ALMATY, AUG. 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev flew to Ankara to meet with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, making him the first head-of-state to travel to Turkey since a coup attempt in July.
The meeting highlighted Mr Nazarbayev’s savvy foreign policy and his attempts to maintain a balance between the competing pressures placed over Kazakhstan by rival powers, mainly Russia, China, and Turkey and to a lesser extent the US.
On his trip to Ankara, Mr Nazarbayev voiced his support for Mr Erdogan, seen as one of the strongest leaders in the Muslim world, and, importantly, he also went some way to appeasing Mr Erdogan’s quest to crackdown on supporters of the exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen when he said that he would send back any teachers linked to the outlawed movement.
“We do not support anyone going against Turkey. This is not in our interest. Both sides’ education ministries will control the schools by creating a working group,” media quoted Mr Nazarbayev as saying. “If there are teachers with links, we will send them back and ask the Turkish government to send other teachers.”
Mr Erdogan has blamed his former ally Mr Gulen, who now lives in the US for organising the coup attempt. He has arrested thousands of Gulenists in Turkey and put pressure on Turkey’s allies to close schools and hospitals linked to the Gulen movement.
Mr Nazarbayev, though, stopped short of agreeing to close the 30 Gulen-linked schools outright, as Kyrgyzstan has also declined to do. They are considered a key part of the Kazakh education system, offering a syllabus based on a secular scientific curriculum. News reports said that only around 8% to 9% of the teachers at Kazakhstan’s Gulenist schools were from Turkey.
ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 292, published on Aug. 12 2016)
