Tag Archives: politics

Kazakh President says ‘no’ to dynasty

ALMATY, NOV. 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — In an interview with Bloomberg News, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev appeared to cautiously rule out a straight handover of power to a family member.

The 76-year-old leader also said that he would be prepared to govern for another five year term from 2020 if he felt well enough and had strong enough public support.

Speculation has been mounting for years over Mr Nazarbayev’s succession plans. Many analysts have suggested that Mr Nazarbayev’s eldest daughter, Dariga who is now a senator, may be being lined up to take over from him.

“I’m not envisaging succession for my children, I don’t think that’s a question for us,” he said. “Our transfer of power is spelled out by the constitution.”

This nuanced reply appears to suggest that Mr Nazarbayev’s successor will have to win power through an election, as the constitution states. Western vote monitors, though, have never judged an election in Kazakhstan to be either free or fair.

And, on the victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election this month, Mr Nazarbayev said he was confident the incoming US President would mend US-Russia relations, a positive step forward for global international relations.

“The best democratisation, say of Russia and all countries, is to have the West in friendly relations with all of us,” he said.

Kazakhstan is dealing with a sharp economic downturn triggered by a collapse in oil prices and a recession in Russia. Mr Nazarbayev also said in the interview that he was looking to strengthen the banking system.

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(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)

Kazakh President discusses his succession

NOV. 25 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — >> In his interview with Bloomberg, Nazarbayev says that he won’t hand power to his children. What do you think he means by this?

>> If you read the interview closely, it is not as clear as that. He says in the interview that he “doesn’t envisage succession for his children” and that it is “not a question for us”. Instead he says that it is up to the Kazakh people to decide through the constitution. This, of course, means through an election. I think that Nazarbayev has deliberately left this ambiguous. He is certainly not ruling out encouraging one of his two daughters, or their children, to take over form him but he is saving that whoever does will have to win a presidential election to earn legitimacy.

>> So you don’t think it is as clear cut as the Bloomberg headline writers make out. They were definitive and gave the story the headline: ‘Kazakh President Nazarbayev Says Power Won’t Be Family Business’.

>> That’s right. I think that he is leaving his options open, fully open. Of course, he can’t sit there in a Bloomberg interview and say that he favours handing over power to Dariga which, as we have said, is a likely scenario. Instead he has to say that the constitution has to be respected and the people have to decide. This can easily be manipulated to give Nazarbayev the result he wants. He just needs his Nur Otan party to select his chosen candidate and then for an election to pass this off successfully. Don’t forget that Western observers have never judged an election in Kazakhstan to be free fair. This generally means that the Kazakh elite can host can election but still generate the results that they need.

>> Right. So, when the time is right, Nur Otan picks Nazarbayev’s favoured candidate. An election is called which this candidate wins. This means that the constitution has been respected and the people have made their choice. Is that right?

>> That process would certainly fit with the process that Nazarbayev described in his Bloomberg interview. We don’t know who he favours but his interview with Bloomberg, in our view, certainly did not reduce Dariga’s chances of becoming his successor.

>> What else was important to pick up on in the interview?

>> I actually think that it’s important that Nazarbayev said he’d be happy to stay on as president past 2020. This had been the date we’d been expecting him to stand aside, he will be 80-years-old in 2020, but he’s now signalled that he is no rush to sort out the succession issue in Kazakhstan and that he’d be prepared to wait until 2025 or, dare we say it, beyond that to sort out this troublesome issue. I thought that Nazarbayev looked spritely in the interview. For a man of 76, he is clearly in good nick.

>> And, what about his comments on Trump? Surely they were important too?

>> Yes and no. I wouldn’t have expected anything else. He has to welcome Trump as the next US President. All the leaders of the Former Soviet Union do. Hillary Clinton would have meant more of the same, which essentially was poor Russia-US relations souring the whole ex-Soviet space. With Trump it’s a clean slate. Nobody is sure what he is going to do.

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(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)

Kyrgyz opposition threatens President

NOV. 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Omurbek Tekebayev, one of the opposition figures in Kyrgyzstan being investigated for allegedly setting up offshore accounts in Kyrgyzstan, said that he had started collecting signatures to impeach president Almazbek Atambayev. Mr Tekebayev is a member so the Ata Meken party which walked out of a government coalition in October over Mr Atambayev’s plans to hold a referendum in December that would extend the powers of the PM.

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(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)

Kazakh President considers name change for Astana

ALMATY, NOV. 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s parliament proposed renaming the capital city, Astana, after president Nursultan Nazarbayev.

It is now for Mr Nazarbayev, 76, to agree to accept the proposal or not. He has previously rejected a similar proposal but over the past weeks and months momentum appears to have built up towards embellishing Mr Nazarbayev’s persona, which some describe as a personality cult.

Last week the Central Bank unveiled a new bank note with his portrait on it, dozens of university, libraries and schools are named after him and in 2011, a statue of him was erected by a park in Almaty.

The proposal to rename Astana, the city that Mr Nazarbayev built on the Kazakh steppe, was buried in the last paragraph of a lengthy monologue lauding the president’s achievement since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Mr Nazarbayev has been Kazakhstan’s only post-Soviet leader.

Astana means capital in Kazakh and has been developed as a brand. Many of Mr Nazarbayev’s pet projects — an airline, a cycling team, a football team — are called Astana and wear the yellow and blue of Kazakhstan.

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(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)

Georgia-Russia mend ties via the Orthodox Church

NOV. 25 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The head of the Georgian Orthodox Church Patriarch Ilia II flew to Moscow for a week of meetings with senior members of the Russian Orthodox Church, hooked around the 70th birthday of its leader Patriarch Kirill (Nov. 20).

Visits by Patriarch Ilia to Moscow are important because they act as an unofficial diplomatic channel between Moscow and Tbilisi. At times, such as immediately after a war between the two side in August 2008, this channel has been vital and the only way the two sides were able to communicate.

On his arrival in Moscow, Patriarch Ilia appeared to recognise the importance of these meetings.

“Georgian and the Russian Orthodox Churches have great importance for our countries and people. The relationship between us ought to be better than it is now, and we should do everything to improve the relationship between the political figures of our countries. I think we can do this. We need each other and we should help each other,” he was quoted by media as saying.

He plays an important role in domestic Georgian politics, often intervening to mediate in disputes or set the tone in national debates.

Patriarch Ilia is the highest ranking public figure from Georgia to have travelled to Moscow since the 2008 war. On a trip in 2013, he also met with Russian president Vladimir Putin. It is unclear whether he will meet Mr Putin on this trip, which is dominated by meetings with various Russian Orthodox officials.

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(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)

Georgian PM unveils new cabinet

NOV. 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Georgian PM Giorgi Kvirikashvili unveiled his new cabinet following the Georgian Dream coalition’s parliamentary election victory last month with only one major change. Dimitri Kumsishvili, the former economy minister, has been promoted to the more important position of finance minister. Mr Kumsishvili is one of a number of cabinet ministers who used to work at Bidzina Ivanizhvili’s Kartu bank. Mr Ivanishvili is the power behind the Georgian coalition. Kakha Kaladze, who under election rules, formerly resigned his ministerial position to fight for re-election in parliament, was reappointed as energy minister.

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(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)

Turkmen President’s son wins parliamentary seat

NOV. 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The son of Turkmen president Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, Serdar Berdymukhamedov, has won a seat in the country’s parliament, local television reported, a possible first step towards inheriting the presidency from his father.

Turkmen TV broadcast Serdar Berdymukhamedov being congratulated after winning a by-election three days earlier. He had previously worked in a senior management position in the foreign ministry.

Little is known about Serdar Berdymukhamedov. Eurasianet ran a story earlier this year which said that as well as holding down government jobs he also owns a “a cotton-spinning plant, a mineral water factory and a chain of hotels”.

Earlier this year, Mr Berdymukhamedov tweaked the country’s constitution so that he could remain in power for life. He also extended the length of presidential terms to seven years from five years.

Succession has become an enduring issue in Central Asia. In September, Islam Karimov, who had ruled Uzbekistan for 25 years died. His daughter had been his preferred successor but was sidelined two years ago, paving the way for PM Shavkat Mirziyoyev to take over. In Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev dodged the issue of a family succession during an interview with Bloomberg this week.

Mr Berdymukhamedov took over in 2007 as Turkmenistan’s president from Saparmurat Niyazov. The only country in the region which has successfully completed a power handover within a family is in Azerbaijan, where Ilham Aliyev became president in 2003 after his father Heydar.

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(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)

Rumours swirl over Gulnara’s death in Uzbekistan, some people want her to return

TASHKENT, NOV. 25 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — If there is a shadow hanging over the presidential election in Uzbekistan and the apparent smooth handover of power to Shavkat Mirziyoyev coupled with warmer neighbourly relations, it is the figure of Gulnara Karimova.

Very little has been heard of Uzbekistan’s self-styled diva since she was placed under house arrest in Tashkent in March 2014. She had been the preferred successor of her father, Islam Karimov, but fell from grace after police forces in Europe started investigating her financial affairs. It emerged she had been taking bribes worth hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign telecoms firms.

Unlike her sister and mother, who have been pictured mourning and have set up an institute in Karimov’s name, Ms Karimova has hardly been mentioned in news coverage since her father’s death on Sept. 2.

That is until a Russian language website which specialises on reporting on Central Asia, centre1.com, quoted an unnamed member of the Uzbek security forces as saying that she had been poisoned at the start of November and buried in a shallow grave (Nov. 22).

The centre1.com story was widely sited across the media until her London-based son, also called Islam Karimov, released a statement two days later saying that she was alive and well.

“These are just rumours. She’s alive and still bound to a house arrest sentence ,” he told the BBC.

Even so, Ms Karimova has still not been seen in public.

On a trip to Tashkent last month by the Bulletin, though, it was clear that she still carries a degree of support from ordinary people, despite Western media referring to her as the most hated person in Uzbekistan – a reference based on a 2005 diplomatic cable sent from the US embassy in Tashkent to Washington.

Umida, 22, a Tashkent-based student, said that it would be good if the glamorous Ms Karimova returned to public life.

“Gulnara did lots of useful things in the sphere of culture and education and gave many opportunities to young people,” she said.

Dilmurad, 28, agreed. “I don’t know whether the accusations about her are right or wrong, but I would like to see many of the social projects she organised, the Forum Foundation, Art Week Style, Marathons, Fighting Breast Cancer, being held once again.”

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(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)

Armenia demurs for WMD

NOV. 17 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenia’s parliament voted to extend for seven years a deal with the United States designed to stop the spread of so-called weapons of mass destruction. Under the deal the US supplies Armenia with equipment and training to stop the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The original deal was signed in 2000.

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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)

Georgia’s former president sets up party

NOV. 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili announced that he was setting up a new political party in Ukraine less than a week after quitting as governor of the Odessa region because of what he said were links between the government and corrupt practices. He called for an early election in Ukraine. Last month, Mr Saakashvili’s United National Movement party was soundly beaten in a parliamentary election in Georgia and his detractors have said that he has set up a political party in Ukraine because his much-vaunted return to Georgian politics failed to materialise.

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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)