In Kazakhstan, there are problems with access to ACCA website. According to our correspondent, the site can only be opened using a VPN.
Access problems have been observed over the past few days, and on the morning of March 1, the site stopped opening directly at all. And this situation is observed in all browsers. Meanwhile, when VPN agents are connected, the ACCA website opens easily.
It should be noted that in Kazakhstan, blocking inconvenient Internet resources is a fairly common thing. So, in October last year, after the use of a DPI attack, access to the online publication HOLA News was blocked. As the editor of the publication Zarina Akhmatova said in an interview with ACCA at the time. The Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry was allegedly unaware of the blocking and stated that it had nothing to do with it. However, 10 days later, after the news of a secret offshore deal involving Asel Kurmanbayeva (the unofficial wife of the first President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev) was removed from the site, the site started working again. At the same time, the founders of HOLA News – Alisher Kaidarov, Adilet Tursynbek and editor-in-chief Zarina Akhmatova – were forced to leave the project.
And during the January tragedy, the authorities of Kazakhstan blocked access to three independent media – Vlast, KazTAG and Orda.kz.
As a result, independent journalists of the country, together with human rights defenders and activists, wrote an open appeal to the President of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, in which they demanded that the authorities stop discrediting and persecuting independent media workers, and also release all journalists and bloggers who were covering the terrorist attack in Almaty.
As for ACCA, in our publications, we rely solely on official and confirmed by our sources data, and we are perplexed by the fact that access to our site is blocked. We cannot understand which publications the censorship of Kazakhstan didn’t like. Maybe these are materials about torture used on participants in the January riots or about President Tokayev’s accounts in Swiss banks and his secret offshore companies, information about which was declassified by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) … We can only guess what caused it. However, the blocking of the site remains a fact.
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