How many hints does a Central Asian president have to drop before someone gives him a Nobel Prize?
A day after Kazakhstan began providing impoverished Kyrgyzstan with gas at knockdown prices, an overwhelming majority of parliamentarians in Bishkek voted to ask Norway to grant Kazakh strongman Nursultan Nazarbayev the Nobel Peace Prize.
Nazarbayev, who likes to tout his role in dismantling the nuclear weapons he inherited from the Soviet Union, has been up for the prize several times before at home. But those efforts failed. And because he rules over Central Asia’s fastest-growing economy, where living standards are rapidly outpacing those in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, it should come as no surprise that a grateful neighbor should step up and help.
Of course, not all Kyrgyz deputies are happy to see their country groveling before its stronger neighbor. When Speaker Akmatbek Keldibekov (no convincing peacemaker himself) suddenly tabled the proposal at the end of the parliamentary session on September 29, one deputy cried, “This really looks like sheer toadyism!”
"This flattery ... had not been discussed before and appeared on the agenda all of a sudden at the last moment," Reuters quoted MP Kanybek Imanaliyev from the Ar-Namys party as saying. "It looks like some [Kyrgyz] politicians have vested interests in this."
It will not be the first time this year that Kyrgyz leaders have sought to flatter regional powerbrokers. In January, just before heading to Moscow to negotiate discounted oil supplies, Prime Minister Almazbek Atambayev proposed naming a Kyrgyz mountain after his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. That measure passed easily.
This time the Kyrgyz MPs are probably a little late: The prize is due to be announced in Oslo in one week. Nazarbayev, though, is no doubt blushing.
David Trilling is Eurasianet’s managing editor.
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