Kazakhstan sentenced dozens of people for lethal ethnic clashes last year, with 19 defendants jailed, a community leader said.

The clashes in the south of the oil-rich country in February 2020 saw Kazakhs attack villages inhabited by a Chinese-speaking minority known locally as Dungans. The fighting killed people and put under scrutiny boasts by the authoritarian regime of inter-ethnic harmony in the former Soviet nation.

A court in the Jambyl region on Tuesday sentenced 19 people to between 5 and 20 years over the violence, with 31 others given suspended sentences or correctional work, a Dungan community leader Khusei Daurov told AFP.

Dungan representatives had complained in the build up to sentencing that Dungan defendants were being punished for protecting their community and homes, dozens of which were damaged or destroyed during the raid.

Two ethnic Dungans were sentenced to 16.5 years in jail each over the murder of a Kazakh man -- the only Kazakh known to have died in the violence -- while another Dungan was handed a 16.5-year sentence for participating in mass unrest and attempting to kill a policeman.

Dungan community leader Khusei Daurov, who said he was almost killed during last year's violence, told AFP by telephone that he thought sentences "could have been a lot worse" given the demands of the state prosecutor.

Lawyers for the Dungan men who were sentenced intended to appeal the verdicts, he said.

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev blamed criminal networks for the clashes that happened not far from Kazakhstan's border with Kyrgyzstan and led to thousands of Dungans seeking temporary sanctuary in the smaller, poorer Central Asian country.

Contraband, mostly from neighbouring China, is believed to be a lucrative source of income for politicians and criminal gangs in both majority-Muslim states.

In interviews with AFP just days after the clashes, Kazakh residents of Jambyl described the violence as having been sparked over an assault by Dungan men on an elderly Kazakh.

Dungans, known as Hui in China, are Muslims who claim both Chinese and Arabic heritage.

Their representatives in Kazakhstan are descendants of a community that fled to Central Asia amid repressions in imperial China during the 19th century.

They now mostly speak a dialect of Chinese and Russian, a holdover from Kazakhstan's Russian imperial and Soviet past.

Kazakhstan is the ninth largest country in the world by territory and is home to 130 ethnic groups, according to the foreign ministry.

The authoritarian regime regularly trumpets inter-ethnic harmony but faces opposition from nationalists who argue authorities have preserved the dominance of Russian language and culture at the expense of Kazakh.

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