Will There Be a Central Asian Spring?

Kazakhstan may not be ripe for revolution, but the West is making the same mistakes it made in the Arab world.

BY JOANNA LILLIS 

Nursultan Nazarbayev, leader of the oil-rich Central Asian state of Kazakhstan, just did precisely that, while the West -- mindful of Kazakhstan's oil and gas wealth and position astride a supply route to Afghanistan -- barely batted an eyelid.

To add insult to injury for Kazakhstan's beleaguered opposition, Nazarbayev's ruling Nur Otan (Light Fatherland) party's landslide in a micromanaged election came a month after security forces fired on protesters in the energy hub of Zhanaozen in western Kazakhstan, killing 17. This was the worst unrest in 20 years of independence in Kazakhstan, a country that has always prided itself on political and social stability as factors that win the hearts and minds of its own population -- and woo the foreign investors who have sunk millions into its energy sector.

Nazarbayev billed the Jan. 15 parliamentary election in Kazakhstan -- a vast state of 17 million people, squeezed between Russia and China -- as a make-or-break moment in the post-Soviet nation's slow transition to democracy. The vote ended with opposition forces shut out of a rubberstamp legislature, as usual.
"There are no genuine signs that the Kazakh president wants to embrace a Western-style democracy," Lilit Gevorgyan, a regional analyst at IHS Global Insight, says. "He and his team have made no secret of this."
Western powers, which prize Kazakhstan as a cooperative partner in a region of often uncooperative states, have been muted in their criticism of this election in particular, and of Kazakhstan's painfully slow progress toward democracy in general -- a policy analysts say may come back to haunt them.
After the election, Washington did timidly express its "hope that the government of Kazakhstan follows through on its stated goal of strengthening the overall conditions necessary for genuine political pluralism."
But critics say pressure on Kazakhstan to conduct meaningful democratic reform is diluted by the value the United States places on Astana's commitment to allowing cargoes to transit this vast state to Afghanistan along the Northern Distribution Network, an overland supply route that has assumed increasing strategic significance as Pakistan has grown increasingly unstable and unreliable.
"Everyone understands that Nazarbayev suits [the West]," says Kazakh analyst Dosym Satpayev. Muted Western criticism also suits Nazarbayev, a president for whom the international seal of approval matters so much that he pays Western PR firms large sums to burnish Astana's image.
Make no mistake: The election was a farce. Nazarbayev's party stormed in with 81 percent of the vote, while two other pro-regime parties -- Ak Zhol (Bright Path) and the Communist People's Party of Kazakhstan (KNPK) scraped through the 7 percent electoral threshold to win a handful of seats in the 107-member lower house.
Ak Zhol's leader is Azat Peruashev, who was a member of Nur Otan until heading up this supposedly rival party last summer, while the KNPK is dismissed by Satpayev as a political clone. "Dolly the sheep didn't live long -- it was an artificial organism with weak immunity," he says wryly. "The same goes for the KNPK."
What of the genuine opposition? Most dissident voices were ruled out of this vote by various means: Alga! (Forward!), is not registered; the Communist Party (a KNPK rival that is critical of Nazarbayev) is suspended; Rukhaniyat (Spirituality) was struck off the ballot paper on dubious procedural grounds when leader Serikzhan Mambetalin started making noises about the Zhanaozen shootings.
That left one option for protest voters: the National Social Democratic Party (OSDP), standing on a platform of democratic reform and social justice, which came second in the 2007 election when it just failed to clear the electoral threshold, leaving Kazakhstan with a one-party parliament manned by Nur Otan -- an anomaly Nazarbayev said he wanted this election to rectify.
He failed. This time, the OSDP cried foul over the last-minute disqualification of co-leader Bolat Abilov, accused of making false financial declarations. When official results came in, the opposition was excluded from Parliament again, trailing on 1.7 percent of the vote.
Election day "was a black day in the calendar of the whole history of Kazakhstan," OSDP deputy leader Amirzhan Kosanov railed at a small post-election rally in Kazakhstan's commercial capital, Almaty, where leaders burned copies of election protocols in protest. "On that day democracy was killed, just as in Zhanaozen our peaceful citizens were killed with machine guns!"