Kazakhstan oppression puts US anti-terror strategy at risk

The Times
May 09, 2002
From Rosemary Righter in Almaty

AMERICA'S carefully honed counter-terrorist strategy is running into serious trouble where it least expected problems. Kazakhstan, the richest, biggest and most liberal of the landlocked Central Asian autocracies, is cracking down on all opposition so hard as to provoke big problems with Washington.

Kazakhstan and its much more unsavoury neighbours, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, are critical to the American-led anti-terrorist offensive. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan are important for their military bases. Kazakhstan, despite its reputation for vast corruption, is important as a source of regional stability.

All this is being called into question by the Government's apparent inability to see that it cannot credibly lay claim to be 'joining the West' if it beats up, banishes and imprisons even the mildest domestic critics and sets out to assert total control over the country's heavily constrained newspapers and broadcast media.

On the international scene, President Nazarbayev is a deft operator, bent on exploiting American interest to attract not just increased investment, but also political backing. His ambition is to establish Kazakhstan in Western eyes as the indispensable regional player, a modern power to be reckoned with independently of America's relations with Moscow.

However, as the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once said: 'Open windows let in flies.' To the President's discomfort, Kazakhstan's heightened international profile has been seen by reformers as their chance to make public attacks on endemic official corruption and the monopoly of political power by Mr Nazarbayev, his family and a closed, immensely wealthy elite.

He appears to have few ideas how to handle this, other than by resort to Soviet-style methods that are denting his credentials as America's most prominent new Asian ally.

The emergence this year of Kazakhstan's first serious political opposition movements, Democratic Choice and Ak Zhol (Bright Path), was tolerated at first. When, however, the leaders of Democratic Choice demanded the election of provincial governors, who are appointed by Mr Nazarbayev and seen by him as essential to the maintenance of his tight personal control of all major policy decisions, the establishment moved rapidly.

The police are cracking heads. Opposition leaders, journalists and human rights advocates have been arrested, harassed or savagely beaten up, some of them right in front of the British Embassy in Almaty. As part of the crackdown, the leading independent newspapers and television stations have been closed, either on flimsy legal pretexts such as 'illegal entrepreneurship' or for non-compliance with technical regulations.

They have been prosecuted for failing to comply with a new decree that half of all media content must be in the Kazakh language instead of Russian, in effect the lingua franca of communication.

Kazakhstan's laws of criminal libel are being used to bankrupt intractable editors. Respublika, the country's equivalent of the Financial Times, has been denied access to printing presses and last month 'unknown persons' destroyed the transmission cables of TAN (Dawn), the most popular independent television station, with machineguns.

The case that has forced Western leaders to take public issue with the Almaty Government's treatment of dissidents is the arrest of Galymzhan Zhakiyanov, the dismissed Governor of the Pavlodar region, who is one of the two main leaders of Democratic Choice.

Last month, Mr Zhakiyanov sought protection in the embassy premises shared by Britain, France and Germany. With forceful American backing, the French Ambassador obtained a written government promise that if Mr Zhakiyanov left the embassy voluntarily, he would only be confined to his house pending public legal proceedings.

That undertaking was broken almost immediately; on April 10, Interior Ministry police seized him at his house and put him on an aircraft. He is now in prison in Pavlodar, and that move has caused an important diplomatic rift with Kazakhstan's four most important Western allies.

The curiosity is that some of the worst attacks have coincided with elaborately planned international meetings. The Davos economic forum was holding an Asian session in Almaty during the embassy stand-off.

Then, at the end of April, editors and reporters from suppressed media organisations disrupted what was intended to be an uncontroversial international Eurasia Media Forum, which was hosted by Dariga Nazarbayeva, the President's powerful daughter, who is also the head of the heavily subsidised state Khabar News Agency. These meetings were intended by the Government to highlight Kazakhstan's economic and political attractiveness and openness to the outside world.

Naively, the Government appears not to have expected that the press and Opposition would seize these opportunities to call attention to domestic repression. The Government wants international interest, but only of the 'right kind' and it has difficulty in absorbing the idea that it cannot be selective.

The brutality of its reaction is damaging Kazakhstan's chances of capitalising on its geopolitical salience as a modernising, religiously and ethnically tolerant bulwark against Islamist terrorism. Before September 11, the country's main claim on world attention was the potential of its vast oil and natural gas deposits. Kazakhstan otherwise was a Central Asian 'empty quarter', a territory two thirds the size of the US, but with a population of only 16 million, plagued by the environmental legacies of Soviet nuclear tests, forced collectivisation in its arid steppes under Krushchev's 'virgin lands' policy and the deliberate draining of the Aral Sea.

Mr Nazarbayev is intent on helping Kazakhstan to shed its image as a political pygmy with a lot of oil. But he measures Kazakh 'moderation', diplomats in Almaty complain, by the miserable standards prevailing in Central Asia. That is not good enough for Kazakhstan's modernisers or its press.

Because repression of non-Islamist dissent raises questions about the ultimate stability of the regime, in the climate since September 11 it is not good enough for Washington either.

The intriguing question is what has prompted Mr Nazarbayev to resort so baldly to the mailed fist. It is at odds with his customary style of co-opting the more biddable of his opponents and hitting hard only against those, such as Azekhan Kazhegeldin, the exiled former Prime Minister, whom he sees as challengers that he may not be able to control.

The answer is that for the first time he may be feeling vulnerable. The Opposition has gone public, in parliament, on corruption within the Nazarbayev clan.

That sort of 'in your face' challenge is where free speech stops in Kazakhstan.

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