Kazakhstan's Assassinated Democracy. Yerzhan Psy.D. Dosmukhamedov
in support of this approach.
Sixth, Kazakhstan should start taking genuine and tangible steps towards adopting the European Convention on Human Rights. This will provide international security for the irreversibility and democratic sincerity of the reform.
Seventh, the President - like the Spanish king after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco - should start a dialogue with constructive social forces. What prevents us from imagining that our dictator has died, Mr. Nazarbayev? Perhaps your stubbornness, fears, pride and distrust in 99 per cent of citizens and the international community? Let us, like America, open a new page in the history of Kazakhstan. Prove to everyone that you are not such a hopeless case.
Kazakhstan has to stop discrediting its national elite. The international authority of the country is being damaged heavily. Huge volumes of intellectual, organizational and financial means are spent by the government and all individual representatives of the elite on confrontations and mutual persecution. As a result, only ordinary people suffer.
What is the practical side of implementing such a proposal?
In informal negotiations, respectable Western politicians displayed a full understanding of our problems connected with establishing our statehood, and a sincere desire to favour a fullscale dialogue aimed at relieving economic and social tension and the formation of a more effective means of political organization.
Unlike other parties, the Atameken Party was not financed by the National Security Committee, the Administration of the President or Western secret services. The Atameken Party does not beg for meetings with the government. People of good sense both in the West and Kazakhstan believe in the Atameken Party. That is why the Atameken Party invites President Nazarbayev to come to the U.S.A. before January 20, 2009, and deliver a lecture and statement at Georgetown University in Washington. For some reason it seems to me that the newly-elected U.S. President and Vice-President will accept Atameken's invitation to attend the Kazakh President's lecture, if he is ready to accept the tangible program I just described. Why not? After all, the head of our country was ready to fly halfway across the globe to Washington for the presentation of his book organized by Ambassador [Erlan] Idrisov, well known in London as a lover of tourist trips to football matches at the expense of taxpayers. I ask President Nazarbayev to accept Atameken's invitation and put aside his apologies made by his advisers, who have been profiting from the rising tension over the last two years. National Security Committee analysts, who thoroughly monitor the speeches of all opposition politicians, can produce mounds of evidence confirming the veracity of my statements, and the accuracy of my forecasts and promises. Where will the presumptuous critics and mockers disappear to after that?
And will Rakhat Aliyev and Alnur Musayev be invited to the lecture?
As far as I know, American law-enforcement agencies have not prohibited their entry. Taking into account the fact that they have discredited the regime as much as possible and, as we all have seen, did not even sweat, may I take this opportunity to invite them as well. every new release of information about revels and drinking parties among Kazakhstan's high-ranking officials, and other bizarre ways of making state decisions, bolsters the opinion of leading countries in the international community that the ruling regime is frivolous.
The problem also lies in the fact that every new information release makes an ordinary person who has lost a father, mother or a child think that this regime does not care about its people with their problems because the government has ignored their sufferings for so long - for example, the lack of medicine or money to pay the corrupt public health system or the family members of dead miners.
The sense of justice is given to humans by God. That is why their faith and their wish to accept the legal supremacy of immoral officials is running out. That is why sooner or later people will start to object to the system that scorns their feelings. even during the dark times long ago, if slaves had a feeling of self-esteem and transformed it into concrete resistance, then I am sure that in the 21st century even such intimidated people as the Kazakhs will wake up.
Unfortunately, all dictators are surrounded by bootlickers, Mercedes cars and bayonets, and gradually start to believe in their divine origin and invincibility. Nicolae Ceausescu and Saddam Hussein, for example, even on the threshold of the next world stubbornly continued to remain dictators, though only in their minds. Won't the sobering up of power in Kazakhstan come in time?
Interviewed by Ramazan Yesergepov
THE ATAMEKEN PARTY IS NOW TWO YEARS OLD, BUT WITHOUT AN OATH OF LOYALTY TO THE PRESIDENT IT REMAINS UNREGISTERED
Radio "Liberty" (USA)
27 October 2008
In an interview with Radio Liberty, the Kazakh political exile and Chairman of the unregistered political party Atameken talks about the differences and similarities among opposition leaders at home and abroad.
Dr. Dosmukhamedov, 27 October is exactly two years since the Founding Convention of your Atameken Party. The party still has not received registration for its activities. Furthermore, you yourself emigrated from Kazakhstan. So you have been in exile now for two years.
Abroad I am still a citizen who appealed to the head of state to guarantee my constitutional rights - first, my personal safety in the context of the statements that I made concerning the political course chosen by our political party. Secondly, I asked him to protect my constitutional freedom of political expression. Unfortunately, our main guarantor of constitutional rights these past two years has kept silent, pretending that the problem does not exist.
I consider this fact very extraordinary. It demonstrates how the Kazakh government machine spits on its ordinary citizens.
But in this case you are not just an ordinary citizen, but a leader of a political organization. At what stage is your party's registration? What do the authorities say? Or, on the contrary, what do they not say?
The bureaucracy fully accepts the quintessential idea incorporated in the Kazakh legislation on political parties. That is, to control the process of the emergence and evolution of civil society in Kazakhstan. As you know, after one month the authorities can initiate a so-called expert assessment. And this assessment, according to the existing legislation, may last 100, 200, 300 years - all depending on how long the regime keeps its grip on power.
One day before the expiry of the one-month period we received a copy of the Order of the Minister of Justice of the Republic of Kazakhstan informing us that our founding documents filed with the Ministry required additional assessment.
Dr. Dosmukhamedov, so if the President does not respond to your appeals and the officers of the Ministry of Justice brush you off, what is the reaction on the part of the political elite? How mature is Kazakh society, to be a catalyst for the political process?
The emergence of our party was a huge surprise for Nazarbayev. It provoked a strong concern on the part of the Administration of the President. The open process by which our party conducted its Founding Convention was a major irritation for Mr. Adilbek Dzhaksybekov, chief of staff to the President at the time.
We should clearly realize that the emergence of our party was a genuine process of the expression of the will of the ordinary citizens of Kazakhstan, who wanted to exercise their simple constitutional right of freedom of political association. The reason for this continuing non-registration is that we set up our party without the blessing of the Administration of the President. It remains unregistered because I refused to take an oath of loyalty on the Quran. Timur Kulibayev, the son-in-law of the President, demanded this oath from me. It remains unregistered because I slammed the cabinet door on Yermukhamet Yertyysbayev, Minister of Press and Information, in response to his harassing demands for a loyalty oath and the introduction of new positions of co-chairmen of our party, through whom the authorities could secure control over our party, NGOs and civil society in Kazakhstan.
Look at the recent situation with the Young Professionals of Kazakhstan, a new NGO. They are also not registered. And these are the very people who form the middle class. This is complete nonsense, President Nazarbayev. I would therefore like to address