyev lives in Austria where he has been granted political asylum and very recently he has started blogging in LiveJournal.

The political refugee is very active in his online protests addressed towards the population of Kazakhstan but his own website, Kaztoday, has often experienced DDOS attacks so he has decided it would be simpler to use LiveJournal as a platform for two reasons - people are already there and it will be way much more difficult to attack the entire LiveJournal.

Kazakhstan president Nazarbayev is known as a very authoritative person keeping the country under a very strict control. Besides, he has reasons to personally dislike the person who used to be his son-in-law and has transformed into his most prominent political opponent. So this very well may actually be the example of political censorship in the country and other blogging platforms may suffer in the future if Aliyev chooses to blog on other free platforms as well.

Of course Kazakhstan is not the only country where people are unable to access LiveJournal - the platform has been banned in China along with other Western blogging platforms. Yet the Chinese bloggers are known to use various anonimyzers to access their blogs and this is the skill Kazakhstan bloggers are now learning as well.

Via CNews Russia (in Russian)

Photo via Gizmodo UK