Not every herder is a kamchy

Nine days ago a bomb under a car outside the IradOne building killed a driver and cost the presenter Aisulu Zhaksybekova a leg. It was a vile crime. Those who planned it should be found, tried in open court and punished. Nothing in what follows excuses them.

But since that night something else has happened, on IradOne and in the DPI press. The attack has been put down to the Kamchylar, the hardliners who walked out of the Kurultai in 2009 and to whom about thirty killings have been attributed since, most of them inside the tribal regions and most of their victims tribal. That attribution may be correct. What followed it is not. On air and in print, kamchy has become a word for any herder, any rider in a felt hat, any family from beyond the line.

A few hundred

The Iradi Freedom Society says the Kamchylar number “a few hundred out of three and a half million”. We have no better figure, and neither does the government. What we do know is that their victims include Boztorgoy cattle traders shot on the Aksay road, El-Choro riders and elders who signed water deals with Talas. The clans have buried more of the Kamchylar's dead than the cities have.

We have heard this before: after the Taiyrov killing in 2010, in the campaigns of 2011 and 2015, after the Merke killings. Each time the word spreads a little further, and each time the line between the two halves of the country gets a little harder to cross.

What the slur buys

A government that calls every herder a terrorist does not have to explain why the herders are angry: about the pastures, about the dam, about the Bill of Sale. It is cheaper than an answer. It is also dangerous, because a young man who is called a kamchy every night on television may one day decide to become one.

Find the bombers. Then stop using the word.