Eurasia Media Forum: Central Asia’s Masters of Spin

By denying any political affiliation and insisting that they are simply providing a much-needed venue for East-West dialogue and networking, the organizers of this annual conference in Kazakhstan manage to attract the biggest names in media year after year.

The Eurasia Media Forum (EAMF)--a massive international gathering of news executives and journalists that will take place again this week in Almaty on 22-24 April--has been both fiercely condemned and passionately defended since it began two years ago. It has also become a testing ground for Western engagement in Central Asia. The debates over the conference have come as the West faces increased scrutiny over its relationships with the heavy-handed regimes of this region; most are new partners in the U.S.-declared war against terrorism but have not given up their old ways of crushing opposition forces and silencing independent media. The question of whether to engage or boycott when progress slows or is virtually nonexistent is one that remains crucial to the overall issue of foreign assistance and democratic development.

I was invited last year to lead a panel at the EAMF on online journalism, but because of the controversial nature of the conference, I long hesitated over whether to participate and accept the organizers' offer to cover all my expenses (attendees receive free room and board). In the end, after a lengthy exploration of my own position on the "engage or boycott" question, I decided to attend, largely motivated by my desire to experience the controversy first-hand. By the time I left Almaty, it was clear to me that the debate was not as black and white as I had previously thought; over the course of the conference, I heard valid arguments for and against attending. The following is my account of the second annual Eurasia Media Forum culled from notes from that time, as well as on-site and subsequent interviews.

GOVERNMENTAL CONNECTIONS

On paper at least, the official organizer of the annual event, the Eurasia Media Forum Foundation, is a non-governmental, not-for-profit organization registered in Kazakhstan. But the chair of the EAMF organizing committee is none other than Dariga Nazarbayeva, President Nursultan Nazarbaev's eldest daughter and a budding politician; her pro-government media company, Khabar, which dominates the domestic market, plays a major role in running the event; and her father gave the opening speech for last year's conference and will do so again this year. Throughout last year's forum, held on 24-26 April 2003, Nazarbayeva made it clear that she is much more than a figurehead--by all accounts she plays a central role in setting the program and vetting presenters.

In keeping with their desire to appear independent of the government, the organizers say they don't take money from the state. Funding comes from local and foreign companies and a few grants (including one from NATO last year). However, a number of the companies on the list of sponsors are owned either by the state or linked to the presidential "family" (as Kazakhs refer to the extended Nazerbaev clan, which controls much of the economy). That has led to much speculation that some of these "sponsors" had little choice to contribute significant sums of money to cover the costs of the lavish event. But it's nearly impossible to find out. Beyond the list published on the forum's Internet site, the organizers do not release information about the size of donations, the actual costs of the forum, or any other financial details, claiming the figures are "a matter of internal policy and internal management."

Those connections to the authorities and the presidential family have been more than enough for local opposition journalists, as well as local and international freedom-of-the-press activists, to cry foul. On the opening day of the 2003 conference, a group of Kazakhstan's most prominent opposition and independent journalists released a letter alleging a litany of government-orchestrated media repression. Among other things, they pointed to fabricated charges filed against anti-regime journalists, the quashing of independent TV channels, and a broadcast monopoly controlled by the Nazarbaev family.

"By holding a global-scale event and [showcasing] its controlled media," the statement read, "the forum organizers are pursuing the goals that are important for them: gaining the image of a press-friendly country, smoothing over criticism from the international community, and concealing the facts about harassment of independent media in Kazakhstan.

"A regime that represses freedom of speech in its own country has no moral right to organize and participate in forums held to support world media."

Charges such as those are equally relevant this year. Just a few weeks before the opening of the 2004 conference, parliamentarians approved a new media law that had been repeatedly condemned by local and foreign press activists, as well as Western governments and international organizations. The International Press Institute had said about the draft law: "A number of articles stray so far from international standards on press freedom that it is difficult not to see the Law Concerning Mass Media as a government-inspired attempt to control and intimidate the media." That criticism and others--especially from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)--led President Nazerbaev to rail in December against outside interference in the country's legislative agenda. Now, the new measures need only Nazerbaev's signature to become law.

SMOOTH CUSTOMERS

The organizers, led by Nazarbayeva, argue that their intentions for the annual forum are simply to gather together prominent media professionals to promote East-West cooperation and understanding--through dialogue on topics such as covering Islam, religious conflicts, corruption, and, yes, freedom of the media. The president's daughter, in her 2003 welcoming address, declared: "Mass media today should be independent and able to provide a community a chance to understand itself. Therefore," she said, "nobody has the right to use it as an instrument of manipulation and propaganda."

Last year, proclamations like that were sandwiched into a packed program of panels, which took place at the five-star Regent Hotel in downtown Almaty. Though the discussions sometimes dragged on--as speakers and individuals in the audience frequently digressed from the topics at hand--the logistics came off with few hitches. Smooth, well-groomed Khabar officials and security personnel blanketed the conference proceedings. Young women--ethnic Kazakhs and Russians studying at a local business academy--hovered helpfully, clad in blue and gold with girl-scout-like scarves. A cornucopia of food overflowed in the hotel restaurant and at the "cultural excursions"--an evening of Kazakh song and dance at the city theater and a late afternoon at a ranch up in the mountains surrounding Almaty.

The slickness, however surprising to Westerners dealing with the Kazakhs for the first time, is no shock to more experienced Kazakh-watchers. Unlike their counterparts in many other parts of the former Soviet Union, the Kazakh elite has clearly learned that image matters and that hiring professionals to do things right is worth the money. Over the past several years, the government has spent millions on lobbyists and public relations campaigns. As only one example, the Financial Times reported last year that the government planned to spend $1 million for Washington D.C.'s largest lobbying company, Patton Boggs, to improve Kazakhstan's reputation among U.S. officials and the media.

In other ways, the authorities operate much more subtly: opponents charge that their techniques include a range of strategies designed to distort reality to such a degree that the truth becomes increasingly hard to decipher. The case of Sergei Duvanov, which served as a grim backdrop to last year's conference, is a prime example.

A MARKED MAN

Over the past decade, Sergei Duvanov--after dabbling in politics following the country's independence--became one of Kazakhstan's leading independent journalists and human rights activists. He was one of the few who dared to write about the high-level corruption allegations known collectively (and unoriginally) as "Kazakhgate," a scandal surrounding charges that Western oil companies paid enormous bribes to Kazakh officials, including President Nazerbaev, for concessions to exploit the country's vast oil reserves.

A central figure in the Kazakhgate scandal is an American named James Giffen, who once served as a special advisor to Nazarbaev. He was indicted in the spring of 2003 by a U.S. grand jury on charges that he handed out nearly $80 million in under-the-table payments to Kazakh officials on behalf of oil companies. (Speculation still abounds that Giffen might strike a plea bargain and implicate Nazerbaev, which would have huge implications for the country's relations with the West--including its new role in the fight against terrorism--and international financial institutions.)

Since the scandal broke, the Kazakh authorities have come down increasingly hard on local opposition media that have dared to cover to the trials. It is within this context that most international press organizations have come to believe that Duvanov's October 2002 arrest and conviction on charges of raping an underage girl was a government frame-up. The journalist was detained the day he was scheduled to leave for the United States to discuss his Kazakhgate investigations with U.S. officials. Two months earlier, in August, three men had brutally beaten him and warned that next time they would cripple him if he didn't stop writing. He didn't.

A Dutch diplomat who attended Duvanov's trial later wrote: "There can be little doubt that Duvanov was the victim of a politically motivated secret operation of the security organs to discredit him." In his meticulously detailed report, the diplomat claimed there were numerous instances where the security services had botched the set-up Keystone Cop fashion, and that the police had committed suspicious procedural violations.

Duvanov's defenders believe he was targeted partly because his coverage was more professional, more balanced--in short, more credible--than other press accounts. He cited specific legal examples, avoided using unsourced allegations, and presented information without the personal slurs and hysterical proclamations that mar some of the opposition media's reporting. Duvanov may have had sympathies for various opposition groups, but he was as close to an "independent" reporter as it gets in Kazakhstan, and certainly could not easily be labeled a political hack.

Duvanov further irritated the authorities by publishing most of his writing on the Internet site, Eurasia.ru.org, a popular source of news and analysis about Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia, with Russian and English versions. It's widely assumed that the site is bankrolled by Nazerbaev's arch-enemy, Akezhan Kazhegeldin, who was prime minister from 1994 to 1997 before he fell out with the president and emigrated to the West. Kazhegeldin, the theory goes, was an Internet-savvy technocrat when he was in power. After finding himself suddenly sidelined as an outsider by the pro-government media, he turned to the online medium as an effective weapon to fight the authorities. One expert on the Kazakh Internet, who did not wish to be named, told me that the state security services had even gone so far as to create a duplicate version of Eurasia.ru.org--almost a mirror, but with sensitive stories deleted.

In September 2001, a Kazakh court convicted Kazhegeldin in absentia of corruption and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. He continues to deny the charges, claiming they were politically motivated, while acting as one of the most prominent critics of the regime abroad--spinning in reverse, as it were, the messages of the authorities.

A DROP IN THE SEA

While nearly every press defense organization abroad, as well as the OSCE, has openly expressed doubts about the verdict, in Kazakhstan, public opinion is decidedly mixed. Only a small minority of people--opposition types and journalists, many of whom worked with Duvanov--believe he is completely innocent. But their non-state affiliated newspapers, which covered the case extensively, reach at most 40,000-50,000 people in a country of 15 million.

"In the provinces, in the northern regions, people have no idea about [the Duvanov] case or only have a very general idea," said Rozlana Taukina, a leading opposition journalist. I met Taukina and a group of other journalists--all of whom have had run-ins with the government--at the local office of Internews, an international organization that fosters independent media in emerging democracies.

Taukina and her colleagues in the opposition press, as well as many independent observers, believe the authorities have engaged in a calculated campaign to limit reporting about Duvanov and the Kazakhgate scandal. Taukina claimed that the local authorities have confiscated opposition newspapers to prevent the dissemination of information. Another opposition journalist told me that the authorities "coincidentally" sued his newspaper under an obscure law that prevents simultaneous publication in Russian and Kazakh one week after his newspaper became one of the first publications to write about Kazakhgate in the Kazakh language.

"I think it's an implicit policy to limit access of at least the Kazakh part of the population to news of this kind," he said. "We simply said that James Giffen had been arrested at the airport in such and such town, and we received a lawsuit almost immediately. That in itself tells you something."

The rest of the press is largely state-controlled or owned by members of the presidential family (ownership remains opaque, but media analysts judge that a vast majority are in the hands of the extended Nazerbaev family). The situation with the broadcast media is even worse, with a major independent station shut down in the months following the first Eurasia Media Forum. All of these state-friendly outlets have either ignored the Duvanov case or, at most, suggested during the trial that he was at least partly guilty.

It's clear when you talk to intelligent, independent people that the state-orchestrated information blockade has successfully created an atmosphere of doubt and innuendo surrounding the Duvanov case. One opposition journalist told me that while she didn't believe he had actually raped the victim, she did think that some sort of sexual contact had taken place. Another 20-something woman, sophisticated and educated in the United States, said she didn't know what to believe, but some friends had told her that Duvanov liked young women. Tatyana Shevyakova, the chair of the journalism department at Almaty University, told me that she and her students don't feel that they have all the information necessary to make a definitive judgment.

GOOD COP, BAD COP

The shadow that the Dubanov case cast over the 2003 EAMF conference seemed to bring a sense of urgency, some might say desperation, to the organizers' attempts to win the hearts and minds of the international and domestic public. And even though Duvanov has been transferred from his cell to house arrest, his situation is likely to pervade at least some of this year's conference.

Last year, during a panel called "Journalists Under Pressure," Nazerbaev aide Ermukhamet Ertysbayev said: "To me, all these years Duvanov was a professional politician. I know people in this audience would vote for releasing him. It is a pity that such prestigious guests have been manipulated in this ideological battle.

"Let me reveal a secret," Ertysbayev went on. "After Duvanov was arrested, as an advisor to the president, I told him [Nazerbaev]: