The 3rd Meeting of State Parties on the TPNW Treaty of the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons watched a 40-minute documentary, ‘I Want to Live On: The Untold Stories of the Polygon,’ on the impact of nuclear testing on the community of Kazakhstan’s Semey region. Credit: Katsuhiro Asagiri

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 11 2025 (IPS)

The documentary I Want to Live On: The Untold Stories of the Polygon exposes the lifelong impacts of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan’s Semey region.

As a third-generation survivor born in Semey, international relations legal expert based in New York, Togzhan Yessenbayeva said she was aware of the “profound impact” that nuclear testing has had on her community and environment. She remarked that the tests in Semipalatinsk have left a “legacy of challenges” that people must deal with to this day.

“I think that attention from the United Nations… is not just important; it is essential. In general, a global acknowledgment of nuclear weapons and an urgent need to address it,” she said. “As we can see from this movie, it is a very hard topic to talk about. But I believe that the Third Meeting of State Parties serves as a global platform for international organizations and experts to highlight the necessity of nuclear disarmament.”

Yessenbayeva continued, “I think it’s crucial to work together to be free of nuclear threats, and we have to say this [at] a global platform. It is our national tragedy. I am calling it a tragedy because for our Kazakh people, not only for the Semey region or east Kazakhstan, but everyone has to know our tragedy.”

I Want to Live On held its very first premiere at the United Nations during the 2nd Meeting of State Parties on the Treaty of the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in 2023. The 20-minute cut of the film was well received in raising awareness of the impact of the tests conducted in the Semipalatinsk Centre on local communities in east Kazakhstan.

This year’s 3rd Meeting of State Parties on the TPNW also hosted the first-ever screening of the full 40-minute cut of the documentary on March 3, in a premiere organized by the Permanent Mission of Kazakhstan, the Center for International Security and Policy (CISP), and Soka Gakkai International (SGI).

The documentary prominently centers on interviews with second- and third-generation survivors from the town of Semey and neighboring areas, who faced and lived with the consequences of the Semipalatinsk nuclear testing site, also known as the Polygon.

CISP founder Alimzhan Akmetov, who also directed the film, said at the screening that building trust with the interviewees was a critical process, and it was only once that could be established that they agreed to sit down with him and his team. He noted that there were people they approached who refused to get involved. He says such behavior is, in part, due to a sense of frustration with past experiences where their stories were shared before, but nothing came of it.

CISP and SGI decided to screen both versions of the documentary in the UN to ensure that the issue of nuclear disarmament is pushed to the forefront of awareness, Akmetov told IPS.

“We thought, as I personally believe, the disarmament forum, in particular the TPNW conference, is the best place to show a film about the consequences of testing in Kazakhstan,” Akmetov said.

“Because people who are involved in the disarmament issues… they can share it wider, further. In the UN, many countries participate in the disarmament forum. So it could be disseminated more effectively than if I showed it only in Kazakhstan or only in Japan,” he said.

Since the 2023 premiere, Akmetov and his partners have since screened the 20-minute version in other countries, including Germany and Ireland, at these states’ invitation. The 40-minute version will soon be screened in Kazakhstan and Japan with the support of SGI.

As the film’s sponsor, SGI’s involvement is in line with one of their key missions to advocate for a culture of peace, doing so through building a coalition for nuclear abolition, according to their Executive Director of Peace and Global Issues, Tomohiko Aishima. They have done so by spotlighting the global impact of nuclear weapons, especially in countries where nuclear testing was conducted. SGI has worked towards providing nuclear survivors platforms to share their experiences beyond their region and onto the global stage.

In the documentary, the survivors share the challenges their community has faced due to the Polygon. Health issues ranging from speech and vision impairment to cancer have plagued the community, as the survivors spoke of watching friends and family members suffer through physical maladies. Cancer rates are high in the communities, with children and adolescents suffering from leukemia.

The documentary also touches on the psychological toll that the tests and prolonged radiation exposure had on the community, through the high suicide rate of suicides during the testing period. It was particularly high among children and adolescents. While the cause behind the suicides is not stated, and research into the phenomenon from that era is severely limited, several survivors attributed it to the nuclear tests.

“Hanging was called the disease of the Polygon,” one interviewee said.

Compared to the 20-minute version, the 40-minute film features additional testimonies from second- and third-generation survivors. Interspersed with these testimonies is archival footage of the tests and the immediate environmental impact. They stand in stark contrast to the reality that the survivors lived through. The archival footage clips show what was being said at the time about the tests, including claims made that radiation levels in the soil and water would eventually fall to safe levels.

One clip shows scientists testing the radiation levels of Chagan Lake located in the Abai region, and the narrator claiming that radiation fell to safe levels after fifty days. To this day, the Chagan Lake is highly radioactive, also being referred to as the ‘Atomic Lake.’

The 20-minute version of I Want to Live On can be watched on YouTube.

This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

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Kazakhstan's anti-gender bill aims for the complete erasure of concepts of gender and gender equality, according to rights activists. Courtesy: CC by 2.0/Steve Evans

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 10 2020 (IPS)

 The coronavirus lockdown in Kazakhstan, and the resultant limited public oversight and limited publication engagement, has paved the way for the government to propose amendments to the country’s laws around gender that could see the exclusion of the rights of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ)  community. 

Aigerim Kamidola, Legal Advocacy Officer, ‘Feminita’ Kazakhstan Feminist Initiative in Kazakhstan, spoke to IPS this week after presenting her organisation at the Jul. 9 United Nations panel on sustainable development for LGBTI people in times of COVID19. She was one of a group of advocates from around the world who shared their opinions and experiences about how the community has been affected during the crisis. 

She explains how the period of the lockdown was used for “the introduction of amendments and additions to legislative acts of Kazakhstan on family and gender policy”.

“The Draft Law (an anti-gender bill) proposes amendments to the law on state guarantees on equal rights and equal opportunities for men and women. The anti-gender bill aims for the complete erasure of concepts of gender and gender equality. The only outcome of the bill is to erase the word “gender” from the national legislation,” Kamidola says.

“And through the comments of some MPs initiating this legislation, we see that the rationale they provided was that there are “too many genders” and that they have the intention to reinstate two sexes.”

But Kamidola points out “the general public discourse in Kazakhstan is very homophobic and transphobic”.

“On a state-level the subject is a taboo so state officials normally do not speak of it.”

Her organisation works with lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer (LBTQ) women on issues of discrimination and hate crimes based on sexual orientation and gender identity in Kazakhstan.

Inter Press Service (IPS): How has COVID-19 impacted the LBTQ community in Kazakhstan?  

Aigerim Kamidola (AK):  We’ve seen two main trends in Kazakhstan regarding LBTQ populations: first one is that the general measures, policies and legislations [around] the state’s response to COVID-19 pandemic didn’t take the intersectional approach at the core of it. As a result, they exacerbated the pre-existing inequalities that disproportionately affected LGBTQ people.

The second trend is measures that specifically target civil society and LGBTQ groups. Despite [the fact] that there was a state of emergency and the quarantine, when there was limited public oversight and civic and social engagement, the parliament and the government actually used the space to adopt certain legislation which actually targeted civil society groups.

IPS: What are some ways in which COVID-19 has affected the health of the members of the LBTQ community in Kazakhstan?

AK: With our allies from transgender initiatives, Feminita completed a big research project on access to healthcare of LBQ women and trans people in Kazakhstan in March. Because of the stigma by medical professionals, there’s a high resentment of the LBQT community for [asking for] medical help and that increases health risks. It’s not only HIV or STIs, which are normally spoken of, but also for other chronic disease and cancer-related diseases.

As a result, it makes the group of people more susceptible to health risks [in the event of a] pandemic or other epidemiological diseases.

IPS: Your organisation was denied registration as an NGO last year — how does this affect your ability to operate in the country and to serve the LBTQ community?

AK: We recently received the supreme court decision upholding the previous court rulings, confirming that there was no violation in a denied registration. And it surely affects the organisation’s institutional development because as a non-registered organisation, you’re not eligible to open a bank account, or apply for funding and hence [unable] to maybe be more effective in responding to some urgent calls. 

As a result, the initiative operates with a small group of people — most of them work other jobs on the side. And they cannot pay the initial salaries, or operate sustainably or have sustainable activities. And that of course exacerbates in the pandemic. 

On the other side, we see a contraction of funding too and it is [being] channelled towards the needs of pandemic response or healthcare needs. Then there’s a contraction of resources to activists and civil society groups and human rights organisations needs. We know that it’s just the beginning and that the financial effects of the pandemic will catch up later.  

IPS: Has the LBQT community reached out to your organisation during this pandemic?

AK: We’ve had some cases throughout this quarantine time. One in particular was regarding a woman who faced hate speech by a prominent sport athlete who made a degrading statement with incitement to hate, and the activist called him out. As a result, there was an avalanche of hate speech towards her and then she faced death threats online. She also faced threats by fans of the athlete. 

We launched a media advocacy campaign and also relocated her during the pandemic. The first measure of the pandemic response by the state was isolation, stay at home, as a safe space but home is not always safe for everyone and it was very problematic to relocate a person during the quarantine, because there was a lockdown measure in place. And borders between the states were closed, so it was impossible to relocate her to another state. She was relocated within the same state.

IPS: How does the current pandemic — and global lockdown — affect the LBTQ community’s work and participation in the SDGs?

AK: What is important for activists and civil society and also for international community when they deal with governments like in Kazakhstan — whose economy is very resource and industry driven, and places priority on a lot of investment coming in — we see quite a lot of political will in engaging with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework. But at the same time it is a country with a low human rights record, that resents a human rights framework.

What is important is for us to actually strengthen the links between the human rights and SDG frameworks and one cannot be implemented without the other. The state cannot cherry pick the one it likes and just ignore the recommendations in human rights treaties.

UN Secretary-General Anto—nio Guterres with Olof Skoog of Sweden, President of the UN Security Council for the month of January Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas.

By Andy Hazel and Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 6 2017 (IPS)

Five of the UN Security Council’s 15 seats were filled by new members this week, but a bigger shift in the council is expected later this month under the new US administration.

Sweden, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan and Italy replaced outgoing non-permanent members Spain, Malaysia, New Zealand, Angola and Venezuela.

They will join the other five non-permanent members – Japan, Egypt, Senegal, Ukraine and Uruguay – as well as the five permanent members of the council – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The council’s five permanent members are considered to be the most powerful, since they hold the ability to veto any vote they disagree with.

This is why the change in the United States administration may signal a greater political shift in the council than the rotation of non-permanent members.

The possible change was foreshadowed by President-elect Trump in December following a controversial vote on Israeli settlements.

The United States took the surprise decision to abstain from the vote condemning Israeli settlements in the disputed territory of the West Bank, rather than using its veto power.

“As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan. 20th,” Trump tweeted shortly after the vote took place.

US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power – a member of President Barack Obama’s cabinet – defended the abstention saying, “Israeli settlement activity in territories occupied in 1967 undermines Israel’s security, harms the viability of a negotiated two-state outcome, and erodes prospects for peace and stability in the region.”

Power is expected to be replaced by Trump’s pick for the council, Nikki Haley, the current Governor of South Carolina, after Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

However Sweden’s Ambassador to the UN, Olof Skoog downplayed the political implications of the change in US administration for the Security Council.

“I haven’t spoken with anyone from the administration of the President-elect, but I expect that when they come to look at the work we’re doing they’ll see it is in the interests of the United States,” Skoog told journalists on Tuesday.

With January bringing a new US president, a changed Security Council and a new UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Skoog said that he hoped to harness this “spirit of newness” to spur momentum into the Council’s work.

However Skoog said he was not expecting particular challenges to the Security Council’s work to come from the incoming US administration, with whom he said he looked forward to collaborating.

Skoog described Power as a strong voice with whom he shares many views. He said he also had a working relationship with Haley, but would not be drawn on possible changes regarding Israeli-Palestinian policy within the council.

Sweden has officially recognised the state of Palestine, putting it at odds with Trump’s pro-Israel stance.

Meanwhile, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said that he hoped Italy could bring the Israel-Palestine conflict “to the forefront of the United Nations’ agenda,” during their month as president in November. Migration from the Middle East and Syria are also expected to be among the issues Italy will prioritise. Italy will be represented by Ambassador Sebastiano Card.

In a new and unusual step, Italy will share its security council seat with the Netherlands due to an impasse vote in the UN General Assembly for the final European seat. Italy will sit on the council in 2016 and the Netherlands in 2017. Gentiloni described the move as “a message of unity between European countries.”

2016 will be the first time that Kazakhstan will sit on the Security Council. The Central Asian country – which is keen to be seen as a major international power – will be represented by the ex-Ambassador to the United States Mr Kairat Umarov.

Kazakhstan – a part of the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone – may also bring a different perspective to Security Council discussions on nuclear non-proliferation. President-elect Trump’s comments on nuclear weapons have signalled that this may be an area high on the UN’s agenda in 2017.

Succeeding Venezuela as the Latin American representative, and holding a seat on the Council for the first time since 1979, is Bolivia. The plurinational state is represented by the Sacha Llorenti, a published author who spent two years at the President of Bolivia’s Permanent Assembly for Human Rights and was a minister in the government of Evo Morales.

Llorenti resigned from the ministry in 2011 following a violent police response to protesters marching against the building of a road through the Amazon rainforest. This was not the first time Llorenti was involved in clashes between indigenous populations and infrastructure.

Ethiopia replaces Angola and joins Senegal as an African representative on the Council. Ethiopia has become a major contributor of over 8,000 troops to UN peacekeeping operations. However in 2016, Ethiopia faced political instability within its own borders amid crackdowns on protestors.

In its first month on the council, Sweden has also taken up the rotating position of President. Skoog told press on Tuesday that the council’s priorities for January would include Syria, South Sudan and the Congo.

Skoog also highlighted massive population displacement, diminishing resources and rise of Boko Haram in Lake Chad region as detailed by Oxfam in a report entitled Lake Chad’s Unseen Crisis, which draws parallels between climate change, terrorism and national security.

Italy and the Netherlands have taken the unusual step of splitting the term of a UN Security Council seat. UN Photo/JC McIlwaine.

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 29 2016 (IPS)

Bolivia, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan and Sweden were elected on Tuesday to serve on the UN Security Council (UNSC) as non-permanent members, while Italy and Netherlands have split the remaining contested seat.

The UN General Assembly (UNGA) met to choose five new non-permanent members who will serve a two-year term starting January 2017 alongside the 15-member council.

As the UN’s most powerful body, the UNSC is responsible for international peace and security matters from imposing sanctions to brokering peace deals to overseeing the world’s 16 peacekeeping missions.

Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom expressed how “happy” and “proud” Sweden is to be joining the UN’s top decision-making body.

“We will do now what we promised to do,” she told press. Among its priorities, Sweden has pledged to focus on conflict prevention and resolution.

“With 40 conflict and 11 full-blown wars, it is a very very worrisome world that we have to take into account,” Wallstrom stated.

Despite its location in Northern Europe,  Sweden has not been untouched by recent conflicts, including the ongoing civil war in Syria. With a population of 9.5 million, the Scandinavian country took in over 160,000 asylum seekers in 2015. The government has since imposed tougher restrictions on asylum seekers including a decrease in permanent residence permits and limited family reunification authorisations.

Ethiopia has also highlighted its position in promoting regional and continental peace and security. The country is the largest contributor of UN peacekeepers and is actively involved in mediating conflicts in Africa, most recently in South Sudan. It has also long struggled with its own clashes, including a crackdown on political dissent.

The Sub-Saharan African country has also promised to work towards UNSC reforms.

During the 70^th Session of the UNGA in September 2015, Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn remarked that he was “proud” that Ethiopia is one of the UN’s founding members, but stressed the need to reform and establish a permanent seat for Africa in the council.

“Comprehensive reform of the United Nations system, particularly that of the Security Council, is indeed imperative to reflect current geo-political realities and to make the UN more broadly representative, legitimate and effective,” he told delegates.

“We seize this occasion to, once again, echo Africa’s call to be fully represented in all the decision-making organs of the UN, particularly in the Security Council,” Dessalegn continued.

Ethiopia has been a non-permanent member of the UNSC on two previous occasions, in 1967/1968 and 1989/1990.

It will also be the third time that Bolivia will have a non-permanent SC seat. Bolivia campaigned unopposed with the backing of Latin American and Caribbean countries.

“Bolivia is a country that has basic principles…one of those principles is, without a doubt, anti-imperialism,” the Bolivian delegation said following their election, adding that they will continue implementing these principles as a member of the UNSC.

Since the election of Evo Morales, its first indigenous leader, the South American country has largely focused on social reforms and indigenous rights. Most recently, Morales has been reportedly implicated in a political scandal that is threatening journalists and press freedom.

Kazakhstan became the first Central Asian country to be a member of the UNSC after beating Thailand for the seat.

Kazakh Foreign Minister Erlan Idrissov said that he was “very happy” and their selection was a “privilege.” He also reiterated the country’s priority focus on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan relinquished its nuclear weapons and has been actively advocating for non-proliferation around the world.

“We have a lot to offer to the world and we believe that it is time to attract attention to the need of development in our part of the world,” Idrissov stated.

However, Human Rights Watch has scrutinized the Central Asian nation’s human rights record, including restrictions on freedom of expression.

Netherlands and Italy were up for the last Western European seat on the UNSC, but after four rounds of voting, they were deadlocked with each country receiving 95 votes while needing 127 to win.

Following deliberations, Italian and Dutch foreign ministers announced that they would split the seat, with Italy in the UNSC in 2017 and the Netherlands in 2018.

Since May, the six countries have been campaigning for council seats by participating in the first-ever election debates in the UN’s 70-year history.

The debates were a part of a new effort to increase transparency in the institution.

The new non-permanent members will work alongside the five veto-wielding permanent members: China, France, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Following their controversial exit from the European Union, known as “Brexit”, the UK may face an uncertain future in the UNSC as the prospects of Scotland and Northern Ireland leaving the UK loom.

By Daya Thussu
LONDON, Jul 22 2015 (IPS)

The formal opening of the BRICS Bank in Shanghai on Jul. 21 following the seventh summit of the world’s five leading emerging economies held recently in the Russian city of Ufa, demonstrates the speed with which an alternative global financial architecture is emerging.

The idea of a development-oriented international bank was first floated by India at the 2012 BRICS summit in New Delhi but it is China’s financial muscle which has turned this idea into a reality.

Daya Thussu

The New Development Bank (NDB), as it is formally called, is to use its 50 billion dollar initial capital to fund infrastructure and developmental projects within the five BRICS nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – though it is also likely to support developmental projects in other countries.

According to the 43-page Ufa Declaration, “the NDB shall serve as a powerful instrument for financing infrastructure investment and sustainable development projects in the BRICS and other developing countries and emerging market economies and for enhancing economic cooperation between our countries.”

The NDB is led by Kundapur Vaman Kamath, formerly of Infosys, India’s IT giant, and of ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank. A respected banker, Kamath reportedly said during the launch that “our objective is not to challenge the existing system as it is but to improve and complement the system in our own way.”

The launch of the NDB marks the first tangible institution developed by the BRICS group – set up in 2006 as a major non-Western bloc – whose leaders have been meeting annually since 2009. BRICS countries together constitute 44 percent of the world population, contributing 40 percent to global GDP and 18 percent to world trade.“Our objective is not to challenge the existing system as it is but to improve and complement the system in our own way” – Kundapur Vaman Kamath, head of the New Development Bank (NDB)

In keeping with the summit’s theme of ‘BRICS partnership: A powerful factor for global development’, the setting up of a developmental bank was an important outcome, hailed as a “milestone blueprint for cooperation” by a commentator in The China Daily.

The Chinese imprint on the NDB is unmistakable. The Ufa Declaration is clear about the close connection between the NDB and the newly-created Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), also largely funded by China. It welcomed the proposal for the New Development Bank to “cooperate closely with existing and new financing mechanisms including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.” China is also keen to set up a regional centre of the NDB in South Africa.

If economic cooperation remained the central plank of the Ufa summit, there is also a clear geopolitical agenda.

The Global Times, China’s more nationalistic international voice, pointed out that the establishment of the NDB and the AIIB will “break the monopoly position of the International Money Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) and motivate [them] to function more normatively, democratically, and efficiently, in order to promote reform of the international financial system as well as democratisation of international relations.”

The reality of global finance is such that any alternative financial institution has to function in a system that continues to be shaped by the West and its formidable domination of global financial markets, information networks and intellectual leadership.

However, China, with its nearly four trillion dollars in foreign currency reserves, is well-placed to attempt this, in conjunction with the other BRICS countries. China today is the largest exporting nation in the world, and is constantly looking for new avenues for expanding and consolidating its trade relations across the globe.

China is also central to the establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a Eurasian political, economic and security grouping whose annual meeting coincided with the seventh BRICS summit. Founded in 2001 and comprising China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the SCO has agreed to admit India and Pakistan as full members.

Though the BRICS summit and the SCO meeting went largely unnoticed by the international media – preoccupied as they were with the Iranian nuclear negotiations and the ongoing Greek economic crisis – the economic and geopolitical implications of the two meetings are likely to continue for some time to come.

For host Russia, which also convened the first BRICS summit in 2009, the Ufa meeting was held against the background of Western sanctions, continuing conflict in Ukraine and expulsion from the G8. Partly as a reaction to this, camaraderie between Moscow and Beijing is noticeable – having signed a 30-year oil and gas deal worth 400 billion dollars in 2014.

Beijing and Moscow see economic convergence in trade and financial activities, for example, between China’s Silk Road Economic Belt initiative for Central Asia and Russia’s recent endeavours to strengthen the Eurasian Economic Union. The expansion of the SCO should be seen against this backdrop. Moscow has also proposed setting up SCO TV to broadcast economic and financial information and commentary on activities in some of the world’s fastest growing economies.

Whatever the outcome, it is clear that a new international developmental agenda is being created, backed by powerful nations, and to the virtual exclusion of the West.

China is the driving force behind this. Despite its one-party system which limits political pluralism and thwarts debate, China has been able to transform itself from a largely agricultural self-sufficient society to the world’s largest consumer market, without any major social or economic upheavals.

China’s success story has many admirers, especially in other developing countries, prompting talk of replacing the ‘Washington consensus’ with what has been described as the ‘Beijing consensus’. The BRICS bank, it would seem, is a small step in that direction.

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Daya Thussu
LONDON, Jul 1 2015 (IPS)

As the leaders of the BRICS five meet in the Russian city of Ufa for their annual summit Jul. 8–10, their agenda is likely to be dominated by economic and security concerns, triggered by the continuing economic crisis in the European Union and the security situation in the Middle East.

The seventh annual summit of the large emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – also takes place with a background of escalating tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine and the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), as well as the growing economic power of Asia, in particular, China.

Daya Thussu

Nearly a decade and a half has passed since the BRIC acronym was coined in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, a Goldman Sachs executive, now a minister in David Cameron’s U.K. government, to refer to the four fast-growing emerging markets. South Africa was added in 2011, on China’s request, to expand BRIC to BRICS.

Although in operation as a formal group since 2006, and holding annual summits since 2009, the BRICS countries have escaped much comment in international media, partly because of the different political systems and socio-cultural norms, as well as stages of development, within this group of large and diverse nations.

The emergence of such groupings coincides with the relative economic decline of the West.

This has created the opportunity for emerging powers, such as China and India, to participate in global governance structures hitherto dominated by the United States and its Western allies.

That the centre of economic gravity is shifting away from the West is acknowledged in the view of the U.S. Administration of Barack Obama that the ‘pivot’ of U.S. foreign policy is moving to Asia.“The major countries of the global South have shown impressive economic growth in recent decades … [it is predicted that] by 2020 the combined economic output of China, India and Brazil will surpass the aggregated production of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy”

And there is evidence of this shift. In the Fortune 500 ranking, the number of transnational corporations based in Brazil, Russia, India and China has grown from 27 in 2005 to more than 100 in 2015. China’s Huawei, a telecommunications equipment firm, is the world’s largest holder of international patents; Brazil’s Petrobras is the fourth largest oil company in the world, while the Tata group became the first Indian conglomerate to reach 100 billion dollars in revenues.

Since 2006, China has been the largest holder of foreign currency reserves, estimated in 2015 to be more than 3.8 trillion dollars. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), China’s gross domestic product (GDP) surpassed that of the United States in 2014, making it the world’s largest economy in purchasing-power parity terms.

More broadly, the major countries of the global South have shown impressive economic growth in recent decades, prompting the United Nations Development Programme to proclaim The Rise of the South (the title of its 2013 Human Development Report), which predicts that by 2020 the combined economic output of China, India and Brazil will surpass the aggregated production of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.

Though the individual relationships between BRICS countries and the United States differ markedly (Russia and China being generally anti-Washington while Brazil and South Africa relatively close to the United States and India moving from its traditional non-aligned position to a ‘multi-aligned’ one), the group was conceived as an alternative to American power and is the only major group of nations not to include the United States or any other G-7 nation.

Nevertheless, none of the five member nations are eager for confrontation with the United States – with the possible exception of Russia – the country with which they have their most important relationship. Indeed, China is one of the largest investors in the United States, while India, Brazil and South Africa demonstrate democratic affinities with the West: India’s IT industry is particularly dependent on its close ties with the United States and Europe.

Although the idea of BRIC was initiated in Russia, it is China that has emerged as the driving force behind this grouping. British author Martin Jacques has noted in his international bestseller When China Rules the World, that China operates “both within and outside the existing international system while at the same time, in effect, sponsoring a new China-centric international system which will exist alongside the present system and probably slowly begin to usurp it.”

One manifestation of this change is the establishment of a BRICS bank (the ‘New Development Bank’) to fund developmental projects, potentially to rival the Western-dominated Bretton Woods institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF. Headquartered in Shanghai, China has made the largest contribution to setting it up and is likely that the bank will further enhance China’s domination of the BRICS group.

Beyond BRICS, Beijing has also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which already has 57 members, including Australia, Germany and Britain, and in which China will hold over 25 percent of voting rights. Two other BRICS nations – India and Russia – are the AIIB’s second and third largest shareholders.

Such changes have an impact on the media scene as well. As part of China’s ‘going out’ strategy, billions of dollars have been earmarked for external communication, including the expansion of Chinese broadcasting networks such as CCTV News and Xinhua’s English-language TV, CNC World.

Russia has also raised its international profile by entering the English-language news world in 2005 with the launch of the Russia Today (now called RT) network, which, apart from English, also broadcasts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in Spanish and Arabic.

However, as a new book Mapping BRICS Media – which I co-edited with Kaarle Nordenstreng of the University of Tampere, Finland – shows, there is very little intra-BRICS media exchange and most of the BRICS nations continue to receive international news largely from Anglo-American media.

The growing economic cooperation between Moscow and Beijing – most notably in the 2014 multi-billion dollar gas deal – indicates a new Sino-Russian economic equation outside Western control.

Two key U.S.-led trade agreements being negotiated – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and both excluding the BRICS nations – are partly a reaction to the perceived competition from nations such as China.

For its part, China appears to have used the BRICS grouping to allay fears that it is rising ‘with the rest’ and therefore less threatening to Western hegemony.

The BRICS summit takes place jointly with Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Heads of State Council meeting. The only other time that BRICS and the SCO combined their summits was also in Russia – in Ekaterinburg in 2009.

Apart from two BRICS members, China and Russia, the SCO includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. SCO has not expanded its membership since it was set up in 2001. India has an ‘observer’ status within SCO, though there is talk that it might be granted full membership at the Ufa summit.

Were that to happen, the ‘pivot’ would have moved a few notches further towards Asia.

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Kairat Abdrakhmanov
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 19 2015 (IPS)

This September, we usher in the post-2015 development agenda with a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed upon by Member States, with civil society participation, based on national, regional and global consultations.

These goals are transformative and their impact goes far beyond the current Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in vision, complexity, outreach and implications.

Kairat Abdrakhmanov, Permanent of Representative of the Republic of Kazakhstan to the United Nations. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

Amongst them is Goal 16, according to which countries will “promote peaceful and inclusive societies with justice for all and build effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels”.

Building civil service excellence will therefore certainly be critical to achieving this goal. Likewise, the proposed Goal 17 on means of implementation calls for institutional capacity building in developing countries to support national plans to operationalise all the SDGs, including through North-South, South-South and Triangular cooperation.

Both of these gave birth to the idea of creating the Regional Hub of Civil Service in Astana, at the initiative of the Republic of Kazakhstan with a view to seek innovative mechanisms to ensure equitable, effective and efficient delivery of public service to its people.

But the intent was also for the wider region of Central Asia and CIS countries to gain from it through advancing “the knowledge base, evidence-informed solutions, practical tools and guidance, and pursuit of emerging and innovative public administration and management models and thinking”.

The idea of setting up this Hub arose from the struggles of a country in transition. Kazakhstan, since its Independence, just like other newly independent nations in the region witnessed profound political, socio-economic and administrative transformations.This scholarship scheme has been serving to level the playing field by providing access to quality education and developing capable and well qualified human capital.

In the early nineties, the economic linkages of Kazakhstan with other 14 republics were abruptly discontinued which led to increased unemployment, devaluation of savings and galloping inflation of up to 2500 per cent.

Against this backdrop, the President of Kazakhstan, H.E. Mr. Nursultan Nazarbayev, first of all, initiated socio-economic reforms, followed by innovations and reforms in the administrative sphere, which the evolving times demanded.

Having no experience of market economy, the Government had to implement reforms with the available personnel. However, the President’s long term vision of subsequent reforms required a new generation of public sector leaders and technocrats which resulted in a generous scholarship programme offered by the Government.

The objective was to provide talented youth with free access to education in leading universities globally. Since 1993, about 10,000 Kazakh students gained degrees in the best universities and joined the job market at home, including the civil service.

This scholarship scheme has been serving to level the playing field by providing access to quality education and developing capable and well qualified human capital.

Having stabilised economic growth in the 1990s, Kazakhstan went further and was first among the CIS countries to significantly modernise its civil service with meritocracy as the key principle.

We acknowledged that the sustainability of reforms was heavily dependent on the quality of institutions, and of the civil service, in particular.

Importantly, the key characteristics of reforms in Kazakhstan have always been logical consistency and continuity. A clear indication of this is the set of five institutional reforms recently announced by our President, the first of which is improved civil service modernisation.

The aim here is to form a professional, accountable and transparent state apparatus in order to ensure sustainable development of the country. The responsible body for this is the National Commission on Modernisation headed by the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan.

Under this process of transformation, criteria will be established to monitor activities and evaluate the efficiency of each Government agency, concerned minister or local governor.

The role of communities in state bodies and local administration will also be strengthened by allowing them to participate and monitor results of strategic plans and development programmes. Civil society will also be engaged in the process of identifying budgets, relevant laws and regulations.

In this endeavour, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) as a trusted partner has been continuously supporting the reform efforts in Kazakhstan since our Independence. Now, we count on the longer term strategic partnership with UNDP all the more, particularly with regards to all the five institutional reforms.

Clearly, Kazakhstan believes in sharing accumulated experience and knowledge, as well as promoting cooperation among the countries and institutions in its region and beyond. Therefore, Kazakhstan’s initiative of the Regional Hub of Civil Service in Astana was founded by 25 countries and five international organisations, at a founding conference in 2013, with UNDP as the key partner.

The aim of the Astana Hub is to facilitate regional, as well as inter-regional professional dialogue in order to promote civil service excellence. This idea has resonated with the Hub today comprising more than 30 countries in 2014, including OECD and EU member countries, as well as China, India, Turkey, and CIS countries. The Hub is thus fostering dialogue between countries of Europe and Asia.

Last year also saw the Hub taking concrete shape with an agreement between the Government of Kazakhstan and UNDP, by which Kazakhstan agreed to make considerable resources available to support the Hub and thus expand its scope and gains to enhance the field of civil service in the region and beyond.

As Helen Clark, the Administrator of UNDP, noted, “establishment of the Hub and its success has been made possible because countries like Kazakhstan are ready to share their experiences with reforms…such as the introduction of meritocracy into professional civil service”.

According to UNDP, “the Hub also offers the potential for continuing Kazakhstan’s emerging global role in providing official development assistance (ODA) to other countries”.

Kazakhstan, with guidance from UNDP, has established its national agency for international aid, called KazAID, which marks an important evolution and achievement in the country’s significance regionally and globally. The support and partnership will focus on Africa, the landlocked countries and small island developing states.

Kazakhstan will continually aspire to serve as an active contributor to the global development agenda. Our efforts will add practical solutions for implementing the post-2015 phase most effectively, with particular relevance to Sustainable Development Goal 16, which calls for inter alia promoting accountable institutions and ensuring responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.

To conclude, Kazakhstan, stands ready and is fully committed to help facilitate regional and interregional initiatives in civil service excellence, and contribute concretely to the achievement of the SDGs in the coming years.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Migrant workers ride in a bus through northern Kazakhstan in May 2014 on their way to find employment in Russia. As the value of the Russian ruble continues to fall, labour migrants from Central Asia say they are less inclined to work in Russia. Credit: Konstantin Salomatin

By EurasiaNet Correspondents
TASHKENT, Dec 26 2014 (EurasiaNet)

Sardor Abdullayev, a construction worker from eastern Uzbekistan, had planned to go to Russia next spring to join relatives working construction sites in the Volga River city of Samara. But now, he says, “I am better off staying at home and driving a taxi.”

As the value of the Russian ruble plummets and Russia’s economy tumbles into recession, millions of Central Asian migrants have seen their real wages dwindle. On top of that, Russian authorities are introducing new, expensive regulations for foreigners who wish to work legally in the country.The return of tens of thousands of labour migrants and the prospect of them joining the vast pool of the already unemployed is making some officials nervous.

Some Uzbek migrants in Russia now say they are contemplating a return home. Such an influx of returnees could have uncertain ramifications for their impoverished country.

According to Russia’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, there are about three million Uzbek labour migrants in Russia, the most from any Central Asian country. Others estimate the number of Uzbeks could be twice that.

Unofficial estimates put their remittances in 2013 at the value of roughly a quarter of Uzbekistan’s GDP. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are even more dependent on labour migrants, with remittances contributing the equivalent of 30 percent and roughly 50 percent to their economies, respectively.

Data from Russia’s Central Bank shows that the funds Uzbeks send home dipped nine percent year-on-year during the third quarter of 2014. Analysts predict the fall will continue. The Russian business daily Kommersant estimates that remittances fell 35 percent month-on-month in October alone.

That was before the ruble, which has steadily fallen since Russian troops seized Crimea in February, nosedived earlier in December. Thanks to Western sanctions, the low price of oil, and systemic weaknesses in Vladimir Putin’s style of crony capitalism, the currency has lost roughly 50 percent against the dollar this year. Most migrants convert their rubles into dollars to send home.

“My salary was 18,000 rubles a month, which several months ago would be equivalent to 500 dollars. Now, it is less than 300 dollars,” Sherzod, a 29-year-old from the Ferghana Valley who was working at a shop in Samara, told EurasiaNet.org.

Sherzod returned home in November and he is not planning to go back to Russia. “The salary is too low.”

It is not only falling wages that labour migrants must consider. Starting on Jan. 1, Russia will require labour migrants to pass tests on Russian language, history and legislation basics, as well as undergo a medical examination and buy health insurance (the entire package will cost migrants up to 30,000 rubles (currently about 500 dollars), by some accounts).

The Moscow city government is also more than tripling the fee for work permits, from 1,200 rubles monthly to 4,000 rubles (currently 64 dollars).

Citizens of countries that are members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), which will come into force on Jan. 1, will not be affected by the new regulations. That adds an incentive – some might say pressure – for migrant-feeder countries like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to join. (Kyrgyzstan is hoping to join in early 2015).

Sherzod, the Uzbek labourer, says that faced with falling real incomes, many Uzbeks working in Russia find themselves in a quandary. Thousands are eager to return home. But many simply do not have funds to buy a return ticket. Others worry about being seen in their native villages as failures.

Russian media outlets have quoted a migrant community leader who projected new requirements for guest workers, along with the falling ruble, will prompt up to 25 percent of migrants to leave Russia in the coming months.

With fewer dollars entering Uzbekistan, the Uzbek sum has fallen 15 percent against the greenback on the black market, according to several Ferghana-based shop owners interviewed by EurasiaNet.org. (The tightly managed official exchange rate has declined about 11 percent against the dollar this year. To help support it, from Jan. 1 fruit and vegetable exporters will be required to sell 25 percent of their hard currency earnings to the state at the official rate, Interfax news agency reported Dec. 18).

Despite the economic fallout from Russia, Uzbek leaders remain open to doing business with the Kremlin. During a visit to Tashkent on Dec. 10, Putin wrote off most of Uzbekistan’s 890-million-dollar debt. That deal paved the way for new loans from Moscow. It is unclear what Uzbek leader Islam Karimov promised in return.

Uzbek authorities and well-connected businessmen claim they are prepared to manage the economic fallout, and the large number of returning migrants.

“We have numerous [state-sponsored] urban regeneration construction projects across the country. One can say that the whole of Uzbekistan is a massive construction site. So if migrants return, many of them will find work,” Nazirjan, a former government official who how heads a private construction company in the Ferghana Valley, told EurasiaNet.org on condition his surname not appear in print.

On Dec. 15, President Karimov signed a decree that increased state employees’ salaries by 10 percent. Still, the return of tens of thousands of labour migrants and the prospect of them joining the vast pool of the already unemployed is making some officials nervous.

“The SNB [former KGB] has instructed local authorities and mahalla [neighbourhood] committees to create lists of labour migrants who are returning from Russia. The arrival of migrants usually increases the crime rate, and local authorities have also been instructed to be more vigilant,” a secondary school teacher in the Ferghana Valley told EurasiaNet.org.

This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A billboard in Astana with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and the slogan “Our Strength” emphasises the country’s Strategy 2050 project that focuses on renewable energy. Regional analysts are unsure how committed Kazakhstan really is to pushing and promoting green energy. Credit: David Trilling/EurasiaNet

By Paolo Sorbello
ASTANA, Oct 24 2014 (EurasiaNet)

From small villages to big cities, wherever you go in Kazakhstan these days, billboards offer reminders that Astana is gearing up to host Expo 2017, the next World’s Fair. Kazakhstan helped secure the right to host the event with a pledge to emphasise green energy alternatives. But now it appears that Kazakhstan is red-lighting its own green transition.

Green energy has been the rage in Kazakhstan in recent years, but the country’s strongman president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, seemed to shift gears out of the blue in late September.

“I personally do not believe in alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar,” the Interfax news agency quoted Nazarbayev as saying on Sep. 30 during a meeting with Vladimir Putin in the Caspian city of Atyrau. And echoing a familiar Kremlin refrain, Nazarbayev added that “the shale euphoria does not make any sense.”Despite the great efforts that were put into branding Astana Expo 2017 as the virtuous, green choice of an oil-exporting country, Nazarbayev’s remarks reveal “that the rhetoric around the Expo is just a cosmetic policy aimed at the construction of an image of Kazakhstan that is close to the Western agenda.” -- Luca Anceschi

For a country where the decisions of one man set the political agenda, it was a stunning change of course. Only last year, Nazarbayev’s office pledged to spend one percent of GDP, or an estimated three to four billion dollars annually, to “transition to a green economy.”

“Kazakhstan is facing a situation where its natural resources and environment are seriously deteriorating across all crucial environmental standards,” stated a widely touted “Strategy Kazakhstan 2050” concept paper. A “green economy is instrumental to [a] nation’s sustainable development.”

Moreover, a switch to renewables would free oil and gas for more lucrative exports, rather than subsidised domestic use.

While Kazakhstan generates 80 percent of its electricity from coal, state media has trumpeted the potential of green energy, showing Nazarbayev touring a solar-panel factory under construction or an official promising Kazakhstan will build the world’s first “energy-positive” city.

Officials often talk of weaning Kazakhstan’s economy off its hydrocarbon dependence. Ultimately, if Nazarbayev wants to fulfill a pledge to make Kazakhstan a middle-income nation by 2030, officials have acknowledged that Kazakhstan must diversify its energy sources.

So Nazarbayev’s comments have left analysts scratching their heads: Is Kazakhstan’s focus shifting, or was Nazarbayev just reminding trade partners – especially Russia – that oil and gas will remain a priority for Astana? Nazarbayev concluded by saying that “oil and gas is our main horse, and we should not be afraid that these are fossil fuels.”

Context is key, according to Marat Koshumbayev, deputy head of the Chokin Kazakh Research Institute of Energy in Almaty. “While sitting next to [Putin], it is normal that Nazarbayev would emphasise fossil fuels. It’s worth noting that during similar events in the West, the focus is still on renewable energy, efficiency, and reduction of carbon emissions,” Koshumbayev told EurasiaNet.org.

The energy networks of Kazakhstan and Russia are strongly interconnected. Most Kazakh oil exports to Europe go through the Russian hubs of Samara and Novorossiysk, while Russian oil flows through Kazakhstan’s pipeline network to China. In addition, Kazakhstan is a key cog in Putin’s pet project – the formation of a Eurasian Economic Union.

Although the context of the meeting may have played a role in Nazarbayev’s declaration, the president has sown doubt about how serious Kazakhstan is about green energy, said Luca Anceschi, an expert on the country at the University of Glasgow. Despite the great efforts that were put into branding Astana Expo 2017 as the virtuous, green choice of an oil-exporting country, Nazarbayev’s remarks reveal “that the rhetoric around the Expo is just a cosmetic policy aimed at the construction of an image of Kazakhstan that is close to the Western agenda.”

Nazarbayev, Anceschi added, was warning Astana policymakers to keep the focus on the current economic course. “It’s a clear message that diversification efforts will slow down, with the hope that [the long-delayed, super-giant oil field] Kashagan will come in to solve all problems,” he said.

Koshumbayev agrees Nazarbayev is backtracking. “Unfortunately,” he said, “for the development of renewable energy, more is needed than just Strategy 2050 and the officials who promote it, and Nazarbayev knows this.”

In policy circles in Astana and Almaty, “alternative” energy refers broadly to non-hydrocarbon resources, including, for example, nuclear. Nazarbayev does appear to believe in the power of the atom. During the meeting with Putin in Atyrau, he inked terms for Russia and Kazakhstan to construct a nuclear power plant.

According to the plan, construction will start in 2018, although it is still unclear if the plant will be built near the old Soviet nuclear hub of Semipalatinsk, in the northeast, or in the industrial west, near the Caspian shore.

Even if Kazakhstan shifts away from green energy, some progress is likely to continue. Two wind farms, one in the north and one in the south, received a financial green light in the past months. In the Zhambyl Region, the local government, with some private Lithuanian financing, has agreed to build a 250MW wind farm for 550 million dollars. And in the Akmola Region, near the capital, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has agreed to fund a 50MW, 120-million-dollar wind farm.

But for one opposition leader, Nazarbayev’s comments prove these projects are mainly for show.

“Our regime has a feudal mentality. Showing off wealth is a fundamental indication of one’s status,” said Pyotr Svoik, a former deputy natural resources minister turned opposition activist. “That’s how we get an Expo branded ‘energy of the future’ while producing only marginal amounts of renewable energy.”

Editor’s note:  Paolo Sorbello is a freelance reporter who specializes in Central Asian affairs. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Edited By Kitty Stapp

Pensioner Jyparkul Karaseyitova says she cannot afford meat anymore. At her local bazaar in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, the price for beef has jumped nine percent in the last six weeks. And she is not alone feeling the pain of rising inflation.

Butcher Aigul Shalpykova says her sales have fallen 40 percent in the last month. “If I usually sell 400 kilos of meat every month, in September I sold only 250 kilos,” she complained.On Oct. 20 a “large player” also sold about 600 million dollars, which kept the tenge stable at about 181/dollar. Observers believe the “large player” is a state-run company with ample reserves, but are mystified that the Central Bank refuses to comment and concerned that the interventions appear to be growing.

A sharp decline in the value of Russia’s ruble since early September is rippling across Central Asia, where economies are dependent on transfers from workers in Russia, and on imports too. As local currencies follow the ruble downward, the costs of imported essentials rise, reminding Central Asians just how dependent they are on their former colonial master.

The ruble is down 20 percent against the dollar since the start of the year, in part due to Western sanctions on Moscow for its role in the Ukraine crisis. The fall accelerated in September as the price of oil – Russia’s main export – dropped to four-year lows. The feeble ruble has helped push down currencies around the region, sometimes by double-digit figures.

In Bishkek, food prices have increased by 20 to 25 percent over the past 12 months, says Zaynidin Jumaliev, the chief for Kyrgyzstan’s northern regions at the Economics Ministry, who partially blames the rising cost of Russian-sourced fuel.

In Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, remittances from the millions of workers in Russia have started to fall. In recent years, these cash transfers have contributed the equivalent of about 30 percent to Kyrgyzstan’s economy and about 50 percent to Tajikistan’s. As the ruble depreciates, however, it purchases fewer dollars to send home.

Transfers contracted in value during the first quarter of 2014 for the first time since 2009, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said last month, “primarily due” to the downturn in Russia. The EBRD added that any further drop “may significantly dampen consumer demand.”

“A weaker ruble weighs on [foreign] workers’ salaries […] which brings some pain to these countries,” said Oleg Kouzmin, Russia and CIS economist at Renaissance Capital in Moscow.

This month the International Monetary Fund said it expects consumer prices in Kyrgyzstan to grow eight percent in 2014 and 8.9 percent in 2015, compared with 6.6 percent last year. Kazakhstan and Tajikistan should see similar increases. A Dushanbe resident says he went on vacation for three weeks in July and when he returned food prices were approximately 10 percent higher. In Uzbekistan, the IMF said it expects inflation “will likely remain in the double digits.”

The one country unlikely to feel the pressure is Turkmenistan, which is sheltered from the market’s moods because it sells its chief export – natural gas – to China at a fixed price.

One factor that could sharply and suddenly affect the rest of the region is a policy shift at Russia’s Central Bank, which has already spent over 50 billion dollars this year defending the ruble. Some, like former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, have condemned efforts to prop up the currency, arguing that a weaker ruble is good for exports.

The tumbling ruble and the drop in the price of oil have helped steer Kazakhstan’s economy into a cul-de-sac, slowing growth projections, forcing officials to recalculate the budget, and suggesting the tenge is overvalued. The National Bank already devalued the currency by 19 percent in February.

On Oct. 21, National Bank Chairman Kairat Kelimbetov urged Kazakhs not to worry about another devaluation, but investors grumble that he said the same thing less than a month before February’s devaluation.

Another devaluation would send a distress signal to investors, says one Almaty banker. Astana “lost a fair bit of credibility last time,” the banker said on condition of anonymity, fearing new legislation designed to combat panic selling.

“They need to be much more careful about how they handle expectations going forward. And that is affecting how things are happening this time. People seem to be a lot more dollarised compared to a year ago and more hesitant to hold large tenge balances.”

“My personal position?” the banker added. “I’m not holding tenge.”

Meanwhile, a mystery investor has been propping up the tenge by selling hundreds of millions of dollars a day, according to Halyk Finance in Almaty. On Oct. 21 “a larger player, again offsetting the intraday trend, sold about 650 million dollars,” Halyk said in a note to investors.

On Oct. 20 a “large player” also sold about 600 million dollars, which kept the tenge stable at about 181/dollar. Observers believe the “large player” is a state-run company with ample reserves, but are mystified that the Central Bank refuses to comment and concerned that the interventions appear to be growing.

In Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, central banks have dipped into limited reserves to ease their currencies’ slides. Nevertheless, the Kyrgyz som has fallen by 12 percent against the dollar this year, the Tajik somoni by about 5 percent. The World Bank said this month it expects the somoni to sink further.

Renaissance Capital’s Kouzmin cautions against the bank interventions in Central Asia, which use up reserves and widen trade deficits. “It makes sense for the national banks of these countries to let currencies depreciate to some extent to keep national competitiveness,” he told EurasiaNet.org.

Overall, the slowdown in Russia has long-term effects on Central Asia. “Portfolio investors look at the region as a whole. If you’re a CIS fund, the news on Russia has been bad and has caused the withdrawal of funds” from the region, said Dominic Lewenz of Visor Capital, an investment bank in Almaty. “So the trouble in Russia has hit things here.”

GDP growth projections have fallen markedly across the region, but nowhere near the levels seen during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Everything, it seems, depends on Ukraine. Any worsening scenario there would have “far-reaching implications” for the region, possibly on food security, according to the EBRD.

Back at the bazaar in Bishkek, Orunbay Jolchuev was forced this month to increase by 15 percent what he charges for flour. But at least sales have not been affected. “We all need flour, we all need to eat bread, macaroni, dough,” Jolchuev said. “It’s not something people can cut back even if it becomes too expensive.”

Editor’s note:  David Trilling is EurasiaNet’s Central Asia editor. Timur Toktonaliev is a Bishkek-based reporter. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Armenia has finalised its accession to the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, an intended regional counterweight to the European Union. But while Armenian and Russian officials focus on future prosperity, some Armenian observers believe membership in the bloc could exacerbate Armenia’s security challenges.

During an Oct. 10 meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council, held in Minsk, Belarus, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan confirmed that Armenia would be formally admitted to the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) when it launches on Jan. 1, 2015.“Currently, we have no expectations with regard to security. We see only threats.” -- Aghasi Yenokian, director of a Yerevan-based think-tank

The Armenian government approved the draft text of the accession agreement in early October, Armenian media reported. The EEU will be an outgrowth of the existing customs union among Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Armenian political analysts greeted the accession announcement with mixed feelings, in part because the final text of the pact has not been subjected to public scrutiny. There is particular concern about the pact’s ramifications for Armenia’s relationship with the Nagorno Karabakh territory, an enclave inhabited by ethnic Armenians who aspire to gain international recognition of their de-facto independence from Azerbaijan.

A draft released earlier this year implied that a customs post would be established between Armenia and Karabakh. Local economists say that such an economic barrier would paralyse Karabakh’s economy since the territory depends on Armenia as its primary market for its limited selection of exports.

Beyond the potential economic ramifications, many Armenians would see the establishment of a customs regime as tantamount to the cutting of cultural ties with Karabakh, an act that could leave the territory – and, consequently, Armenia itself – vulnerable to possible Azerbaijani aggression.

“Currently, we have no expectations with regard to security. We see only threats,” commented Aghasi Yenokian, director of the Armenian Center for Political and International Studies, a Yerevan-based think-tank.

Over the past year, Armenian officials have said repeatedly that Armenia’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Union takes into account security guarantees for both Armenia and Karabakh, but no proof of this has been offered.

As a result, uncertainty continues to swirl around the future of the Armenia-Karabakh trade relationship. Two of the EEU’s three members, Belarus and Kazakhstan, are on record as categorically opposed to allowing Armenia to share the bloc’s trade advantages with Karabakh, which none of the members recognise as a country independent from Azerbaijan.

In Minsk, however, Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev stated that a “compromise” had been reached “on a delicate question within the borders by which Armenia will be joined to our union,” the ITAR-TASS news agency reported.

Details were not immediately available.

Members of the ruling Republican Party of Armenia contacted by EurasiaNet.org declined to comment on the challenges that EEU membership could pose for Armenia’s ties with Karabakh.

“There is a very complicated period awaiting us, taking into account the somewhat unfriendly attitude of the EEU to Armenia, particularly on the part of Nazarbayev and [Belarusian President Alexander ] Lukashenko,” commented Styopa Safarian, director of the Armenian Institute of International and Security Affairs.

President Sargsyan, a native of Karabakh, does not, however, appear to share such worries. Congratulating Russian President Vladimir Putin on his Oct. 7 birthday, Sargsyan stated that Putin’s “consistent efforts” for a peaceful resolution of the 26-year Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan, and his support for Armenia’s EEU membership “deserve the deepest appreciation.”

Opposition parties have also adopted conciliatory stances toward Russia, observers note. This fact leaves some analysts glum; to them, it means the political class is unlikely to push hard to promote Armenia’s interests within the EEU.

“The opposition and the authorities do their best not to make the Kremlin angry,” said Styopa Safarian, the analyst and former member of the opposition Heritage Party. “This situation is not encouraging at all.”

Editor’s note:  Marianna Grigoryan is a freelance reporter based in Yerevan and editor of MediaLab.am. 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

Today is the fifth observance of the International Day against Nuclear Tests.

One of the first decrees of President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, upon the country gaining independence in 1991, was the historic decision to close, on Aug. 29 the same year, the Semipalatinsk Nuclear test site, the second largest in the world.

Kazakhstan also voluntarily gave up the world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal, with more than 110 ballistic missiles and 1,200 nuclear warheads with the capacity to reach any point on this earth.

Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

Many believed at that time that we took this decision because we did not possess the ability or competence to support such an massive atomic arsenal. Not true. We had then, and have even today, the best experts.

For us, it was more a question of political will to withdraw from the membership of the Nuclear Club because Kazakhstan genuinely believed in the futility of nuclear tests and weapons which can inflict unimagined catastrophic consequences on human beings and the environment.

The closing of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site was followed by other major test sites, such as in Nevada, Novaya Zemlya, Lop Nur and Moruroa.

Therefore, at the initiative of Kazakhstan, the General Assembly adopted resolution 64/35, on Dec. 2, 2009, declaring Aug. 29 as the International Day against Nuclear Tests.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the Ground Zero of Semipalatinsk in April 2010 and described the action of the president as a bold and unprecedented act and urged present world leaders to follow suit.

In the words of President Nazarbayev, this historical step made by our people, 23 years ago, has great significance for civilisation, and its significance will only grow in the coming years and decades.

It is acknowledged today that the end of testing would also result in the ultimate abolition of nuclear weapons and hence the importance of the entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.

Kazakhstan was one of the first to sign the treaty, and has been a model of transforming the benefits of renouncing nuclear weapons into human development especially in the post-2015 phase with its emphasis on sustainable development.

It has been internationally recognised that nuclear-weapon-free zones on the basis of arrangements freely arrived at among the states of the region concerned enhance global and regional peace and security, strengthens the nuclear non-proliferation regime and contributes towards realizing the objectives of nuclear disarmament.

Yes, there are political upheavals, and there will be roadblocks, but we have to keep pursuing durable peace and security. For these are the founding objectives of the United Nations.

Each year in the U.N.’s First Committee and the General Assembly, a number of resolutions are adopted, supported by a vast majority of member states calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons, and accelerating the implementation of nuclear disarmament commitments.

There are resolute and continuing efforts by member states, various stakeholders and civil society who advocate for an international convention against nuclear weapons.

We also see the dynamic action taken, especially by civil society, which brings attention to the devastating humanitarian dimensions of the use of nuclear weapons.

The meeting hosted by Norway in Oslo, and earlier this year in Nayarit by Mexico, have given new impetus to this new direction of thinking. We hope to carry further this zeal at the deliberations in Vienna, scheduled later this year.

The international community will continue its efforts on all fronts and levels to achieve the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.

There was also a reaffirmation by the nuclear-weapon states of their unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament, to which all states parties are committed under article VI of the Treaty of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

The international community, I am sure, with the impassioned engagement of civil society will continue to redouble its efforts to reach Global Zero.

Ambassador Kairat Abdrakhmanov is the Permanent Representative of the Republic of Kazakhstan to the United Nations.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

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.

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.

Kazakhstan, an oil-rich ex-Soviet nation in Central Asia best known for voluntarily forsaking the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal, is carrying out an unprecedented media crackdown that will leave it virtually without any opposition newspapers for the first time in its 21-year history as an independent nation.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan is closing virtually all the opposition media. Credit: Christopher Pala

Last week, agents of the KNB secret police swarmed the offices of Respublika, a weekly with a strong focus on economic analysis and investigative reporting on corruption that was founded in 2000, when the country’s economic boom began. They confiscated much of the equipment and closed the office.

A court found the paper guilty of “extremism” and banned its dissemination, even online, its managing editor, Tatyana Trubacheva, told IPS in a Skype interview Wednesday.

The paper has a Facebook page and it is unclear how the government could close that, she added.

“Some of our reporters have been publishing stories in Azzat,” a long-dormant title resuscitated as a weekly for the occasion, she said. “We don’t know how long that will last.”

Ultimately, she said, Respublika, which had survived multiple attacks from government institutions, will publish only on its web site, which the government has blocked since 2009.

“We’ve been educating our readers on how to use proxy servers to get to our site,” she said. “It works quite well.”

On the same day last week, other security agents closed the offices of Stan.kz, a video news company that posts its reports on Youtube and sells them to K-Plus, a satellite television station based in London that focuses on news about Kazakhstan and whose broadcasts are officially banned in Kazakhstan, though they are widely watched on Youtube. Stan.kz and Respublika were ordered dissolved as companies.

The video reporting teams work partly from home, in Internet cafes or in the offices of a related production company, said Elina Zhdanova, Stan.kz’s director. The ban, she said, will not deter them from conducting interviews and reporting independently on the news, even if they can’t get paid.

“The government thinks we only write about corruption because we’re paid to do it, they think that if we can’t pay our staff, they will stop,” she said in another Skype interview. “But of course, we do it because we care.”

The crackdown came shortly after both Respublika and Stan.kz devoted considerable resources to the first anniversary on Dec. 16 of an explosion of violence in the impoverished western town of Zanaozen, when police fired at unarmed demonstrators.

Both accused the government of covering up the true number of casualties and ignoring evidence of agents provocateurs, as did several human rights organisations.

Yevgeniy Zhovtis, the dean of human rights activists in Kazakhstan, attributes the crackdown to a gradual weakening of the system of personal guarantees instituted by the long-time president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who is 72.

“We’re in a period of uncertainty and lack of confidence, no one feels safe any more” as different business groups manipulate the government and the courts in unpredictable ways, he said.

“The big question is, will Nazarbayev be replaced by another strongman, or will the elite produce a system of institutional guarantees like in a Western democracy, which is what the opposition has been calling for all along,” he said.

Trubacheva, of Respublika, said the crackdown might be related to the succession in another way. Nazarbayev, who single-handedly built Kazakhstan into a relatively well-managed, vibrant economy, remains broadly popular despite wide discontent over the growing corruption that puts Kazakhstan in 133rd place out of 174 countries polled in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.

“The next president is probably going to be less popular, especially if he’s not elected democratically,” Trubacheva said. “They may not want to allow open criticism of that process.”

Respublika, Stan.kz, K-Plus and Vzglyad, another opposition weekly banned earlier, have one thing in common: all are widely believed to be financed by Mukhtar Ablyazov, a former energy minister turned fugitive banker who has become Nazarbayev’s bête noire.

Ablyazov built up Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank, spent a year in jail for co-founding a technocratic opposition party, re-took the reins of BTA and grew it to become Kazakhstan’s biggest in assets before it defaulted in 2009 and was taken over by the government.

He fled to London, claiming the government gutted the bank for political reasons, while the government sued him over claims he stole five billion dollars from BTA before fleeing. Last month, the London court ordered him to pay 1.6 billion dollars to the bank.

Ablyazov has been in hiding, reportedly in France, since February and regularly gives interviews blasting Nazarbayev’s rule. Zhdanova and Trubacheva both deny they receive any funding from him.

“Things have suddenly become very harsh and nobody knows exactly why,” says former journalist and media analyst Yevgeniya Plakhina. “We’ve become like Turkmenistan,” whose founding leader, Sapparmurat Niyazov, built a personality cult second only to North Korea’s before dying of natural causes six years ago.

“They’ve even appropriated a slogan from Nazi Germany,” she said, referring to Kazakhstan’s new motto, “One Fatherland! One Destiny! One Leader!”, which brings to mind Hitler’s “One People, One Nation, One Leader!”

But, she added, “People here are more educated, so I don’t think closing all the opposition media is going to have any effect except to radicalise more people, especially Muslims. The corruption is stifling, it’s getting worse and worse, and people have no way to get the government to work for them.”

The reaction from the West has been muted because the United States and the other NATO countries have been using Kazakhstani roads to get war equipment out of Afghanistan, said Jeff Goldstein of the Open Society in Washington.

Also, Nazarbayev has built a reputation as a champion of denuclearisation that has muted criticism of rigged elections, assassinations of political opponents and repression of critical media.

That reputation, according to diplomats and historians, rests on the false notion that Kazakhstan had taken possession of SS-18 nuclear missiles with 1,200 warheads left behind when the Soviet Union dissolved. In fact, these were always under the control of Russian forces, which eventually withdrew them with U.S. financing. They were never Kazakhstan’s to give up.

The disappearance of the weeklies Vzglyad and Respublika means the only media independent of government censorship available to people who don’t use computers are Radio Azzatyk, a unit of America’s Radio Liberty, and the Russian service of the BBC, as well as K-Plus for those with a satellite dish.

The destroyed headquarters of Uzenmunaigas, the company at the heart of the protracted labour dispute in the oil town of Zhanaozen in December 2011. Credit: Joanna Lillis/IPS.

By Paul Bartlett
ALMATY, Kazakhstan, Nov 29 2012 (IPS)

This December will see the first anniversary of unrest which left at least 15 dead in the oil town of Zhanaozen in western Kazakhstan. As Catherine Ashton, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy visits the Kazakhstan capital Astana on Nov. 30, concerns are being raised that the last year has seen a serious erosion of rights in this Central Asian country, with political, civil and media liberties being curbed, as the authorities in Astana construct their narrative about what went wrong in Zhanaozen.

The main target of Astana’s ire has been the unregistered Alga! Party. On Nov. 20 the General Prosecutor’s office announced it was seeking a court order prohibiting the activities of Alga! and its ally the People’s Front movement in Kazakhstan. It labelled the unregistered organisations “extremist” and also applied to ban two independent newspapers Respublika and Vyzglad, along with a number of associated websites.

The crackdown comes a week after Kazakhstan was elected as a representative to the UN Human Rights Council for a three-year term and a day after Vladimir Kozlov, the head of Alga!, lost an appeal against his seven-and-a-half year sentence for plotting to overthrow the government and fomenting the unrest in Zhanaozen, which grew out of a protracted oil sector strike.

Mikhail Sizov, deputy chairman of the Alga! coordination committee told IPS by telephone that he was not surprised by the failure of the appeal. “Since the very outset, since Vladimir Kozlov’s very arrest, it was obvious that it was a political order, an order to isolate Vladimir from society. So we did not expect the court of appeal to be able to change anything today.”

International advocacy groups also expressed concern about Kozlov’s jailing and the failed appeal.

“The rejected appeal further consolidates authoritarian trends in Kazakshtan,” said Susan Corke, director for Euraisa programmes at Freedom House. “The government of Kazakhstan tries to promote an image of stability and democratic reform, but until all can be guaranteed the right to a fair trial, including for legitimate political activities, this will not be true in practice.”

The U.S. also expressed concern over Kozlov’s conviction and “the apparent use of the criminal system to silence opposition” in Kazakhstan. Yet Kazakhstan’s government, led by strongman President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been in power for over two decades and brooks little dissent, rejects allegations that the post-Zhanaozen landscape is marred by an erosion of civil liberties. After Kozlov was first sentenced on Oct. 8, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Altay Abibullayev defended the legal process, calling Kozlov’s sentence “the result of an impartial and objective investigation” He pointed to the fact that the trial was open and that media and civil society groups were granted free access.

During the trial Kozlov was accused of working in tandem with disgraced banker Mukhtar Ablyazov, operating his Alga! party – which the government has long refused to register so that it can operate legally – as a “criminal group”. The Kazakh authorities claim that the party is bankrolled by Ablyazov, who has been in hiding since fleeing London in March after he was sentenced to 22 months in prison by a UK court . He was being sued for fraud when he was convicted for concealing his assets in violation of a court order.

A total of 17 protesters and former oil workers from Zhanaozen have been imprisoned in relation to unrest in trials marred by allegations that evidence had been coerced out of suspects by torture. Six members of the security forces are serving sentences over the violent deaths, which occurred when police opened fire on unarmed demonstrators. Three local officials have been jailed on charges of graft that Astana says fuelled disaffection in Zhanaozen.

Astana’s critics say political freedoms have come under threat in Kazakhstan in the last year. An election in January replaced Kazakhstan’s previous one-party parliament with a multi-party legislature – but all three parties in the parliament are loyal to President Nazarbayev. Kazakhstan has never held an election deemed free and fair by international observers.

Parties that are critical of President Nazarbayev do not fare so well. The future of Alga! – one of Kazakhstan’s few genuine opposition voices – is unclear. “It’s quite hard to talk about the future of the organisation (Alga!),” Sizov told IPS. “Of course we could be declared an extremist organisation, we could be declared an organisation that has been part of Mukhtar Ablyazov’s organised criminal group, they could pin something else on us.”

Kazakhstan’s other genuine opposition force, OSDP Azat, was vocal in the aftermath of the January parliamentary vote, holding monthly protests – but these gatherings petered out by June after some of the party leaders had served short prison terms for rallying without official permission, a crime in Kazakhstan despite the right to do so being enshrined in the constitution.

Kazakhstan’s independent media has also been under pressure in the aftermath of Zhanaozen. In January Igor Vinyavsky, editor of the weekly newspaper Vzyglad was detained on charges of seeking to overthrow the state, but was then amnestied in March. The Respublika newspaper, which the authorities allege is funded by Ablyazov, has also felt the squeeze, with its journalists hauled in for interrogation by the security services. The verdict in Kozlov’s trial alleged that he and Ablyazov used Respublika and other media to incite unrest.

State-controlled media, meanwhile, have launched blistering attacks on Kozlov, Ablyazov and Alga!. The Khabar TV channel broadcast a scurrilous documentary on Nov. 15 which linked Ablyazov with the financing of the party and portrayed it as a money-making exercise. Two days earlier human rights activists Galym Ageleuov and Murat Tungishbayev were named in an article in the state-run Kazakhstanskaya Pravda newspaper which accused them of being “paid servants” of Kozlov and Ablyazov.

Sizov said the space for civil liberties had shrunk over the last year. “There is a feeling of fear. Freedoms have become fewer, and fear has become greater,” he told IPS and yet he maintains change will come: “The process of liberation of citizens is all the same inevitable. Sooner or later there will be a change of regime and democracy will come. It is a question of time.” (End)

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.

Lukpan Akhmedyarov speaks at the National Press Club in Washington. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Oct 26 2012 (IPS)

Lukpan Akhmedyarov, a 36-year-old reporter for an independent weekly in western Kazakhstan who was recently ambushed and nearly killed, was awarded the Peter Mackler Award for Ethical and Courageous Journalism this month – the first journalist from that country to receive international recognition in 10 years.

An examination of his articles and the lawsuits they triggered reveals an unusually detailed picture of why Kazakhstan, a nation blessed with ample natural resources and a president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who covets the Nobel Peace Prize, is 154th out of 179 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index.

Over several long interviews with IPS in Washington, Akhmedyarov described the stories written for the Uralskaya Nedelya (Uralsk Weekly) paper that had generated lawsuits. They reported on police corruption, rampant nepotism, rigged tenders, how 1990s racketeers are now senior government officials, and how disqualified referees keep on refereeing.

His story illustrates claims by human rights monitors that Kazakhstan, whose official line is that it is inching toward democracy at its own pace, has in fact been doing just the opposite since its economy stared booming a decade ago.

The Kazakhstan International Bureau of Human Rights recently reported that in the area of freedom of expression, of “particular concern” were increases in libel lawsuits against newspapers and journalists and physical attacks on journalists.

“Before, (President Nursultan) Nazarbayev was stronger and he cared about his image,” Akhmedyarov said. “You could criticise anyone except him and his family. Now he’s weaker and there’s more money around, so the local bosses depend less on him and they’re getting more and more control over the courts.”

The saga starts in 2006, when a newly hired police officer with a law degree named Marat Sagitov discovered soon after taking over a staff of 16 street cops that they each had to collect 2,000 dollars in bribes each month and hand over the cash to Colonel Kuantay Uteshev, known as the “black Colonel”. Sagitov ordered the 16 policemen to write detailed, signed depositions and mailed them to the region’s governor, leaving a copy on a government website.

Directed by a tip to the internet URL, Akhmedyarov interviewed Sagitov, examined the depositions and wrote a story. A few days later, Sagitov was in jail on charges of corruption that Akhmedyarov said were obviously false. Then the police department sued the reporter for libel.

The plaintiff won on appeal but the suit that was dropped only when a new governor took office a year later.

“Everyone knows the police are corrupt, but it’s very unusual to publish so many details with names, amounts and places,” Artur Shakhnazarian, a journalist in Atyrau, the regional capital, told IPS.

After serving two years, Sagitov, the honest policemen, started gathering evidence against the “Black Colonel”, who in the Uralsk police department has the reputation of overseeing the extorting and distribution of bribes.

He passed the information to Akhmedyarov, who wrote that the colonel’s son worked in the particularly lucrative license plate department (personalized places require bribes). In an article, he quoted the son’s boss as saying he was unqualified and would never have gotten the job without his father’s influence.

Then Akhmedyarov reported that the son bought a Hummer stretch limousine for weddings and didn’t put on any plates to avoid paying taxes (there was no lawsuit, but the plates appeared after the story).

Finally, he reported that the colonel failed a literacy test and was due to be fired. But he arranged to go on sick leave retroactively (the sick cannot be fired in Kazakhstan) and continues to manage the flow of bribes from the comfort of a health spa, Akhmedyarov said.

In the summer of 2010, the new governor of oil-rich but impoverished Western Kazakhstan, Baktykozha Izmukhambetov, a former oil minister, announced that Uralsk, just 300 km from the giant and highly profitable Karachaganak gas field, would finally get gas service through a new pipeline and that tenders for its construction would go out that November.

Driving along that route one day, Akhmedyarov noticed a major construction project by a large company called TengizNefteStroy, so he stopped to ask what it was. It was the pipeline, the workmen told him proudly. The 200-million-dollar company is a major local player in Tengiz, the world’s costliest oilfield development project.

Akhmedyarov contacted the governor’s office and was told no work had begun because the tenders had not gone out. So he wrote a good-news story suggesting that Uralsk might get its gas earlier than anticipated.

“We never thought this had any anything to do with corruption,” he recalled – until he was approached by the owner of a rival construction company who told him that the governor was a childhood friend of the owner of TengizNefteStroy, Tuken Jumagulov.

“He told me that if you know you’re going to get a contract, it gives you a huge advantage in the tender competition,” Akhmedyarov said.

The company sued over the ensuing article and the paper faced closure. The publisher promised to stage a protest at an upcoming OSCE conference.

“Just before it opened, Jumagulov came to see us and told us the suit would be dropped, and it was,” Akhmedyarov said.

Akhmedyarov said that on the evening of Apr. 19, he was returning home when two men stepped out from the shadows, one of them saying, “It’s him.” They shot him three times, stabbed him multiple times and fled when a neighbour arrived. Despite a cracked skull and punctured lungs, liver and kidneys, he recovered.

“I think they wanted to kill me; they would have said something if they wanted to warn me,” he said.

The attack, which came shortly weeks before a presidential visit to Uralsk, was reported by his paper and some national ones but ignored by the seven other papers in Uralsk, all owned by government entities.

Two suspects, aged 16 and 21, were arrested in a village 200 km away. An Uralskaya Nedelya team went there and reported that both were orphans, among the poorest in a poor village. They quoted relatives as saying could not have afforded to buy the gun or pay the cab fare. One had an alibi. The two were released after Nazarbayev’s visit and no one else has been arrested.

Later came lawsuits based on articles that reported that 35 junior officials were related to 35 senior ones; that two officials refused to pay for a boozy restaurant lunch, waving government IDs; how a disqualified soccer referee was spotted refereeing a major match and how three former racketeers now have senior positions in the local government.

All the suits are pending and seek half the damages from the writer and half from the publisher. If they lose, the paper will close and he will go bankrupt.

Akhmediarov, hours before leaving Washington for Almaty, brushed away any notion that he, his pregnant wife and their six-year-old daughter would be safer here. “My place is there,” he said. “And they’d be crazy to try to kill me again.”

The United States and Kazakhstan are exploring the idea of expanding the amount of military cargo passing through Kazakhstan into and out of Afghanistan. The focal point of the discussions is the Caspian port city of Aktau.

Kazakhstani authorities want to turn Aktau into a major regional transit hub, enlarging the port, expanding the municipal airport’s cargo capacity and constructing new rail routes to Turkmenistan and Iran.

They are also intent on integrating their vision for Aktau into the U.S.-backed concept of a New Silk Road, which aims to build up a regional transit network that would help stabilize Afghanistan following the pullout of U.S. and NATO troops.

Kazakhstani leaders see U.S. military cooperation, under the auspices of the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), as a means of achieving that goal, Birzhan Keneshev, the deputy governor of the Mangystau Region (which includes Aktau), said in an interview.

“This is a good opportunity for the U.S. military to send goods through our sea port (and) airport… We will get good experience in organising multi-modal transportation businesses, which we have not had until now in Kazakhstan,” Keneshev said. “It’s a good way to set up some joint ventures with the American side, with logistics companies, and get this experience. They can transfer experience, transfer technology, set up IT systems, train people.”

U.S. diplomats, when discussing the New Silk Road project, frequently cite India’s prime minister, who is said to have quipped, “I dream of a day, while retaining our respective identities, one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore, and dinner in Kabul.”

Kazakhstan’s ambassador in Washington, Erlan Idrissov, has adapted that phrase, imagining a day when one can have “breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Aktau and dinner in Dusseldorf”.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s administration is presenting Aktau as a better alternative for NATO than a proposed transit hub at the Russian city of Ulyanovsk. “The closest way to Europe (from Afghanistan) is through Aktau,” said Keneshev. “It’s a long way to Ulyanovsk,” and by using Aktau, the United States “can save a lot of money”.

A Kazakhstani Foreign Ministry spokesman declined to comment directly on the negotiations concerning Aktau. But the ministry provided a statement to EurasiaNet.org: “During 2009-2011, 15,430 containers have already been shipped through Aktau port from the United States and Europe to Afghanistan, i.e. the majority of the cargo passing through NDN.”

“Kazakhstan is ready to contribute to implementing the (New Silk Road) initiative in the form of some new projects. One of them is the Transportation and Logistics Center (TLC) in Aktau Sea Port,'” the statement continued. “It can be an integral part of the Kazakhstan- Turkmenistan-Afghanistan route as part of the New Silk Road connecting Central and South Asia.”

Pentagon planners have been actively seeking to expand their options on the NDN, as problems with transit through Pakistan and, to a lesser degree, Uzbekistan, have caused delays and interruptions with existing transit routes.

Among options under consideration are potential hubs in Russia and India. Taking geography and the fickle nature of Uzbekistan’s particpation in the NDN into account, it would seem any expansion of goods going to Aktau would mean an increase of transit traffic through Turkmenistan into Afghanistan.

U.S. officials have declined to provide details of the negotiations with Kazakhstan over NDN transit. “We’re eager to talk to any governments in the region about options and opportunities that increase access for U.S. and allied throughput into and out of Afghanistan, and that would include Aktau,” U.S. Army Col. Robert Timm, the defense attache at the U.S. Embassy in Astana, said in an interview.

“They have a plan to develop this multi-modal transit hub out there,” Col. Timm added. “Insofar as the development of that creates opportunities for us, we’re interested in looking at that.”

U.S. diplomats have long seen potential in Aktau, even before the development of the NDN. One 2009 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks was titled “The Strategic Importance of Aktau Seaport.” Another, from 2008, compared Aktau’s role on the New Silk Road to that of Samarkand on the original Silk Road: “Aktau is still a sleepy town in comparison with Almaty and Astana. Its growth potential, however, is significant, particularly when oil from Tengiz and Kashagan is shipped westwards.

“The Kazakhstanis see Aktau as a potential ‘capital city’ of the Caspian region, the central point for transportation, regional educational cooperation, and even tourism. If the cross-Caspian route is the new Silk Road for Central Asia, Aktau may yet prove to be its Samarkand.”

*Editor’s note: Joshua Kucera is the editor of Eurasianet’s Bug Pit blog who also writes on military security issues elsewhere. This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

(END)

Quiz: Over the next three months, three former Soviet republics will hold elections – Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Russia. Whose official outcome will most closely resemble the truth?

If you replied Russia’s upcoming presidential election, you are correct, which, given the apparent scale of fraud in its Dec. 4 Duma vote, says much about politics on the Caspian Sea oil patch: While Vladimir Putin reluctantly permitted a large election protest in Moscow – and may face more in the coming weeks – the popular will is likely to play almost no role in the voting along Russia’s southern rim.

Instead, the rulers of these self-styled sultanates, courted by the West since the 1990s for their hydrocarbons and geostrategic location, will declare outsized victories for their chosen candidates, unruffled by the turbulence that has terrified petrocrats elsewhere.

The rulers of this stretch of land seem to think they will simply hang on. One is led to conclude that they may be right, given the region’s history. Yet, their gamble is considerable – that the influences of the outside world, held at bay for so many centuries, will remain far, far away.

Two decades after the Soviet breakup, the Caspian is reaping the profits of more than 1.5 million barrels a day of oil exports. It is one of China’s choice suppliers of natural gas. And it is an increasingly crucial military staging ground for the United States, which originally embraced the republics in order to direct their oil and gas through new pipelines to the West, and now to facilitate the shipment of war supplies to Afghanistan.

Judging by the rulers’ behavior, this trifecta of factors has helped to make them feel insulated from the political and economic trends pushing and pulling the rest of the world. While the Arab Spring has persuaded even Saudi Arabia to shower 130 billion dollars in added payouts on its population as insurance against unrest, the rulers of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, along with Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, have more or less gone about their usual business.

Which is what? A drive through central Baku – the capital of Azerbaijan – reveals a sparkling horizon of luxury apartment houses, ultra-modern office complexes and posh hotels, most of them built by a tight and powerful clutch of wealthy clans that include and surround the family of President Ilham Aliyev.

In Kazakhstan, Timur Kulibayev, the billionaire son-in-law of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, has grown from dominating the oil sector to directing two-thirds of the entire economy through Samruk- Kazyna, a state-run investment fund that owns or controls the nation’s biggest industries.

Gulnara and Lola Karimova, the daughters of Uzbekistan’s president, have become wealthy through control of key businesses in the country.

And Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov presides over a country that, according to Transparency International, is tied with Uzbekistan as the fifth most-corrupt of the 183 nations evaluated in the organisation’s most recent survey. Berdymukhamedov is Turkmenistan’s sole decision-maker five years after succeeding Saparmurat Niyazov.

If they are immune to some maladies, the republics are still subject to at least one of the worst – terrorism. Oddly, Kazakhstan – the region’s most prosperous state, with the broadest middle class, the mildest autocrat and the most open approach to religion – has faced the greatest violence this year.

Since May, some 30 people have died in seven suicide, shooting and bombing attacks. The source of the mysterious trouble is not clear, although Kazakh security officials link it to Afghanistan and Pakistan. By comparison, Uzbekistan, where one has expected increasing trouble, has been relatively calm.

The leaders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have exhibited contrasting styles: President Nazarbayev has sought conciliation, jailing opponents only if they fail to yield to him, while Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov has embraced unapologetic brutality.

There are similarities – they have led their respective republics for the entire post-Soviet period, and neither suggests any readiness to set in motion a leadership transition. On the latter point – the disinclination to move on – Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev and Turkmenistan’s Berdymukhamedov also seem rather comfortable in their respective palaces.

Looping back to the original point, are these four leaders in fact safely screened off from the type of outside events that could challenge their rule? On the positive side of the ledger, all have proven good at balancing the highly ambitious forces in their countries, and doling out the spoils of hydrocarbon and mining wealth. None of their republics seems to suffer the social cracks that elsewhere have prefigured political instability.

Yet, one wonders how deeply any has thought through the risk. One comforting factor must be the safety of distance – Tunisia and Libya seem a long way away. But Moscow is less so, and therein one might become disquieted. One is reminded of the source of the last couple of disruptions to this remote region’s tranquility – first in 1917, then in 1991.

Editor’s note: Steve LeVine is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, and the author of The Oil and the Glory, a history of the post-Soviet oil rush on the Caspian Sea. LeVine was based in Central Asia and the Caucasus for 11 years, reporting for the Wall Street Journal and before that The New York Times. He is an adjunct professor in energy security at Georgetown University, and a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.