The chairman of a Tashkent polling station opens a curtain to a voting booth during the Uzbek presidential election of December 2007. Uzbekistan’s Dec. 21 parliamentary elections feature only four staunchly pro-regime parties to fill the 150-seat lower house, or the Legislative Chamber. No opposition parties are permitted to legally exist in Uzbekistan, and independent candidates are barred from standing. Credit: OSCE

By Joanna Lillis
TASHKENT, Dec 19 2014 (EurasiaNet)

Uzbekistan’s parliamentary elections on Dec. 21 will offer voters a choice, but no hope for change.

Only four staunchly pro-regime parties – the Liberal Democratic Party of Uzbekistan, the People’s Democratic Party of Uzbekistan, as well as the National Revival and the Justice parties – can field candidates for the elections to fill the 150-seat lower house, or the Legislative Chamber.“People have gotten used to all these elections as something staged, and they don’t really care what the outcome will be, because most people think it will all be the way the authorities want it to be." -- A Tashkent-based businessman

They will be joined by representatives of the Ecological Movement of Uzbekistan, which has a “green” quota of 15 seats reserved under electoral law.

No opposition parties are permitted to legally exist in Uzbekistan, and independent candidates are barred from standing.

“The state of political freedoms [in Uzbekistan] is non-existent,” Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, told EurasiaNet.org. “Genuinely independent voices have not been allowed to register and participate in this election, as in all previous ones.”

HRW and other watchdog groups routinely rank Uzbekistan as among the most repressive states on earth. That reputation is not stopping strongman President Islam Karimov from touting this election as evidence that Uzbekistan – which he has led for over two decades, brooking no opposition to his iron rule – is on the path to democracy.

Uzbekistan is “building an independent democratic state” and “creating a civil society” that prioritises “human interests, rights, and freedoms and the supremacy of the law,” he claimed in his Constitution Day speech earlier in December.

Critics say Karimov is merely attempting to add a democratic veneer to a dictatorial system. Thousands of political prisoners are languishing in jail, the media is muzzled, and most civil society activists are “either in prison or in exile,” said Nadejda Atayeva, a France-based human rights campaigner exiled from Uzbekistan.

“The Uzbek government is doing all it can to portray this election as legitimate, without actually making it legitimate – without making the election free and fair,” Swerdlow says, adding that Tashkent is harnessing the vote “as an act of consolidation and public mobilisation around the regime.”

Observers expect a high turnout. “Uzbekistan has never had free and fair elections, but the government will ensure that the turnout is sufficiently high,” Alexander Melikishvili, a Washington-based analyst at the IHS Country Risk think-tank, told EurasiaNet.org.

“The government will organise voting drives among public sector employees, and local administrations will compel people to vote through the community (mahalla) councils.”

Voters in Uzbekistan readily acknowledge that mahallas – state-sponsored residents’ councils that control local affairs – rely on coercive measures to get out the vote.

“Mahalla committees will be going round the houses asking people to go to vote,” one Tashkent-based businessman told EurasiaNet.org on condition of anonymity. “That’s exactly what happened last time there were parliamentary elections.”

The public will dutifully turn up at polling booths to avoid reprisals, he added, but will cast their votes without enthusiasm. “People have gotten used to all these elections as something staged, and they don’t really care what the outcome will be, because most people think it will all be the way the authorities want it to be,” he said.

In practical terms, the parliamentary elections mean little for day-to-day affairs in Uzbekistan. As David Dalton, an Uzbekistan analyst at the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit, points out, “Voting to parliament is heavily controlled, and the real levers of power are anyway located elsewhere.”

International observers will be in Uzbekistan on election day, but the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, or ODIHR, the election-monitoring arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, will field only a limited mission, partly due to what it describes as “the limited nature of the competition” in the election.

ODIHR has never deemed conditions conducive to sending a full observation mission to Uzbekistan, or judged an election in the Central Asian nation to be free and fair.

Meanwhile, Karimov has been on what Swerdlow describes as a “media blitz” in an attempt to legitimise “an electoral process that’s genuine in form, but not in substance.”

That may be designed to help bolster the legitimacy of another, far more important vote next year: a presidential election due in the spring, in which Karimov has not stated if he will stand, although he has hinted he will.

Editor’s note:  Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Russia’s aggressive actions toward Ukraine are vexing Central Asian states.

First, officials in Kazakhstan were chagrined to hear comments by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, during a recent town-hall-style meeting with university students, appeared to denigrate Kazakhstani statehood. Now, Uzbek leaders are showing signs of displeasure with Moscow.“Tashkent is deeply concerned about the potency of Russian media and disinformation campaigns, as well as the potential political vulnerability of the status of millions of Uzbek [labor] migrants in Russia." -- Alexander Cooley

Insular Uzbekistan has long viewed Russia with a wary eye: it has kept its distance from Moscow-led regional bodies and has shown no interest in joining the Eurasian Economic Union, Putin’s pet project to reassert Kremlin influence across the former Soviet Union.

The rhetoric currently coming out of Tashkent suggests that the conflict playing out in Ukraine has unsettled President Islam Karimov’s administration, and is prompting Uzbek officials to consider new steps to distance themselves further from the Kremlin.

During Independence Day celebrations on Sep. 1, Karimov pointedly denounced the tyranny of the Soviet past – and effectively thumbed his nose at Moscow. The “totalitarian” Soviet period, Karimov said, was a time of “oppressive injustice” and “humiliation and affront, when our national values, traditions, and customs were trampled upon.”

Karimov was harking back to the past, but given the battles raging in southeastern Ukraine, and with Putin making no secret of his ambition to expand Russia’s sway over former Soviet territory, the remarks were a clear sally at the Kremlin.

Karimov did not name Ukraine, but spoke of the need to prevent the escalation of conflicts into full-blown warfare in the current “alarming situation.” In comments clearly aimed at Russia, he went on to call for sovereignty and borders to be respected, and the use of force rejected.

Like other post-Soviet states, Tashkent has struggled to formulate a response to the Ukraine conflict, in large part because the Karimov administration finds neither side appealing. On one hand, Tashkent is leery of Kremlin expansionism; on the other, the dictatorial Karimov is no fan of popular uprisings, such as that embodied in the Euromaidan movement.

Analysts say Uzbek President Islam Karimov is clearly apprehensive about the Kremlin’s capacity to use soft power to undermine his long rule if he fails to toe Russia’s line. Credit: Agência Brasil/cc by 3.0

Ukraine “has raised grave concerns [for Uzbekistan], precisely because each side has given the [Karimov] regime something to fear,” Alexander Cooley, a professor at New York’s Barnard College who specialises in Central Asian affairs, told EurasiaNet.org.

Until recently, Karimov’s government may have viewed Euromaidanist Ukraine as representing the larger threat to Uzbekistan’s status quo. But attitudes in Tashkent may be shifting.

“[The] revolutionary change of power seen in Ukraine is something that Uzbek authorities under President Karimov have been tirelessly working to prevent in their country by effectively rooting out any potential pockets of political dissent,” Lilit Gevorgyan, a regional analyst at IHS Global Insight, told EurasiaNet.org.

“It is hard to see Uzbekistan cheering for the popular uprising in Ukraine,” she added – but “they are still likely to be critical, albeit not openly, of Russia’s meddling in Ukraine.”

What Karimov is clearly apprehensive about is the Kremlin’s capacity to use soft power to undermine his long rule if he fails to toe Russia’s line, suggested Cooley.

“Tashkent is deeply concerned about the potency of Russian media and disinformation campaigns, as well as the potential political vulnerability of the status of millions of Uzbek [labour] migrants in Russia,” said Cooley. “They could be a lever for Moscow to bring Uzbekistan further in line with its position.”

Uzbekistan could face a destabilising social crisis if Russia opted to expel Uzbek guest workers. Uzbekistan’s economy would be ill-equipped to absorb such a vast number of returning workers.

Russia’s assertion of a right to defend Russian-speakers abroad is also viewed with trepidation in Tashkent, David Dalton, Uzbekistan analyst at the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit, told EurasiaNet.org.

“As with the other Central Asian countries that have a Russian minority, the Uzbek leadership, already wary of Russia’s ambitions in the area, will have viewed with great alarm Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine on the pretext of protecting Russian-speakers,” he said.

Uzbekistan does not share a border with Russia and has a relatively small ethnic Russian minority, comprising 5.5 percent of the country’s overall population of almost 29 million, but Kremlin policies still make Tashkent nervous.

The Kremlin’s muscle-flexing incentivizes Uzbekistan to boost other alliances, analysts believe. “It will emphasise Uzbekistan’s need to diversify security and economic partnerships to the greatest extent possible,” Cooley said, mainly “through growing partnership with China, as well as economic partnerships with emerging Asian powers such as South Korea, Japan and the Gulf States.”

Tilting east is more promising for Tashkent than attempting to turn westward: partly since Uzbekistan’s geopolitical importance to the West is waning as NATO withdraws from Afghanistan; and partly since many Western states consider doing business with Karimov toxic due to Uzbekistan’s poor human rights record.

Western states, especially the United States and United Kingdom, “remain constrained from increasing their engagement by political and human rights concerns, as well as the negative blowback they received from forging close security ties with Tashkent in the 2000s,” Cooley pointed out.

After 9/11, Washington wooed Uzbekistan (which sits on Afghanistan’s northern border) to open a military base – from which it was summarily ejected after criticising the killing of protesters by Uzbek security forces in Andijan in 2005.

“Uzbekistan has tended to ‘turn West’ when it finds that Russia is becoming too assertive, and then back again to Russia when pressed too strongly by the West on its poor human rights record,” said Dalton. “This could happen again this time – although with most of its gas pipelines connecting with China, and Western forces pulling out from Afghanistan this year, it is not clear what Uzbekistan could offer the West in return.”

Ultimately, China – now a major purchaser of Uzbek gas – stands to benefit from Uzbekistan’s present dilemma. Karimov’s visit to Beijing in August was “an important signal,” said Dalton, “that Uzbekistan wishes to maintain good ties with strong foreign partners, to counterbalance Russian influence.”

Editor’s note:  Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Victory Day on May 9 was an occasion for Russians to indulge in patriotic flag waving in Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin used the previous day to muster a show of diplomatic support for his efforts to bring formerly Soviet states closer together.

On May 8, Putin met with the presidents of Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan in the Kremlin. Following the success of the Euromaidan movement in Kyiv, Putin has made it a priority to shore up support among other formerly Soviet states for Russia’s geopolitical agenda, in particular the establishment of a regional economic union as a precursor to a wider political union of Eurasian states.“It’s hard to predict anything these days, but it seems to me that the treaty will be signed -- but in a reduced form, with most difficult issues to be resolved after signing,. -- Nargis Kassenova

A treaty on the formation of a Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) is due to be signed in Astana in late May, paving the way for its launch in January 2015. The body would be an outgrowth of the existing Customs Union, a free trade zone comprising Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Armenia and Kyrgyzstan are slated to join the Customs Union before the end of the year.

As Putin warmly welcomed existing and potential union members in Moscow on May 8, ostensibly for security talks unrelated to the economic integration project, the question on the lips of Kremlin watchers was: will they or won’t they put pen to paper on the EEU founding document in less than three weeks’ time?

The Moscow meeting came on the heels of a disastrous Customs Union summit in Minsk on Apr. 29, where expectations of finalising the treaty fizzled as Putin and his counterparts, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus and Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, admitted that, at this late stage, they have differences over the pact’s wording.

Nazarbayev’s conspicuous absence from the May 8 talks in Moscow, convened under the auspices of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, set tongues wagging about differences of opinion. Contacted by telephone by EurasiaNet.org, Nazarbayev’s office said it had no comment — but some observers interpreted his no-show as a snub to Putin from one of his closest allies.

As other regional leaders were cozying up to the Kremlin, Nazarbayev was having a tete-a-tete in Astana with a senior official from the United States, Moscow’s arch-rival in the geopolitical struggle over Ukraine. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns used the meeting to assure Nazarbayev of America’s “enduring” commitment to Kazakhstan and Central Asia, the State Department said, as the Ukraine crisis helps “underscore what’s at stake.”

Regional analysts tend to believe that the recent signs are not indicators of insurmountable problems surrounding the EEU’s formation.

“It’s hard to predict anything these days, but it seems to me that the treaty will be signed — but in a reduced form, with most difficult issues to be resolved after signing,” Nargis Kassenova, director of the Central Asian Studies Center at Almaty’s KIMEP University, told EurasiaNet.org.

“If it’s not signed it will be a blow to the reputation of Vladimir Putin, but also to some extent that of Nursultan Nazarbayev,” she added. “Both invested a lot of personal image capital into it.”

Alex Nice, a regional analyst at the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit, also feels that integration plans are more or less on track.

“It’s possible there might be a further delay to the final signing of the document, but I’m confident that the treaty will come into force as planned next January,” he told EurasiaNet.org, pointing out that “negotiations on the EEU treaty are very far advanced.”

“Of course, some of the more controversial provisions will be subject to lengthy transition periods,” Nice added.

The chances of the agreement being signed on time are “quite high,” concurred regional security expert Aida Abzhaparova of the University of the West of England. Nazarbayev is a cheerleader for integration, she pointed out, and signing the treaty in Astana would have huge “symbolism” for him: Nazarbayev first proposed the notion of a Eurasian union long before Putin took it up, and sees himself as “the father of the idea.”

Speculation that the union might be heading off the rails was fueled by reports on May 7 that Kyrgyzstan’s prime minister, Joomart Otorbayev, wished to postpone membership for a year — but his spokeswoman denied the claim. Otorbayev had, on the contrary, said Kyrgyzstan would complete the legislative groundwork to join by the end of the year, Gulnura Toraliyeva told EurasiaNet.org by telephone.

Armenia is expected to join sooner – but is currently bogged down trying to negotiate some 900 exemptions to the union’s single customs tariff.

Analysts believe that incorporating the weaker economies of Armenia and Kyrgyzstan into the union is a sticking point in the treaty negotiations; Kazakhstan and Belarus are believed to be wary of the economic implications amid Russian efforts to expand its geopolitical clout.

Perhaps the biggest threat to the EEU’s success is Russia’s actions in Ukraine, suggests Kassenova.

“The Ukraine crisis undermined Russian policy in the post-Soviet space,” Kassenova said. “Now it’s seen as a bully without any respect for the sovereignty of its neighbors. Plus, the crisis undermined the economy of Russia and made it less capable of serving as the locomotive of integration.”

“On the one hand, the crisis should give more bargaining power to Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan,” she continued. “On the other, the overall destiny of the project is in doubt: will Russia have the will and resources to support and sponsor it further?”

Editor’s note:  Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

On a hill overlooking the northeastern Kazakh city of Oskemen, bright white letters spell out ‘Kazakhstan’ under a large Kazakh flag in early April 2014. Oskemen - known in Russian as Ust-Kamenogorsk - is a Russian-majority city, where 67 percent of inhabitants are ethnic Russian, triple the national ratio in Kazakhstan. Credit: Joanna Lillis/EurasiaNet

By Joanna Lillis
ASTANA, Apr 15 2014 (EurasiaNet)

On a hillside in northeastern Kazakhstan, south of the Russian border, a simple and stark slogan looms over the city of Oskemen: “Kazakhstan,” reads the message in giant white letters arrayed across the green slope.

When the sign was erected in 2009, ostensibly to foster Kazakhstani patriotism, it seemed to be stating the obvious. But now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has set himself up as the defender of Russians everywhere, and used that rationale to annex Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, the slogan seems more pertinent than ever – at least to Kazakhstani leaders in Astana.

Ever since the Soviet collapse in 1991, President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s administration has stressed the promotion of tolerance and inter-ethnic harmony. For the most part, Nazarbayev has succeeded in keeping the country tranquil, enabling the economy to attain an unrivaled level of growth in Central Asia.

But now, the ripple-effect created by the Ukraine crisis threatens to test the loyalties of Kazakhstan’s ethnically diverse populace, in particular the substantial ethnic Russian minority, which is concentrated in northern regions of the country.

Given recent developments, boosting patriotism has rocketed up Nazarbayev’s political agenda. Highlighting the high level of concern in Astana, officials introduced amendments in early April to punish public calls for separatism with long jail terms.

Separatist sentiment in the industrial northeast created a headache for Nazarbayev in the 1990s – and Oskemen was once a hotbed of intrigue, with 13 pro-Russian conspirators jailed over a separatist plot in 2000. In this city, known in Russian as Ust-Kamenogorsk, 67 percent of inhabitants are Russian, triple the national ratio.“Russia isn’t seen as some sort of enemy here. It’s seen as an opportunity.” -- Aleksandr Alekseyenko of the East Kazakhstan State Technical University

Separatist moods ebbed as Kazakhstan consolidated its nationhood – but the scenarios playing out in Ukraine are enough to cause Nazarbayev a full-blown migraine. Russia’s justification of its annexation of Crimea on the grounds of protecting Russian speakers makes Astana jittery. In Kazakhstan, 22 percent of the population is ethnic Russian, with far higher ratios living along the sprawling 7,000-kilometre border with Russia.

Inflammatory statements by Russian nationalists about claims on northern Kazakhstan have added fuel to the fire, sparking an unusual diplomatic spat between close allies Moscow and Astana. On Apr. 11, following a sharp rebuke from Kazakhstan, Moscow disassociated itself from the pronouncements – but did not explicitly deny having designs on Kazakhstan’s territory.

Astana may be up in arms, but Oskemen’s Russian-speaking community views the nationalist outbursts across the border with equanimity.

“On the immutability of borders … talking about some actions being eternal is simply somewhat incorrect,” says Viktor Sharonov, a gruff Cossack ataman (leader), choosing his words carefully. “Then what call would the Scottish have to hold a referendum on separating from Great Britain?”

Sharonov was speaking on Apr. 8 at a meeting of Oskemen-based Russian community groups attended by EurasiaNet.org, where community leaders championed the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine and denounced what they perceive as Western meddling in Russia’s backyard.

“I personally, and our Cossacks, see this as the desire of Western countries … to totally do the dirty on Russia once again,” Sharonov said heatedly.

“Unfortunately real fascists, ultranationalists… have come to power in Kyiv,” obliging Moscow to intervene to defend Russian speakers’ rights, said Oleg Navozov, chairman of the LAD Slavic movement.

On one hand, the prevailing view among Oskemen’s Russian-speaking community, as articulated by Navozov, echoes Astana’s official line: Nazarbayev has called the government in Kyiv “neo-fascists” and railed against Ukraine’s “discrimination against minority rights,” winning him plaudits from these community leaders.

“Nazarbayev supported Russia in those actions aimed at protecting the rights of ethnic minorities in Ukraine and protecting its national interests,” said Nikolay Plakhotin of LAD approvingly.

On the other hand, Russian intervention in Ukraine leaves many in Kazakhstan wondering: What if Moscow decides Russian speakers here need protection?

This scenario is overwhelmingly rejected in Oskemen, where Russian speakers interviewed by EurasiaNet.org said without exception that Nazarbayev’s inclusive ethnic and linguistic policies rule it out.

“The situation in Kazakhstan is completely different to Ukraine,” Vadim Obukhov, deputy head of the Russian Cultural Centre, said. “We don’t have any confrontation between Kazakhs and Russians.”

As Nazarbayev juggles competing agendas, promoting the interests of the majority Kazakhs while protecting minority rights, “this balance is being maintained very competently,” said newspaper publisher Yevgeniy Cherkashin.

Nazarbayev’s pro-Kremlin stance in the Ukraine crisis is playing well in the Russian-speaking community in the north, although elsewhere critics vehemently attack it as a betrayal of national interests.

“In the consciousness of many Russians the northern part of Kazakhstan is Russian territory,” Almaty-based analyst Aydos Sarym told EurasiaNet.org, hence “as many Kazakhs understand it, this [official pro-Moscow] position is mistaken.”

In Oskemen some ethnic Kazakhs do “fear” a Russian land grab, albeit at some hazy point in the future, Kenzhebay, a middle-aged Oskemen resident who declined to give his surname, told EurasiaNet.org. Many also believe that close partnership with Russia offers Kazakhstan its best protection: Astana can best safeguard its sovereignty by acting as a friend to Moscow rather than foe.

Russians questioned on Oskemen’s city streets viewed the idea of Moscow encroaching on Kazakhstan as preposterous. “I don’t think Russia’s going to grab a piece of Kazakhstan – what would it want to do that for?” puzzled engineer Viktor Chernyshev.

“Russia isn’t seen as some sort of enemy here,” explains Aleksandr Alekseyenko of the East Kazakhstan State Technical University. “It’s seen as an opportunity.”

From Oskemen, the Russian city of Novosibirsk is closer than Kazakhstan’s capital Astana, and locals flock over the border into Siberia to work and study – helped by Kazakhstan’s membership of the Russia-led Customs Union.

This free trade zone is to be transformed next month into the Eurasian Economic Union, amid vociferous opposition from Kazakh nationalists and liberals who fear Russian domination. But in northeastern Kazakhstan backing for the union is rock solid.

Vladimir Putin makes no secret of his nostalgia for the Soviet Union, or his vision of the union as a political vehicle promoting Russia-dominated post-Soviet integration; and some in Oskemen seem to share his dream.

The union represents “a return – perhaps not entirely, but nevertheless largely – to what existed in the Soviet Union,” suggested Navozov.

These words may be music to Putin’s ears, but perhaps not to Nazarbayev’s: he is suspicious of any political element to integration and has pledged not to cede “an iota” of Kazakhstan’s sovereignty.

While looking to Russia for political and economic reference points, Oskemen’s Russian-speaking community is strongly loyal to Nazarbayev, seeing him not only as guarantor of minority rights but also as guarantor of political and social stability.

Ukraine-style unrest is impossible here, said Leonid Kartashev, president of the Russian National Cultural Centre, since “in Kazakhstan President Nazarbayev is legitimately elected, and in Kazakhstan there is a legitimate government.”

Editor’s note:  Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specializes in Central Asia. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Vladimir Putin and Nursultan Nazarbayev shaking hands at a Kremlin meeting in December 2013. Credit: Kremlin Presidential Press and Information Office - CC BY 3.0

By Joanna Lillis
ASTANA, Apr 7 2014 (EurasiaNet)

The Crimea crisis is putting pressure on Kazakhstan’s long-standing, multi-vectored foreign policy, which has sought to balance the competing interests of Russia, China and the United States in Central Asia.

In forcefully backing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, many in Kazakhstan worry that President Nursultan Nazarbayev could be setting himself up for separatist woes of his own.“Kazakhstan’s position is dictated not so much by creed as by fear… Events in Crimea are a possible scenario for Kazakhstan too.” -- Aidos Sarym

At the Nuclear Security Summit on Mar. 25 in The Hague, Nazarbayev jumped off the diplomatic fence to offer strong support for Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, the architect of the Crimean land-grab.

Nazarbayev essentially blamed Ukraine’s new leaders for precipitating the crisis, saying that “an unconstitutional coup d’etat” had occurred in Kiev. He also noted there had been “discrimination against minority rights” in Ukraine, thus providing diplomatic cover for Russia’s position that it intervened to protect Russians in Crimea.

Outraged officials in Kiev called Nazarbayev’s remarks “unacceptable;” A Kazakhstani Foreign Ministry representative quickly retorted that the Ukrainian reaction was “dictated largely by emotions, and not common sense.”

The occasion marked Kiev’s second protest within a week: on Mar. 20 it complained about Astana’s recognition of the Mar. 16 Crimean referendum, which Russia proceeded to use as justification of its annexation of the peninsula.

On Mar. 27, Kazakhstan abstained in a vote against a U.N. resolution declaring the plebiscite invalid.

The crisis is placing considerable strain on Nazarbayev’s “multi-vector” approach, which is premised on the maintenance of good relations with all powers.

The policy, along with an abundance of natural resources, has raised Kazakhstan’s international profile during the post-Soviet era. Nazarbayev’s recent statements, however, are leading Kazakhstan into a “political and diplomatic blind alley,” cautioned opposition leader Amirzhan Kosanov.

“Kazakhstan has basically lost its independence in assessing events taking place in the world and, wittingly or unwittingly, is becoming hostage to the foreign policy pursued by the Kremlin,” Kosanov told EurasiaNet.org.

Kosanov is far from the only one worried. Kazakhstan’s pro-Russian stance is causing widespread consternation at home, where critics fret that Putin’s doctrine of intervening to protect Russian speakers in Crimea could eventually be applied to Kazakhstan – albeit in circumstances currently unimaginable, since Astana and Moscow are close allies and Russian speakers’ rights are guaranteed.

Northern Kazakhstan is home to a sizable Russian minority.

The similarities between Kazakhstan and Ukraine are blinding: both are post-Soviet states sharing long borders with Russia, with large ethnic Russian minorities (22 percent of the population in Kazakhstan’s case).

“Kazakhstan’s position is dictated not so much by creed as by fear… Events in Crimea are a possible scenario for Kazakhstan too,” Almaty-based analyst Aidos Sarym told EurasiaNet.org.

Hyperbolic headlines splashed across Kazakhstan’s press illustrate the apprehensions.

“Is Kazakhstan Threatened With Occupation Tomorrow?” thundered the Assandi Times. “Is Kazakhstan Being Dragged Into Someone Else’s War?” wondered Adam Bol magazine.

“Supporting the precedent of the actual annexation of Crimea from sovereign Ukraine, Akorda [the presidential administration] is itself encouraging possible separatist sentiments within the country,” said Kosanov.

Dosym Satpayev, director of the Almaty-based Risks Assessment Group think tank, suggested that Nazarbayev’s backing of Russia over Ukraine may represent what he sees as the lesser of two evils: for the 73-year-old president, in power for over two decades, his fear of domestic dissent seems to be overwhelming any concern that “separatist sentiments could be possible in Kazakhstan itself.”

“That means fears of revolutions and coups turned out to be higher for Kazakhstan’s leadership than fear of the threat of separatism,” he told EurasiaNet.org.

Unfazed by Nazarbayev’s pro-Kremlin stance, Western leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and French President Francois Hollande lined up to meet him in The Hague.

This suggests that Kazakhstan still retains lots of diplomatic wiggle room to get back squarely on a multi-vector track. As well as eyeing Kazakhstan’s oil and gas reserves, Western leaders may be hoping the veteran Kazakhstani leader can exert a behind-the-scenes, calming influence on the irascible Putin.

In a nod to Western sentiment and Kiev’s sensibilities, Astana has mixed pro-Russian pronouncements with statements on the need to uphold Ukraine’s sovereignty, performing what Sarym calls a “verbal balancing act.”

The nuclear summit also offered Nazarbayev a PR opportunity to note the contrasts between Kazakhstan and Ukraine, says Satpayev, and laud “Kazakhstan’s domestic political and inter-ethnic stability.”

Nazarbayev has consistently made clear that, multi-vector policy notwithstanding, he considers Russia to be Kazakhstan’s main geostrategic ally. Beyond the politics of such a position lie glaring economic realities.

Russia is Kazakhstan’s largest trading partner, last year accounting for 36 percent of imports worth 17.6 billion dollars and seven percent of exports worth 5.8 billion dollars.

The trade balance may be in Russia’s favour, but – crucially for Kazakhstan – while most trading partners buy oil, Russia is a major consumer of non-oil exports.

Kazakhstan is also tied into economic cooperation with Russia through their membership of the Customs Union, a trilateral free trade zone with Belarus which is due to sign an agreement in May to expand into the Eurasian Economic Union from 2015.

For Putin, Ukraine’s tilt westward has infused his Eurasian Union vision with even greater political significance. Nazarbayev is a strong backer of Eurasian integration (he first proposed the idea of a Eurasian Union in 1994) – but he nowadays views the political element of integration with suspicion.

In The Hague he took pains to stress that Kazakhstan has a “purely pragmatic economic interest” in the union, which, as he pointed out, allows his landlocked country tariff-free access to the Black Sea through Russia.

Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that, in addition to political and economic factors, there is a “mental factor” contributing Kazakhstan’s support for Russia, suggests Sarym: many in the Astana political elite (including Nazarbayev) have held top posts since the Soviet era, and in their worldview, “Moscow is the center of the world and the Kremlin is a cultural mecca.”

Editor’s note:  Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

When banker Darkhan Botabayev tried to book a flight on Kazakhstan’s national airline last September, what started as a routine transaction turned into an assault that shocked the nation: Botabayev lost his temper and punched the young female ticket clerk in the face.

Another violent incident occurred in October, when Kanatbay Turmaganbetov, a rural mayor in northern Kazakhstan, took exception to a woman photographing a billboard of President Nursultan Nazarbayev: He summoned her to his office where he “bashed her head against the wall, punched her several times in the chest and kicked her,” according to a local media report.“It is a social problem, because it goes beyond the boundaries of the family. It is a problem of the state.” -- Nadezhda Gladyr

Turmaganbetov was prosecuted, fined and fired; Botabayev was forced to resign as a member of Kazinvestbank’s board and blacklisted by Air Astana – after which he apologised to his victim bearing a bouquet of flowers, and donated 10,000 dollars to charity. These incidents caused an outcry in Kazakhstan, but activists point out that they aren’t isolated cases. Most disturbingly, many assaults against women take place behind closed doors.

Take Marina, who married an abusive man to escape a father who turned violent on her after she was raped at the age of 15 and became pregnant; or Irina, whose husband set fire to her mother’s flat after she fled there to escape further abuse. Some victims do not survive, like Rashida, found with a knife sticking out of her chest after her husband broke into her safe house, locked her daughters into a bedroom and stabbed her to death.

These testimonies were collected by the Podrugi (Girlfriends) Crisis Centre in Almaty, which offers psychological and legal support for victims of violence, and training for law-enforcement, education, and healthcare professionals. The organisation also is trying to force the issue up Kazakhstan’s political agenda.

When Podrugi was set up 15 years ago, domestic violence was not acknowledged as a problem or a crime, instead it was often portrayed as a private family matter. Activists’ relentless efforts have helped change public perceptions. And in last year’s state-of-the-nation address, an “alarmed” President Nazarbayev singled out the issue as one in need of attention.

“Violence is not a private problem,” Nadezhda Gladyr, Podrugi’s president, told EurasiaNet.org in an interview. “It is a social problem, because it goes beyond the boundaries of the family. It is a problem of the state.”

One landmark in the fight to raise awareness was the passing of a law against domestic violence in 2009. Legal amendments to tighten it up and offer victims more support are currently making their way through parliament.

No one knows how many women are victims of domestic violence in Kazakhstan every year. Paradoxically, official statistics (notoriously unreliable on gender violence in most countries) show that the number of reported crimes has fallen since the law was adopted, whereas a rise might have been expected with a new legal mechanism in place.

According to data from the General-Prosecutor’s Office Legal Statistics Committee, there were 783 registered cases in 2012, against 887 in 2009. Last year, 285 women died in domestic-violence-related incidents, according to Gulshara Abdykalikova, head of the National Commission for Women’s Affairs and Family Demographic Policy. Last month, she was promoted to deputy prime minister.

Podrugi representatives suggest that one-fifth of families in Kazakhstan suffer from domestic violence. Meanwhile, the national Statistics Agency’s report on crime against women in 2012 said 13,797 violent crimes against women were registered, “in many cases” incidents of domestic violence.

The stigma of reporting it is great, so “not all women talk about this, they don’t want to air their dirty laundry in public,” Abdykalikova said in February. “Society is very tolerant toward domestic violence,” Tatyana Usmanova of the Center for Supporting Women, an NGO, told a round table in January.

Even when women go to the police, complaints are often dropped for reasons ranging from family pressure to financial dependence on the alleged perpetrator. Some 20,000 women filed police complaints about domestic violence in 2011, Deputy Interior Minister Kayrat Tynybekov told parliament last year. Only a fraction of those initial complaints, however, end up in the official records.

The disparity between the number of reported crimes and the number of women seeking help is huge: In October parliament heard that 37,000 women had sought assistance from special Interior Ministry Units to Protect Women From Violence so far in 2013, and 11,000 had turned to Kazakhstan’s 28 crisis centres.

The conviction rate for domestic violence crimes appears to have fallen since the law was adopted. There were 509 convictions in 2012, against 988 in 2009 – a 48 percent drop that is far greater than the 12-percent fall in reported crimes, although convictions on lesser charges can skew the numbers. Last year 386 people received custodial sentences (76 percent of convictions).

In connection with the annual global Say NO campaign, which began Nov. 25 and concluded Dec. 10, Podrugi lobbied Astana to set up a nationwide network of state-funded shelters for victims of domestic violence. At present, non-governmental organisations operate a patchy network, and some major cities – including Almaty – do not have designated shelters. MPs have spoken out in support of a state role.

“It is important for us human rights defenders who represent women’s rights that the state should play a major role in preventing this violence, and state shelters are therefore really important to us,” Gladyr said. She is confident that Astana is “now listening to us, and they are with us.”

 Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Giving in to sustained international pressure, authoritarian Uzbekistan is opening up its cotton fields to international monitors this fall.

The International Labour Organisation has confirmed to EurasiaNet.org that it is sending a mission to monitor the Uzbek cotton harvest, which starts in mid-September.“It is in these [Western] capitals’ long-term interests to drive a harder, more public, bargain with Tashkent over its abysmal record.” -- Steve Swerdlow of HRW

“The ILO will be involved in the monitoring of the cotton harvest in Uzbekistan with the aim of preventing the use of child labour,” spokesman Hans von Rohland confirmed by email on Sep. 12. Monitoring will start “in the next few days”.

Uzbekistan has been the target in recent years of international criticism and a widespread commercial boycott over its reliance on child and forced labour to reap the cash crop. Earlier this year, the U.S. State Department assailed Uzbekistan on the forced labour issue.

The surprise news that an observer mission is being allowed into Uzbekistan – which has always denied the use of systematic state-sponsored child and forced labour, but resisted years of pressure to invite monitors in – has received a cautious welcome from watchdog groups. Nevertheless, labour rights advocates are concerned that the ILO’s mandate will not go far enough to stamp out abuses in the cotton fields.

“We are pleased that this year the International Labour Organization expects to deploy teams to Uzbekistan to monitor during the harvest,” the Cotton Campaign, a coalition lobbying for improved standards in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry, said on Sep. 9.

“We remain concerned that the ILO monitors will be accompanied by representatives of the Government of Uzbekistan and the official state union and employers’ organizations, whose presence will have a chilling effect on Uzbek citizens’ willingness to speak openly with the ILO monitors,” the Cotton Campaign statement added.

Von Rohland, the ILO spokesman, confirmed that the mission “involves cooperation with the Uzbek authorities who have the mandate to deal with child labour issues, as well as with experts from employers’ organisations and trade unions.”

Uzbek participants will receive ILO training aimed at “ensuring that the monitoring is credible and reliable,” the representative added. One goal “is increasing awareness and building up the capacity of national actors to ensure the full respect of the provisions of ratified Conventions.”

Uzbekistan has ratified two ILO conventions on child labour, but human rights activists say Tashkent routinely flouts them.

Campaigners are concerned that the observers will not gain unfettered access to the cotton fields. “It is essential that monitoring teams be comprised only of independent observers and not include any Uzbek officials,” Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch, told EurasiaNet.org.

Access without minders is essential to allow labourers to speak freely, he said, since “the Uzbek government has a well-documented record of suppressing all forms of dissent.”

Activists are also concerned that the ILO’s remit covers child labour, but not forced labour, although Uzbekistan has signed ILO forced labour conventions which would provide a legal basis to monitor it.

“The mission’s mandate should explicitly include forced labour as the entire system of the cotton harvest as it affects millions of Uzbeks rests on a state-sponsored system of coercion,” Swerdlow said.

The ILO representative countered that “the monitoring will look at child labour, including forced child labour, and important aspects of forced labour are bound to come up.”

The Cotton Campaign has already documented cases of forced labour during harvest preparations.

“During the spring 2013, Government authorities mobilized children and adults to plough and weed, and authorities beat farmers for planting onions instead of cotton,” it reported. In summer it documented “preparations to coercively mobilize nurses, teachers and other public sector workers to harvest cotton.”

Uzbekistan’s cotton harvest rests on forced labour to help farmers meet government-set quotas to pick the crop. Forced labourers can buy their way out: The going rate this year is 400,000 sums (200 dollars at the official exchange rate, or five times the minimum wage), according to the Uzmetronom.com website. Cotton pickers are paid a pittance: the rate was 150-200 sums (7-10 cents) per kilo last year, Uzmetronom said.

For Tashkent the crop, dubbed “white gold”, is a cash cow. Uzbekistan is the world’s fifth largest producer and second largest exporter of cotton, data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) shows. Cotton accounted for 11 percent of Uzbekistan’s export earnings in 2011, according to a report by the Responsible Sourcing Network lobby group.

Uzbekistan has been the target of a sustained campaign over child labour, which two years ago embarrassingly led to Gulnara Karimova, daughter of strongman president Islam Karimov and a fashion designer, being barred from New York Fashion Week.

A pledge organised by the Responsible Sourcing Network “to ensure that forced child and adult labour [in Uzbekistan] does not find its way into our products” has been signed by 131 retailers, including big-name brands like Nike and Adidas Group.

In the face of this barrage of negative publicity, Uzbekistan moved to keep younger children out of the cotton fields last year – “a hopeful reminder that pressure sometimes works, even on governments with records as authoritarian as Tashkent,” Swerdlow said.

However, a report by HRW found that this simply shifted the onus to adults and older children.

Campaigners have long accused Western governments of turning a blind eye to Tashkent’s human rights abuses due to strategic considerations. Uzbekistan sits astride the Northern Distribution Network, a key transportation route into and out of Afghanistan which is assuming fresh importance as NATO troops withdraw by the end of 2014.

Nevertheless, activists say Western governments should set aside geopolitics and seize the moment to ramp up pressure on the Uzbek government.

“It is in these [Western] capitals’ long-term interests to drive a harder, more public, bargain with Tashkent over its abysmal record,” said Swerdlow. “Ultimately, an Uzbekistan that continues to be plagued by such a wide spectrum of serious abuses risks a worse, more explosive type of instability for the country, its 30 million people, and the wider region.”

Editor’s note: Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

A group of flashmobbers took to the slopes in southeastern Kazakhstan on a crisp March morning this year to spell out a heartfelt SOS with their bodies.

In this case, SOS could have stood for “save our slopes:” the 70 activists who lay down in the snow to form the letters were protesting controversial plans to build a ski resort in an area of pristine natural beauty near the commercial capital, Almaty. Opponents were also calling attention to apparent conflicts of interest that surround the project and raise the potential for corruption.

The dispute over plans to develop the pristine slopes of Kok-Zhaylau (“green summer pasture” in Kazakh) pits the city government and powerful business interests against environmental activists and concerned citizens, who are fighting to preserve a beauty spot inside the Ile-Alatau national park. Despite the official designation, development in protected territory is legally possible in certain cases.

Supporters assert that the resort will attract tourists from as far afield as India and China, and with them a flood of investment and jobs. They say the project feeds into Kazakhstan’s strategy of promoting infrastructure projects and boosting the tourism sector to wean the economy off its current reliance on oil and gas exports.

“In 30-40 years the oil will finish, and mountain tourism could become the engine of Kazakhstan’s economy,” Bakitzhan Zhulamanov, head of Almaty City Hall’s Tourism Directorate, a driving force behind the project, argued at public hearings in January.

Opponents counter that development will damage the environment and threaten rare flora and fauna.

“What is the chief objective of national parks? To preserve biological diversity; preserve forests; preserve water resources; preserve unique types of Red Book flora and fauna which inhabit the territory of the national park?” asked Sergey Kuratov, head of the Green Salvation environmental group. “Or to develop mountain tourism, exhausting water resources; chopping down forests; annihilating rare fauna; destroying glaciers; ruining landscapes?”

The plans – which Kuratov argues contravene national law and international environmental commitments – are not finalised, but are well-advanced. A feasibility study has been conducted by two companies, Canada’s Ecosign Mountain Resort Planners (an international leader in ski resort design) and the Kok-Zhaylau firm, founded and owned by Almaty City Hall.

According to Ecosign’s website, if plans are approved, 77 ski slopes will be constructed stretching 63 kilometres, with 16 lifts capable of carrying 10,150 skiers at a time. In addition, hotels with a total of 5,736 beds will be built.

The resort is “intelligently planned according to the state-of-the-art international planning and development standards,” Ecosign says.

The goal is to attract a million visitors a year from within a four-hour flight radius of Almaty, spanning areas of India, China and Russia. Opponents argue this target is unrealistic. An influx would undoubtedly change the face of Kok-Zhaylau, whose unspoiled slopes are currently reached by most visitors via a steep three-hour hike.

Many opponents say they have no objections to building a new ski resort near Almaty (which already boasts several, including a popular spot at Shymbulak), but not inside a national park.

“We’re not trying to get rid of the plans for developing a ski resort, for developing the mountains, because […] we would also love our country to develop, but our position is that we call for all kinds of ski resorts to be placed out of the national park,” Nursultan Belkhojayev, a member of the Initiative Group of Kok-Zhaylau Protection (an unofficial body with no funding), told EurasiaNet.org.

Developers “are going to change the habitat of the endemic species” in the park, added group member Zhamilya Zhukenova. This includes the endangered snow leopard – a symbol of both Kazakhstan and the city of Almaty.

According to an open letter to President Nursultan Nazarbayev against the project signed by over 8,000 people, the area is home to 811 types of flora (including 17 listed as endangered by Kazakhstan) and 1,700 types of fauna.

Officials at Kazakhstan’s Environmental Protection Ministry told EurasiaNet.org it has no jurisdiction over Almaty’s municipal government. City Hall’s Tourism Directorate rejected environmental “misgivings” as “verbal assertions without the presentation of any proof,” it told EurasiaNet.org in a written response to a query about the issue. There will be solid environmental safeguards, it added, and international experience will be considered “to reduce to a minimum the impact on the environment.”

The Kok-Zhaylau firm said it was attentive to environmental concerns, but studies had shown that the area selected has the best climatic and geographical conditions for the resort. “We are hearing and listening to public misgivings,” it told EurasiaNet.org in writing. “This is a normal process – the exchange of opinions with society.”

The company said it was preparing to conduct environmental field research, “so at this point public misgivings about the resort’s negative impact on the environment are not supported by facts – the results of ecological studies.”

Zhulamanov has pledged that if research finds that the project will seriously damage the environment, it will be abandoned. He has promised to replant more trees than will be chopped down, and install webcams for real-time public monitoring of construction.

City Hall also is dismissive of concerns about the potential for corruption and cost-overruns, saying that the close scrutiny to which the project is subject guarantees transparency. There is big money involved: as currently envisioned, the state will invest 700 million dollars in infrastructure and seek 2.1 billion dollars in private investment.

Misgivings have also been voiced about potential conflicts of interest. According to a report published in the Alau monthly last September, Zhulamanov, the official propelling the project forward, is a long-time associate of Serzhan Zhumashev, the chairman of Capital Partners, which has built several major infrastructure projects around Almaty, including reconstructing the Shymbulak ski resort.

Capital Partners managing director Aleksandr Guzhavin stepped down to head the new Kok-Zhaylau company founded by City Hall.

Capital Partners did not respond to requests for comment, and in its written response city hall did not answer a question about potential conflicts of interest. The Kok-Zhaylau firm rejected the idea as unfounded in any “official information.”

*Editor’s note:  Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia.

This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

A group of villagers is held in thrall by omnipotent rulers, who warn that misfortune will befall the inhabitants if they defy authorities. And then, one day, the emperor is revealed to have no clothes.

On a recent Friday evening in Kazakhstan’s cultural capital, Almaty, a small audience was transfixed by the story unfolding on the stage in Avalanche, a play by Turkish playwright Tuncer Cücenoğlu.

Avalanche is a tale of a village whose inhabitants walk on eggshells because their rulers have convinced them that if they flout strict rules governing their everyday lives, they will spark an avalanche that will engulf them.

A childbirth breaks the spell: as the rulers order a woman buried alive for going into labour without authorisation, the child is born. The commotion fails to bring down a disastrous avalanche, and the leaders are revealed to have lied and manipulated to keep the people in check.

The political parallels with Kazakhstan are unmistakable. A country led by an authoritarian president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has retained power for over two decades through methods that his critics say include sham elections, restrictions on political freedoms, and the silencing of dissent.

Airing this tale about the subjugation of personal and political freedoms to the whims of powerful rulers is provocative, and the Aksaray theatre troupe performing the play has left no doubt that it is sending a political message.

This is a play about how “fear does not let people fight for their rights,” Gulnar Amanzhanova, the troupe’s director, told the audience before the performance. “Maybe it’s necessary to get rid of that fear and fight for justice.”

Last spring the theatre performed Avalanche to raise money for the victims of social unrest in the town of Zhanaozen in December 2011, when 15 people died after police opened fire on protestors in violence that shook Kazakhstan to the core.

Last summer the troupe performed Avalanche again to draw attention to the plight of its founder, 61-year-old Bolat Atabayev, then jailed on suspicion of helping to orchestrate the Zhanaozen violence.

Atabayev is now free, absolved of charges soon after Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience – but others, including opposition leader Vladimir Kozlov and dozens of inhabitants of Zhanaozen, are serving prison sentences on what their supporters maintain are politically motivated charges.

Aksaray – which is mainly a musical theatre troupe – did not initially have a political message in mind when it staged Avalanche, which it performs in Kazakh, long before the Zhanaozen turmoil. After the violence, the play assumed a new significance, the performers say.

“Why did the show change after Zhanaozen? We started to perform it differently. The show took on an edge,” actor Asan Kirkabakov told EurasiaNet.org after a recent performance. “I feel that this is my civic position. I have to perform this; I have to get this across to my audience.”

By a quirk of fate, Avalanche was first staged using a state grant allocated to Aksaray. At that time, Amanzhanova said, the troupe’s main source of funding came from the financial patronage of Kazakh oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov, a political foe of Nazarbayev’s who lives outside Kazakhstan.

That funding has now dried up. Ablyazov is currently on the run from British justice, his whereabouts unknown since he fled the UK last year after a British court ordered him jailed for concealing his assets in a fraud case.

Ablyazov has also become tied up with the real-life drama played out in Kazakhstan over the Zhanaozen turmoil: Astana has accused him of bankrolling the unrest in a bid to overthrow the state, a charge he denies.

Using the arts to send political messages is nothing new, but in Kazakhstan the theatre has more usually been utilised as a platform for promoting messages favourable to Astana than as a forum for airing messages critical of the Nazarbayev administration.

Productions at state-funded theatres, which receive generous arts subsidies, are often lavish affairs that – whether by accident or by design – feed subtly into Astana’s nation-building efforts, such as the popular showpiece opera about national hero Abylay Khan, the 18th-century warrior revered as the founder of Kazakh statehood.

Shows like this use feel-good historical stories to boost patriotic sentiments, but the theatre has also been overtly used to foster loyalty to the modern-day politician who towers over Kazakhstan’s political stage: Two years ago a play called Deep Roots that lionised Nazarbayev in a mythologised version of his life was staged in Astana.

After the recent performance of Avalanche, the Aksaray actors held a question and answer session with the fascinated audience. They explained how they feel driven to perform a play.

“Our job is to have an impact on [public] consciousness,” Almas Azhabayev explained.

In the aftermath of the Zhanaozen rioting, authorities have cracked down on dissent, resulting in the closure of Kazakhstan’s most vocal opposition party, Alga! and the shuttering of independent media outlets.

Are the actors not afraid of suffering retribution from the authorities, one member of the audience asked – a pertinent question given that many who voiced solidarity with the protestors in Zhanaozen later faced unpleasant consequences.

“We have nothing to fear,” Kirkabakov replied. “We’ve done nothing illegal. We’ve done nothing against our authorities.”

*Editor’s note: Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia.

This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

In the official narrative of Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet history, President Nursultan Nazarbayev is lauded for fostering widespread prosperity while maintaining inter-ethnic harmony.

Lately, though, the official paeans to Nazarbayev’s virtues haven’t been able to drown out voices of doubt about Kazakhstan’s development path, voices that reflect an ever-widening rich-poor gap and urban-rural divide.

One relatively minor, but illustrative incident occurred in January: authorities jailed a young man who made a rude gesture at an official motorcade in the northern city of Pavlodar.

Outside official circles, the incident was seen as an outgrowth of the frustration felt by the considerable segment of society that is being bypassed by the country’s energy boom. This is precisely the type of sentiment that provided the fuel for violent protests last month in Azerbaijan, another oil-rich country with a gaping social divide.If a political force that could mobilise [the disaffected] emerged, it would be a very powerful tool.

There is an ample dose of truth in Kazakhstan’s founding myth: the country during Nazarbayev’s more than two decades in power, has made significant economic strides, thanks to an energy-export boom. Kazakhstan registered five percent growth in 2012. GDP stands at 11,357 dollars per capita, and average salaries are 670 dollars per month, very respectable by regional standards.

But wealth is far from evenly distributed in Kazakhstan: a few have concentrated vast riches in their hands, while many struggle to get by. Kazakhstan’s richest 50 people are worth a combined 24 billion dollars, according to Forbes Kazakhstan. The rich list features many people close to the president, including his son-in-law and daughter, Timur Kulibayev, and Dinara Kulibayeva (both billionaires), his daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva, and his grandson Nurali Aliyev (both millionaires).

As the rich get richer, a middle class is also taking shape. Altynshash Smail, a 35-year-old mother of four and married to a successful businessman, is typical among those who consider themselves comfortable, rather than wealthy. She is grateful to Nazarbayev for giving those with initiative a chance to realise their dreams.

“There’s money in Kazakhstan, and there are prospects,” she told EurasiaNet.org. “The president has provided such good opportunities… I think Kazakhstan’s in a very good position.”

Smail was out shopping on a recent weekday afternoon at Almaty’s Esentai Mall, whose opening last year was hailed by enthusiasts as a sign of Kazakhstani citizens’ increased spending power.

Prosperity is currently concentrated in Almaty, the financial centre, and Astana, the glitzy capital. But wealth is steadily spreading out to the regions – to energy hubs like Atyrau and Aktobe, along with other provincial cities.

On a Saturday morning in bustling Shymkent in southern Kazakhstan, another chic shopping mall, Mega, was doing a roaring trade. And contented mall rats were full of praise for their leader.

“I like the president,” said student Margo Stepovaya, who was drinking coffee with friends. “He’s elevated Kazakhstan.”

Yet in Shymkent, and elsewhere, dissenting voices are never far off. The village of Badam is only a jolting half-hour bus ride from the boutiques of Shymkent’s Mega mall, but it feels more like half-a-world away. There, prosperity is something people only hear about on television.

“No one’s dying from hunger, but this is a rural area, salaries are low… and pensions are tiny,” said one pensioner who gave only his first name, Marat. “To be honest, people are dissatisfied with the current [political] leadership, but they’re afraid to say so.”

The pensioner had harsh words for Nazarbayev, castigating him for preferring to posture on the world stage while “inside the country his people live at the lowest level.”

Another villager, 60-year-old plumber Amirkhan Tuleyev, was less keen to blame the president for the problems of rural life.

“You can see we’re not prospering,” he said, gesturing at the muddy, potholed lanes and dilapidated housing. Tuleyev tends to blame corrupt, incompetent local officials rather than the man at the top, whose “vision is right, but it doesn’t reach us.”

Amangeldy Kalybek of Shymkent’s PRISMA youth activist group sees such attitudes as symptomatic of “a crisis of confidence in the [local] authorities,” who are failing to tackle problems such as unemployment, poor infrastructure and access to medical care and easy access to water.

Only 24 percent of Kazakhstan’s rural population had running water in 2010, according to a WHO/UNICEF sanitation report published last year.

Poor living conditions and prospects have sparked a stampede from villages to towns. “Young people in villages are protesting with their feet,” analyst Dosym Satpayev, director of the Almaty-based Kazakhstan Risks Assessment Group think-tank, told EurasiaNet.org. Yet amid stiff competition for good jobs, they risk joining the ranks of the disaffected urban underclass.

In oil-rich western Kazakhstan, overt signs of disaffection have emerged. The region witnessed independent Kazakhstan’s worst ever bout of social unrest in 2011, when 15 civilians died in clashes with police in the depressed town of Zhanaozen, and the region has seen several terrorist attacks – “also a form of protest,” Satpayev says.

One railway engineer living in a small town a couple of hour’s drive from the oil city of Aktobe – where Kazakhstan’s first ever suicide bombing occurred in 2011 – says the mood locally is “negative”.

“People increasingly don’t like Nazarbayev,” he told EurasiaNet.org by telephone on condition of anonymity, citing familiar complaints about corruption, nepotism, unemployment and high prices.

“The expression of protest moods in Kazakhstan is quite high,” Satpayev said, pointing to small, sporadic protests – mainly over socioeconomic grievances – that have occurred around the country of late.

The opposition is weak and fragmented and has failed to capitalise on the protest mood, Satpayev points out, but “if a political force that could mobilise [the disaffected] emerged, it would be a very powerful tool.”

Nazarabayev’s administration is aware of the widening rich-poor gap, and has expressed a desire to close it. In the Kazakhstan-2050 development strategy launched last year, socio-economic development and raising living standards are identified as key strategic priorities.

The affluent, too, are not blind to the widening social and economic divide, and, quietly, some admit that things aren’t as rosy as officials depict. Back at Almaty’s Esentai Mall, one banker, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that Kazakhstan “could do better” for the poor.

“Everything is not really stable and perfect, you know,” she added with a wry smile.

*Editor’s note: Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia.

This story was originally published on EurasiaNet.org.

Newly released documents appear to make a connection between executives from a Swedish company accused of bribing its way into Uzbekistan’s telecoms market and Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of the country’s strongman, Islam Karimov.

Two separate bribery and money-laundering probes have been ongoing in Sweden and Switzerland since last fall. Executives at the company under investigation, TeliaSonera, a Swedish-Finnish venture, insist they have “zero tolerance against corruption” and have repeatedly denied making bribes, as well as having any knowledge of dealings with Karimov or his family members.

But evidence recently submitted to a Swedish court by prosecutors appears to undermine these claims.

The Swedish graft probe was sparked by an investigative report aired last fall by broadcaster SVT. The documentation includes e-mails from company executives stating that they believed their negotiating partner to be an intermediary of Gulnara Karimova, a flamboyant and controversial figure once described in a Wikileaked U.S. diplomatic cable as the “single most hated person” in Uzbekistan.

TeliaSonera is standing its ground. In a Jan. 8 statement, it reiterated that its innocence will be proven and “the ongoing investigations will clarify that we have not bribed anyone, or participated in money laundering.”

The TeliaSonera probe is focusing on events in 2007, the year when the company is suspected of making improper payments in order to gain access to Uzbekistan’s cell phone market via the acquisition of a stake in the company that became Ucell.

Specifically, TeliaSonera is alleged to have made shady payments of around 333 million dollars to what the broadcaster SVT described as “a small, one-woman company in a tax haven” – Takilant Limited, run out of Gibraltar by an Uzbek national – Gayane Avakyan, a woman who has been photographed in public in Karimova’s company and who is believed to be an associate of the president’s daughter.

Among the emails that are drawing scrutiny are exchanges between company representatives and Bekhzod Akhmedov, described by a TeliaSonera executive at the time as Karimova’s intermediary. In them, Akhmedov talks TeliaSonera representatives through the details of the agreement that would shortly secure its entry into Uzbekistan’s mobile phone market.

In another e-mail, dated March 2007, Serkan Elden, then CEO of TeliaSonera subsidiary Fintur Holdings (he was later dismissed) believed he was dealing with the president’s daughter’s intermediary, referring to Akhmedov as “the telecom representative of Gulnara Karimova”. Keen to forge links with the ruling family, Elden added that “Lola Karimova, the No. 2 daughter, (i.e. President Karimov’s younger daughter), is willing to meet with us.”

That e-mail was sent to an “S Escudero” (addressed by Elden as “Stan”), who responded that he had sounded out Uzbek diplomats in Washington about TeliaSonera’s ambitions, and Tashkent “views our application favorably”.

The addressee’s identity has yet to be confirmed, but the recipient appears to have the same or strikingly similar name as Stanley Escudero, a retired American diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan in the 1990s, and later became a consultant in the Central Asian and Caucasus regions.

Karimova is known for her extensive financial interests, prompting a description of her as a “robber baron” in another Wikileaked cable. In addition to reported involvement in business ventures, she pursues multiple other professional activities, from fashion designer and pop diva to diplomat, serving as Uzbekistan’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.

Karimova has not publicly commented on the corruption investigation, nor responded to numerous requests for comment submitted by EurasiaNet.org. Requests for comment sent to the e-mail addresses indicated in the documents for Escudero, Elden and Akhmedov received no response. Avakyan could not be reached for comment.

The documents submitted to the Swedish court also show that the Uzbek government agency that issued licenses and phone numbers to TeliaSonera has denied any wrongdoing, and Tashkent has protested to the Swedish government over the conduct of the investigation and media coverage.

TeliaSonera has acknowledged knowing that Akhmedov, the middleman, was head of a rival telecoms firm that was once owned by Gulnara Karimova, O’zdunrobita. She sold it to Russian telecoms giant MTS, which last year became embroiled in a major dispute with Tashkent in another scandal on Uzbekistan’s telecoms market also featuring Akhmedov, whom Tashkent accused of corruption before seizing MTS’s assets in Uzbekistan (a decision since overturned).

That case – which remains unresolved – sparked separate and still ongoing money laundering investigation in Switzerland against four Uzbek nationals including Akhmedov, Avakyan and two other associates of Gulnara Karimova.

TeliaSonera is also acknowledging “much speculation and rumors” over whether Avakyan and Takilant were serving as fronts for other interests. “Various rumors around who could be part of this group circulated, including Gulnara Karimova,” TeliaSonera’s Jan. 8 statement said, but in the due diligence process “we could not identify any other beneficiaries than Gayane Avakyan.”

Editor’s note: Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia.

This story originally appeared on Eurasianet.org.

“One Fatherland, one Fate, one Leader of the Nation” – so says the slogan beside the smiling face of President Nursultan Nazarbayev on giant billboards looming over the streets in Kazakhstan. They are promoting a new holiday on Dec. 1: First President’s Day, when Kazakhstan will fete its longtime leader.

Astana – the glitzy capital, and Nazarbayev’s brainchild – will be the focal point of celebrations. There, Nazarbayev University will host Nazarbayev readings that will ponder the president’s “strategic vision and outstanding leadership”. Hearts and minds will be won with 830,000 dollars-worth of largesse distributed in cash to socially-vulnerable groups in Astana. Babies born there on the auspicious day will be awarded romper suits emblazoned with a holiday logo.

Nationwide, there will be concerts, exhibitions, and competitions (one schoolboy has already won a quiz on the life and times of Nazarbayev). As Yerlan Aryn, governor of northern Kazakhstan’s Pavlodar Region, explained in a broadcast to over 150 local schools: “Great history… is made by great people,” and Nazarbayev is “a born leader (who) showed resoluteness and assumed responsibility for the Kazakhstanis’ fate”.

For critics, the holiday serves as evidence that a cult of personality is burgeoning around Nazarbayev, who already has been immortalised on the silver screen, on stage, as a children’s fairytale hero, and in statues.

In his third decade in power, 72-year-old Nazarbayev is one of the world’s longest serving leaders. Despite unconfirmed rumors about health concerns, he shows no sign of preparing to step down.

Last year, he won a 95.5-percent share of the vote in a presidential election deemed unfair by international observers (like every other vote in post-independence Kazakhstan). If Nazarbayev – who assumed power in 1989 during the Soviet era, and became president of the independent state in 1991 – serves his term to 2016, he will have run his country for over a quarter-century.

Some observers in Kazakhstan see dangerous parallels with the Arab Spring, but Nazarbayev’s aides reject similarities. They point to Nazarbayev’s genuine popularity among ordinary people, which critics counter is the result of a steady drip-feed of pro-Nazarbayev propaganda.

Nazarbayev’s supporters see him as a strong leader who steered Kazakhstan out of post-Soviet economic meltdown and possible political disintegration during the 1990s, making possible the oil-fuelled prosperity and political stability of the 2000s. As presidential adviser Yermukhamet Yertysbayev put it last year: “There will be no second Nazarbayev.”

His critics see him as an increasingly out-of-touch autocrat. He is the only citizen exempt from presidential term limits, a privilege granted under the 2010 Leader of the Nation law which gave him and his family lifelong immunity and awarded Nazarbayev the right to intervene in policy-making following his potential retirement as chief executive.

Granting Nazarbayev a permanent political role was an apparent move to smooth the transition to a post-Nazarbayev future – which analysts see as fraught with uncertainty.

“All of our political system, our constitution, is very closely connected with only one person,” Dr. Dosym Satpayev, director of the Kazakhstan Risks Assessment Group, told EurasiaNet.org, pointing to the weakness of other political institutions like parliament (where all deputies are Nazarbayev loyalists) and political parties.

His one-man system may become a headache for his eventual successor, says Satpayev: “It’s very difficult to organize decentralisation in a very centralised system.” There is a risk that “this super-centralised system will collapse”.

Cracks have already started to appear in Kazakhstan’s socio-political framework. Stability is Nazarbayev’s watchword, but 2011 witnessed Kazakhstan’s first terrorist attacks and – more damagingly for Nazarbayev’s personal legacy – fatal unrest in the town of Zhanaozen last December.

This indicated a degree of social disaffection that officials in Astana have yet to publicly acknowledge. Ultimately, it was Kazakhstan’s opposition that took the political rap for the unrest.

Vladimir Kozlov, leader of the unregistered Alga! party was jailed (to international opprobrium) for allegedly inciting it. Moves are afoot to close his party – one of the few genuine opposition voices left in Kazakhstan, though deemed “extremist” by prosecutors – and around 40 independent media outlets, including the well-known Respublika and Vzglyad newspapers.

Nazarbayev administration officials like to point to political stability and economic prosperity as his legacy, but opponents say stability is a veneer brought about at the cost of silencing dissenting voices.

Vzglyad editor Igor Vinyavskiy sees the clampdown on the Alga! Party and media outlets as linked to the post-Nazarbayev future. “The main goal is to purge the field (of dissent) for a handover of power,” he remarked in a commentary posted on his Facebook page.

There has been much speculation about who will become Kazakhstan’s second president, and – with Nazarbayev showing no signs of grooming a successor – the field is open, lacking a front-runner.

For some analysts, more important than the successor’s identity is the weakness of the political system that Nazarbayev will leave behind. This weakness could give rise to a destabilising struggle over political power and economic assets among rival elites, Satpayev suggested.

“He (Nazarbayev) has time to present some successor,” Satpayev said. “But he hasn’t time to organise some modernisation of the political system of Kazakhstan – to realise some reform for increasing the stability of this political system after him.”

*Editor’s note: Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia.

This story was originally published by Eurasianet.org.

Religious life in Kazakhstan features a glaring dichotomy these days. Officials in Astana tout the country as a bastion of toleration, yet they are making it harder for those practicing what are deemed non-traditional faiths to worship openly.

In late October, Kayrat Lama Sharif, chairman of the government’s Religious Affairs Agency, announced the outcome of a year-long process set in motion by the adoption of a controversial religion law last fall. The legislation gave religious denominations and faith-based civic associations one year to re-register under stringent new criteria, or face closure.

The results were stark: President Nursultan Nazarbayev used to proudly proclaim that Kazakhstan welcomed over 40 officially-recognised faiths, but that number has been slashed by about 60 percent, from 46 to 17. Meanwhile, roughly one-third of all faith-based civic organisations face elimination, leaving 3,088 against the previous total of 4,551.

In an interview with the Kazakhstanskaya Pravda daily, Lama Sharif said the law aimed to increase Astana’s sway over religious matters. He also insisted that Kazakhstan – where about 70 percent of the population identifies itself as Muslim, and another 25 percent as Orthodox Christian – “is for the entire world an example of interfaith harmony.”

State media have published letters from religious leaders to Nazarbayev (who hosts regular congresses of clerics from around the world to promote interfaith dialogue and tolerance) hailing the reform and lauding Kazakhstan’s credentials as a haven of religious freedom.

Yet, leaders of religious minority groups endured a nail-biting few months as they waited to hear if their respective groups would survive the re-registration process.

Speaking to EurasiaNet.org after a lively Sunday morning service at Almaty’s Sun Bok Ym Pentecostal Church, Pastor Vasiliy Shegay said his group had its registration application turned down initially, but gained approval on a second attempt. At the same time, its sister church faces closure.

He said his reservations that the law would “infringe our rights” had not been borne out. “We Christians are treated well,” he said.

Astana divides religions into “traditional” (including Islam, Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and Buddhism) and “non-traditional” – which includes a broad spectrum of smaller denominations, some with strong missionary elements, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baptists, Hare Krishnas, Ahmadi Muslims and Sufis.

“Non-traditional” religious groups were under pressure well before the adoption of the religion law – but raids on places of worship are now being stepped up. At a Protestant church in Astana in October, pastors were accused of driving a member insane, harbouring extremist literature and giving worshippers a red drink containing “hallucinogenic ingredients inducing euphoria”. Worshippers deemed in breach of the law are usually fined.

Critics believe disproportionate police efforts are being directed against religious communities with no known extremist agenda, and worry that punitive measures will push some pious Muslims underground.

“One of the problems is that when people have an interest in hiding their activities from the state because the state is being very intrusive, then it does become more difficult for the government to know what they’re up to,” Felix Corley of the Oslo-based Forum 18 religious freedoms watchdog told EurasiaNet.org.

The new law sets what critics see as a much higher bar for religious groups on membership requirements, calling for minimum membership of 5,000 nationally, 500 regionally, and 50 locally. The law also contains provisions covering the vetting of religious literature and tightens guidelines for the training of clergy.

It contains no ban on wearing the hijab, although it is officially discouraged (Nazarbayev says it is not a Kazakh tradition). Controversially, it prohibits prayer in state buildings, including government offices, educational establishments, and military facilities.

Some critics say the religion law can be used as a tool for Astana to exercise control over what should be private choices about faith. They also contend the law contravenes Kazakhstan’s international commitments to uphold freedom of conscience.

“Formally, under the law, there is freedom (of conscience), but in effect it is hard to exercise it in our realities,” said one young member of a Protestant church in Almaty (which did receive registration), speaking on condition of anonymity. The closure of religious groups is a “purge”, he suggested, intended “to abolish religions that are inconvenient to the state”.

Moving forward, the law gives officials a powerful tool to enforce a state-designed religious orthodoxy. “Waves of pressure are continuing on religious communities, and the government is trying to funnel religion into channels that it can control,” Corley said.

Astana is seeking “a completely controlled religious environment,” he added, “but history shows that it just doesn’t work like that.”

*Editor’s note: Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia.

This story originally appeared on Eurasianet.org.

The recent travails in Uzbekistan of Russian cellphone giant MTS – hit by employee arrests and a three-month suspension – highlight the perils for foreigners of doing business in Central Asia’s most populous country.

Although Tashkent tries to project an investor-friendly image, experts say pervasive corruption makes it difficult, if not impossible for most foreign entities to enjoy a stable operating environment.

Tashkent suspended the operations of Uzdunrobita, MTS’s Uzbekistan arm, on Jul. 17 for 10 working days, accusing it of using equipment illegally. On Jul. 30, the suspension was extended for three months. Tashkent has also accused MTS representatives of engaging in criminal activity, including evading 1.3 million dollars in taxes and violating Uzbekistan’s Byzantine currency regulations.

Five managers – including Russian citizen Radik Dautov, who was appointed Uzdunrobita’s acting head after director Bekzod Akhmedov fled Uzbekistan – are under arrest. On Jul. 25, Russian officials said they had voiced their “concern” to Tashkent about Dautov’s detention. Six days later, Moscow urged a resolution to an “ever more acute” dispute.

MTS (owned by Russian oligarch Vladimir Yevtushenkov) denies being in breach of the law and is fighting back, condemning “the use of the tactic of intimidation and arrest of Uzdunrobita staff”, and assailing the “ungrounded attacks on a Russian investor’s business”.

The shutdown sparked an exodus of its 9.5 million clients to rivals amid frenzied speculation about the future of Uzdunrobita, which had a 40-percent share of the cellphone market among Uzbekistan’s 29.5-million population.

Observers doubt that a dispute over equipment is really at the root of MTS’s troubles in Uzbekistan. General malaise amid the smoke-and-mirrors nature of Uzbekistan’s economy is fueling such scepticism, as are recent case histories, particularly the rapid demise of the conglomerate Zeromax.

Analysts believe that the most lucrative business opportunities in the country are controlled by a coterie of movers and shakers close to President Islam Karimov, key among them Gulnara Karimova, the president’s daughter whose worth was estimated at 570 million dollars by the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2010.

“Commercial interests are closely tied with political elite in Uzbekistan, although often direct ownership of businesses is hard to trace,” Lilit Gevorgyan, regional analyst at IHS Global Insight, told EurasiaNet.org in e-mailed remarks.

“For those entering the Uzbek market, it is pretty clear that without the continuous endorsement of a very narrow political elite led by President Islam Karimov carrying out business in Uzbekistan bears high risks.”

Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables have detailed the sway of the well-connected over Uzbekistan’s economy. One 2008 cable memorably described the rush for assets as “a fairly brazen, at times seemingly desperate grab by (Uzbekistan’s) elites for portions of the Uzbek economic pie”.

It also spoke of “a steady drumbeat of complaints from foreign investors” – and four years on, the list of disappointed investors continues to grow, encompassing Western, Turkish, and Asian firms, as well as Russian ones like MTS.

The case of UK-based company Oxus Gold illustrates the risks faced by bold investors venturing into Uzbekistan’s high-stakes economy. Following sustained pressure (including the imprisonment of a company metallurgist for 12 years on espionage charges), Oxus agreed to sell its 50-percent stake in the Amantaytau Goldfields mining operation to its Uzbek partners last year – but its troubles did not end there.

Oxus accused the buyers of understating the value of its share and remains locked in litigation, seeking 400 million dollars at international arbitration over what company lawyer Robert Amsterdam has bitterly described as “an ongoing campaign to fabricate a reason to steal the last foreign assets in the mining industry in Uzbekistan”.

Turkish-owned businesses have also come to grief. The once popular Demir supermarket in downtown Tashkent stands shuttered after its owners quit Uzbekistan amid disagreements with authorities; investors in another Tashkent store, Turkuaz, fared worse: one is serving a three-year jail sentence on tax evasion charges, seven other Turks were convicted on the charge, but deported, and Turkuaz (renamed Toshkent) is doing a roaring trade under Uzbek management.

The list goes on: Indian textile firm Spentex Industries this spring lodged a 100-million-dollar compensation claim with Tashkent after “bankruptcy was thrust upon it;” Denmark’s Carlsberg suspended operations this year over what it described as a “shortage of raw materials”.

In this toxic investment environment, Tashkent launched a privatization drive in May, with 497 assets in sectors including energy, metallurgy, agriculture and industry up for grabs.

According to official statistics, growth is robust: the Asian Development Bank says Uzbekistan’s economy grew by 8.3 percent in 2011 and forecasts 8-percent growth this year. Nevertheless, without cast-iron guarantees investors are likely to be leery of stumping up cash.

Tashkent says entrepreneurs’ rights are secured by legislation, which includes guarantees against confiscation without compensation. A presidential decree issued on Jul. 16 also aims to ease the regulatory environment by simplifying often baffling red tape, mainly concerning tax and licensing procedures. Nevertheless, businessmen privately complain that in Uzbekistan laws are at best applied unevenly.

The country fares poorly in international rankings, languishing near the bottom of the World Bank’s Doing Business 2012 report (166th out of 183 states) and Transparency International’s 2011 corruption ranking (177th out of 182).

Uzbekistan’s business environment has even hit Washington’s foreign policy agenda: the United States has urged Tashkent to address “pervasive corruption issues”, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake said on Jul. 24, and simplify “restrictive currency conversion laws”.

Another defining feature of Uzbekistan’s economy is the thriving black market, where a dollar fetches a third more than the official rate of around 1,900 Uzbek soms.

Against this troubled background, “the MTS case will only add to Uzbekistan’s already tainted investment destination image,” Gevorgyan said. “For now, the protection of business rights remains weak and there are no high expectations that Karimov is going to bring positive changes any time soon.”

*Editor’s note: Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia.

This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

An attempt to render justice is quickly turning into a PR debacle for Kazakhstan. Troubling allegations that torture was employed to obtain incriminating statements is engulfing the trial of 37 individuals accused in connection with a deadly riot last December in the western oil town of Zhanaozen.

The torture claims are sparking calls from human rights groups to suspend the trial, which began on Mar. 27 in Aktau, 150 kilometres from Zhanaozen. At least 16 people died in the Zhanaozen confrontation on Dec. 16, when police opened fire on protestors.

“The alleged widespread and serious ill-treatment of the defendants undermines the ability to guarantee them a fair trial, which should lead a court to halt proceedings,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement distributed Apr. 23.

Officials in Astana maintain they have a zero-tolerance attitude toward torture and are pledging that the allegations will be thoroughly investigated. “The Government takes any allegation of mistreatment seriously,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Altay Abibullayev told EurasiaNet.org in an e-mailed statement.

Still, it appears the burgeoning scandal could result in another black eye for Kazakhstan’s democratization record. The entire Zhanaozen episode has done considerable damage to Astana’s efforts to shape Kazakhstan’s image as a modernizing, stable and law-governed state.

More directly, the torture allegations come after Yerlan Idrissov, Kazakhstan’s ambassador to Washington, asserted in an Apr. 6 commentary published on The National Interest website that the Zhanaozen trials “will prove to the world that Kazakhstan respects the rule of law, believes in an open and transparent system of government, and does not tolerate violence against its citizens.”

In the Aktau proceedings, claims of systematic violence by members of the security forces, several of whom were named in court, include beatings, threats of sexual assault, water torture and threats against family members. These methods, the accused alleged, were used to extract confessions, or incriminating statements against others.

“(The interrogator) suffocated me with a trash bag, he strangled [me] – when the bag’s taken away your eyes pop out and you can’t breathe and you start breathing deeply, and when you breathe deeply your head spins,” Roza Tuletayeva testified on Apr. 16.

A second interrogator “lifted me up and slapped my face; he lifted me by pulling my hair upward,” she added. An audio file of her testimony was smuggled out of the courtroom, where the judge has used his legal prerogative to ban recording devices. The file was subsequently posted on YouTube.

Tuletayeva is one of 18 defendants who are former employees of the OzenMunayGaz energy company, which was at the centre of a prolonged labour dispute last year: the strike ended up becoming the catalyst for the deadly rioting. A prominent figure during the strike, Tuletayeva is among those accused of being a ringleader of the unrest, which prosecutors say was premeditated. She faces up to a 10- year prison term.

Abibullayev, the Foreign Ministry representative, pointed out that the government has already shown a willingness to punish authorities who acted excessively.

“Local officials have already been charged in relation to the treatment of detainees following the violence in Zhanaozen. Further allegations will be thoroughly investigated and more charges brought if they are found to be true. There is no place for such conduct in a modern society,” Abibullayev said.

Civil society activists in Kazakhstan began calling for a halt to the trial back on Apr. 16, while demanding the opening of an investigation.

A statement released by the activists detailed some of the torture claims: defendant Shabdal Utkilov alleged he was suffocated with a plastic bag; Maksat Dosmagambetov and Naryn Dzharylgasynov said their ribs were broken in beatings; Yesengeldy Abdrakhmanov claimed he had cold water poured over him and interrogators jumped on his chest; and Tanatar Kaliyev testified to being beaten around the face with a stool.

Another defendant, Parakhat Dyusenbayev, whose father was killed when police fired on demonstrators, said he was hit and threatened with sexual assault, according to a report carried by the Guljan news website.

“What has rattled me more than anything is that we, who didn’t beat anyone up, are sitting in the cage (the dock in court) and those with bloody hands are sitting in the (court)room,” Dyusenbayev said.

The presiding judge, Orazbay Nagashybayev, has ordered a probe: on Apr. 16 he demanded that Zhanaozen’s prosecutor’s office investigate and respond within 10 days. Contacted on Apr. 20, an official at the regional prosecutor’s office said he could not immediately comment on the investigation over the telephone.

Even before the results are known, the investigation is coming under fire. “It is absurd to think that the same prosecutor’s office involved in the investigation in which some of the abuse is alleged to have taken place is going to carry out an impartial review of the defendant’s claims,” Mihra Rittmann, HRW’s Central Asia researcher, was quoted as saying in the HRW statement.

To date, authorities have acknowledged and acted on one case of abuse in custody: that of Bazarbay Kenzhebaev, who died after a beating in detention last December. The officers who inflicted his injuries have not been identified, but the head of the detention center is to stand trial on a negligence charge. He will be among five police officers going on trial on Apr. 27 accused of crimes related to the deaths of demonstrators.

Concerning the Zhanaozen violence, the number of protestors being tried outnumbers the number of law-enforcement personnel facing punishment by roughly a 10-to-1 margin. In addition to the 37 on trial in Aktau, the trial of 12 defendants opened on Apr. 17 in the village of Shetpe, where one man was shot dead by police on Dec. 17, when unrest spread from Zhanaozen.

The date of another trial involving individuals accused of inciting violence in Zhanaozen by “fomenting social discord” has yet to be set. The defendants in those proceedings include Vladimir Kozlov, leader of the unregistered Alga! party, and labor rights activists who were advising striking energy-sector workers before the dispute descended into deadly violence.

Editor’s note: Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia.

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.