Kazakhstan is joining an illustrious bunch by avoiding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony today in Oslo. This year the award goes to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. But despite their invitations, the likes of Kazakhstan, China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Sudan will not attend.
Mr Liu will also not attend, as he is serving an 11-year prison term for his human rights activism.
When pressed about the visible absence, Kazakhstan Foreign Ministry spokesman Ilyas Omarov said that the diplomatic representative accredited in Oslo was unable to attend the ceremony due to a previously arranged business trip.
The awarding of the prize to Liu Xiaobo for co-authoring a document calling for political reforms, has caused widespread controversy, with China accused of behind the scenes arm-twisting to encourage countries to boycott the event. Of the 65 diplomatic outposts invited to send representatives, 44 have agreed, 19 have declined and two have abstained.
China, which shares a land border with Kazakhstan, has significant investments in the country's oil and gas sphere. Astana, in turn, is a staunch supporter of Chinese foreign policy. Democratic reforms are also a touchy subject in Kazakhstan, which has a one-party parliament and a long-serving president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who can stay in the job for as long as he likes while reveling in his official title, Leader of the Nation.
Kazakhstan also has its own “dissidents” serving time, most famous among them human rights activist Yevgeniy Zhovtis, currently in the middle of a four-year sentence for vehicular manslaughter. Legal experts and activists say his conviction was unsound and related to his work.
There's been talk in the past of nominating Nazarbayev himself for the Nobel Peace Prize, including from the Kazakh-led World Assembly of Turkic Peoples earlier this year. However, wits in Kazakhstan are joking that Nazarbayev’s kowtowing may put him in line for China's alternative prize – the newly inaugurated Confucius Peace Prize.
Paul Bartlett is a journalist based in Almaty.
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