DEVELOPMENT-KAZAKHSTAN: President Seeks Support For New Plan

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Nov 11 1997 (IPS) - Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev comes to Germany Nov. 25 to 27 seeking financial and political support for his newly announced national development plan.

The plan, spelt out early last month, sets the year 2030 as a target for Kazakhstan to establish itself as an independent, sovereign state with “a high level of development” which could serve as “an example worth emulating by the developing nations”.

While an on-the-record official German response to Nazarbajev’s ‘Kazakhstan 2030’ plan was not available, the fact that a financial cooperation agreement would form the highlight of his visit spoke volumes.

Germany is willing to provide some 15 million dollars for setting up of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and additional eight million dollars for drinking water treatment in the highly polluted Aral Sea region next year. Since the former Soviet republic became independent in 1991, Germany, the largest donor to Kazakhstan in the European Union, has set apart some 86 million dollars.

The aid has underlined the significance of its ties with the multi-ethnic nation of about 17 million people. 52 percent of them are ethnic Kazakhs, 34 percent Russians, five percent Ukrainians, some 300,000 Germans, and others belonging to more than 100 nationalities.

German government officials admit that in a bid to encourage Kazakhstan’s ethnic German minority to stay at home and help in the reconstruction of the country — rather than emigrate to Germany — Bonn has assigned a priority place to Almaty in its relations with Central Asia.

Some 31 million dollars, from the budget of Bonn’s Internal Affairs Ministry, has gone to projects tailored to the needs of persons of German origin, who have stayed put reather than follow in the footsteps of the 700,000 ethnic German Kazakhs who have already migrated to Germany.

So far nearly 55 million dollars have been allocated by the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) as part of official development assistance (ODA) since 1993, according to government sources.

“Our objective is to improve the living conditions of all sections of the society, including those of the people of German origin,” says Klaus-Juergen Hedrich, parliamentary state secretary (deputy minister) at the BMZ.

“We do not want to give the (ethnic) Germans any preference over other groups, but we will keep a close eye so that they are not discriminated (against),” added Hedrich in an interview with IPS this summmer.

Hedrich was on a five-day official visit to Kazakhstan, afollowing up on a flyying visit by his minister, Carl-Dieter Spranger. The aim was to explore in talks with finance minister Alexander Pavlov and his other government colleagues new avenues of cooperation.

Inter-governmental discussions between Bonn and Almaty continued at several levels in the following months, including bilateral negotiations on next year’s financial and technical assistance.

Ahead of these talks, the German government sponsored from Sep 30 to Oct 1 a workshop arranged by the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) in Kazakhstan with a view to boosting SMEs in the Central Asian republic.

The workshop chaired by GTZ’s eminent expert Prof. Dieter Biallas was joined by a broad range of Kazakh government and business and industry officials.

They agreed that SMEs played a crucial role in creating new employment opportunities without which sustainable development will not be achieved in Kazakhstan presently undergoing transformation from communist to market economy structures.

This view is shared by the chief of the newly established Kazakh Agency for Strategic Planning and Reform, J.E. Utembajev, who is regarded as a ‘super-minister’ with wide authority. Utembajev’s clear endorsement is seen at the BMZ as an evidence that Bonn has been on the right path all along in its backing for Kazakhstan.

Bonn hopes that its aid for SMEs will be availed of by ethnic Germans, facilitating them to adopt what Hedrich termed “a culture of self-reliance”.

Nazarbajev’s plan is to develop precisely this kind of culture, which German officials says is not going to be an easy task. This is because the people in the former Soviet republics have for the last seven decades been brought up in a communist system, where individual initiative was not encouraged.

“Here many developing nations are in a better position, though some of them took to socialism for some years,” says Hedrich.

But then Kazakhstan has made significant advances in the past years in breaking away from its past and given the high level of literacy and education, it would manage to face challenges, he adds.

However development cooperation with Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries also brings benefits to SMEs and consultants in eastern Germany where knowledge of the Russian language is quite common. Up to some 390 million dollars flow to eastern Germany every year from the budget of the BMZ.

There is also the lure of rich natural resources, particularly oil and gas. Though German corporations have much less to offer in the field than their U.S. counterparts, the region remains of “a crucial importance,” posited as it is between Russia, China, Iran and Afghanistan.

A recent report backed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) takes a close look at the economic transformation under way in Kazakhstan and notes that the basis of an open economy is in place, the privatisation of state property practically completed along with the decentralisation of economic authority.

The report adds, however, that the results achieved in economic reform are “not all positive”. Accomplishments vary in different sectors of industries, and are considerably out of balance with social indicators.