Protests in Kazakhstan against conduct of polls

Hundreds turned out Saturday for an unusually large protest in Kazakhstan against the conduct of parliamentary polls that gave a landslide victory to President Nursultan Nazarbayev's ruling party. Up to 1,000 people so far arrived on the fringes of Republic Square in Kazakhstan's largest city Almaty for the protest, despite the presence of hundreds of police who had previously cordoned most of the square off, an AFP correspondent said. "Freedom!" chanted the demonstrators. The protest -- whose size was already unusual in Kazakhstan's tightly controlled society -- has been given an additional impulse by the arrest and jailing of three prominent opposition figures over the last few days. Nazarbayev's Nur Otan party won almost 81 percent of the vote in the January 15 polls which international observers said failed to meet "fundamental principles of democratic elections." The controversy came just one month after over a dozen people were killed in clashes between striking oil workers and police in the Caspian Sea city of Zhanaozen in Kazakhstan's worst bloodshed since the fall of the Soviet Union.