Kazakhstan's Assassinated Democracy. Yerzhan Psy.D. Dosmukhamedov
episode metamorphosing into democracy.
Having ascertained how important it was to produce the proper impression on Western politicians, President Nazarbayev cultivated his image as a progressive and enlightened monarch from the steppes of Kazakhstan. This task was greatly facilitated because Western guests, who arrived in Kazakhstan to denounce his authoritarianism and censorship, conveniently forgot their mission as soon as it came to the issue of oil contracts. The President of Kazakhstan simply bought them off, just as he had liquidated his national dissidents.
Kazakhstan's great reserve of natural resources has made this country the richest in Central Asia. Kazakhstan become wealthy and Nazarbayev had money for everything. He generously pumped funds into the hands of dissidents and Kazakh students with a revolutionary outlook, including those who returned from foreign universities. Caring for his positive image in the West, President Nazarbayev invited the best and most expensive public-relations specialists, propagandists and lobbyists in the world. His good reputation helped the Kazakh Khan do business in the West.
Abundant natural resources and the public-relations efforts of the Kazakh Khan made the West forget about President Nazarbayev's ruling style.
"Nothing is so upsetting to some Western politicians as their naive belief that everything is not so bad in Kazakhstan", Dr. Dosmukhamedov says. “Surely there is always something that can be even worse, but don't you think this is a silly argument?"
In fact, after each election in Kazakhstan monitors from Europe stated that the elections did not meet democratic standards, although they acknowledged their results.
Eternal President
"It is difficult not to be tempted", says Dr. Dosmukhamedov about his contemporaries, who stopped thinking about social changes in exchange for offers of promotion and the possibility of having a prosperous life.
Oil dollars have allowed President Nazarbayev to comfortably settle every student returning from foreign universities, in exchange for the obedience he demands.
Oil dollars enriched not only the elite but simple businessman, entrepreneurs, and farmers, who have enjoyed a comparatively good life after Soviet times. The Khan put forward only one condition - enrich yourself as much as you like but leave politics to me. In the list of the richest people in the world published in Forbes magazine, there are eight citizens of Kazakhstan, among them President Nazarbayev's daughter Dinara and his son-in-law Timur Kulibayev. For the last couple of years, the middle class in Kazakhstan has grown so that it now comprises almost a quarter of the population.
"Oil is our blessing as well as our curse", says Dr. Dosmukhamedov. "The state and the economic system of Kazakhstan are built on oil, and this is the only reason Kazakhstan is staying afloat. It is the main way in which organisations prosper, and it causes some Western politicians to loose both their sanity and their moral conscience. They want to act as teachers of democracy and freedom when they arrive in Kazakhstan, but they soon forget all about this and become strictly interested in petrodollars. For them, Kazakhstan is just a colony of raw materials. They are not embarrassed by a dictator, as long as he sells them oil".
President Nazarbayev has always been dreaming about Kazakhstan as the first post-Soviet country to receive the OSCE chairmanship. Western leaders were against it, saying that the OSCE can't admit as a leader a country that has never held fair elections, and whose leader supports the so-called Chinese way of development, according to which profit maximization prevails over civil freedom.
President Nazarbayev's efforts to obtain the chairmanship of the OSCE were even supported by former U.S. President Bill Clinton after his visit to Astana. President Nazarbayev contributed generously to his fund. The American government also changed its point of view after President Nazarbayev's visit to Kennebunkport, the seaside summer retreat of his old friend George H.W. Bush.
The dream of the Kazakh Khan came true last year in the autumn. OSCE member countries conditionally decided that in 2010 Kazakhstan will chair the organization. To fulfill this honour, President Nazarbayev will have to carry out democratic reforms that the Kazakh Khan has solemnly promised.
In particular, he promised to reform the constitution by limiting the President's power, so that it would correspond more closely to European constitutions. President Nazarbayev also promised to allow the registration of opposition parties that emerged without his consent.
After this, however, the deputies in Parliament decided to repeal the constitutional limitation on the term of the President, on the ground that President Nazarbayev's merits legitimized his ruling the country for as long as he likes.
Murder? Suicide!
Yerzhan Dosmukhamedov notes that the required 50,000 signatures were collected to register the centre-right Atameken Party, in accordance with the Political Parties' Law. By the end of 2006, all necessary documents had been submitted to the Ministry of Justice. But a month later, authorities stated that the registration process had stopped, so the government neither consented to nor rejected the party's request. When he wanted to take part in the popular television program Serious Talk, the program was withdrawn from the air at the last moment. Besides Atameken, one other opposition party is waiting for registration - Alga (Onward). "In striving for the chairmanship in the OSCE, our regime has deceived the West. It has promised everything that the democratic community wanted to hear but it intended to do everything as it liked", states Dr. Dosmukhamedov. He emphasized that before the country obtains the chairmanship in the OSCE, it is necessary to make President Nazarbayev fulfill all that he has promised.
The Kazakh Khan had not foreseen that wealth, which it seems should only have distracted vigilant citizens, suddenly also gave them the feeling of independence. More self-assured and believing in their luck, oligarchs were annoyed with the omnipotence of the President.
Before Dr. Dosmukhamedov passed the registration documents to the Ministry of Justice and his party's registration application at the end of 2006, an ex-Minister of President Nazarbayev, Zamanbek Nurkadilov, had died in his house in Almaty. Before his death, he had accused the President of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from American oil companies. expelled from the government, he joined the opposition and promised to reveal the compromising documents concerning President Nazarbayev. Officially it was announced that Nurkadilov had committed suicide, but that did not explain why he was shot twice in the breast and then received another shot to the head.
Some months later in a car on the roadside near Almaty, the corpse of another Kazakh opposition leader was found. This time the public prosecutors expressed the opinion that Altynbek Sarsenbayev was killed in a hunting accident, though it is not clear again why the corpse was found in a car together with the driver and the security guard, both of whom had had their hands bound and had been shot in the back of the head.
After the murders, Dr. Dosmukhamedov left for Europe. "I will come back when the party is registered", Dosmukhamedov said. "This would be the proof that something has really been changed in Kazakhstan".
Godfather-in-law
Last year, turmoil gripped the family of President Nazarbayev's son-in-law, Rakhat Aliyev, husband of his elder daughter Dariga, who announced that after Nazarbayev's retirement he would apply for the President's post. When he learned that Khan Nazarbayev was not thinking about retiring, he called him a dictator. President Nazarbayev in turn deprived his son-in-law of the post of ambassador in Vienna, and ordered his daughter to divorce her husband immediately. He also announced an international search for his son-in-law who, so the authorities explained, took advantage of the kindness and trust of the sovereign and had created a Mafia organization. In January, a Kazakhstan court sentenced him in a sentia to long-term imprisonment for thefts and kidnapping. In June, Aliyev announced he would publish a book about President Nazarbayev in which the whole world would find out who was the true Mafioso. The book exposing the Kazakhstan sovereign will be published under the title Godfather-in-Law.
On the advice of his entourage, in April President Nazarbayev had an interview with a correspondent from the Reuters news agency. A long, sincere conversation with a journalist from one of the most popular news services, as they thought, should have restored the President's image that had