The first day of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe summit in Kazakhstan produced consensus on the need to address security threats. But as participants prepared for the final day of the gathering, deep divisions remained on key democratization issues, including human rights standards.
A group of Uzbek asylum seekers facing extradition to Uzbekistan from Kazakhstan has appealed to human rights organizations to use the summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) opening in Astana today to pressure Kazakhstan, this year’s OSCE chairman, not to extradite them to Uzbekistan.
“We ask you to do your best to prevent the extradition of Uzbek refugees,” the appeal, distributed by e-mail, said, asking them to lobby for the issue to be discussed at the summit.
The appeal, dated November 25 and addressed to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Human Rights in Central Asia association and the Memorial Human Rights Center was signed by 15 detainees who are among 28 arrested in June and are being held in an Almaty detention center pending an appeal against their extradition.
The asylum seekers have almost exhausted their legal options. The Kazakh Prosecutor-General’s Office has ordered their extradition to Uzbekistan, where they say they risk being tortured.
Kazakhstan is signatory to international conventions prohibiting refoulement (extradition to a country where a deportee may face torture). However, human rights organizations say regional security agreements often override such commitments for Kazakhstan – a bit of realpolitik to keep authoritarian neighboring states sweet.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s administration in Kazakhstan is hoping the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit, which opens in Astana on December 1, will enhance the Central Asian nation’s global prestige.
As Hillary Clinton landed on the tarmac in Astana ahead of the summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), she might have been feeling a trifle uncomfortable. Many of the world leaders she’s facing as they embark on thorny negotiations over security, conflict resolution and arms control are at the center of uncomfortable revelations through WikiLeaks – and, embarrassingly, the latest bout of indiscretions is full of juicy gossip about Clinton's Kazakh hosts.
Anyone who thought Kazakh officials were a dry-looking bunch will have to agree that appearances can be deceptive. The allegations contained in one confidential cable purportedly sent by the US Embassy in Astana suggest that US diplomats have witnessed the city’s powerful leaders letting their hair down in style. Some dance the night away, while others prefer the more prosaic entertainment of drinking themselves into oblivion.
According to the document on the lifestyles of Kazakhstan’s leadership, Prime Minister Karim Masimov was once spotted at Astana’s chicest nightspot, Chocolat, strutting his stuff -- and not on the dance floor, either, but on a raised podium above it, alone, after his companions wore themselves out with all the fun and went back to their seats.
The Kazakh Agriculture Ministry has sounded an alarm over the fate of the saiga, a critically endangered antelope that roams the steppes of Central Asia. The animals continue to fall prey to poachers engaged in the lucrative trade in their horns, which fetch large sums over the border in China where they’re prized for use in traditional medicine, the Kazakhstan Today news agency reports.
Over the last two months forestry inspectors in western Kazakhstan have found 111 saiga carcasses left behind by poachers, and since the beginning of 2009 a total of 312 saigas have been found shot dead, the Agriculture Ministry’s Forestry and Hunting Committee says.
The deaths registered by inspectors are undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg. Kazakhstan faces a formidable challenge in its saiga conservation efforts, with hard-pressed inspectors trying to police the vast and remote territories where the antelopes roam as poachers continue to hunt them down.
The World Wildlife Fund identifies loss of habitat and hunting as key threats to the existence of the saiga, a distinctive creature with a long, humped nose that allows it to filter air during the dusty summer months and breath warm air during the freezing winters.
The epic Kazakhgate bribery scandal has finally come to an end, and – in a breathtaking twist – the man originally accused of funneling millions of dollars in kickbacks to top Kazakh officials has suddenly emerged as a Cold War hero – at least, that’s what the judge who sentenced him on November 19 said, according to the Main Justice website.
Judge William H. Pauley heaped defendant James Giffen with praise, describing him as a “significant source of information to the United States government and a conduit for secret communications with the Soviet Union and its leadership during the Cold War.”
Pauley said he’d learned this in classified information about Giffen, which also revealed that the defendant had worked tirelessly in the 1980s to help Soviet Jews leave the country – a sort of latter-day Schindler of the Soviet Union.
This is a remarkable turnaround for a man arrested in 2003 on suspicion of channeling $78 million to senior officials in Astana in exchange for energy contracts in the 1990s, when he was adviser to Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. The amount of the alleged bribes rose to $84 million in a later indictment under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Giffen insisted the CIA authorized his dealings in Kazakhstan; the agency denies the charge. In remarks that lend some credence to Giffen’s defense, Judge Pauley hinted that if investigators had had access to classified information, the charges wouldn’t have been filed.
Officials in Kazakhstan are developing a grand plan to get virtually everyone in the Central Asian country speaking Kazakh by 2020. Data from a recent survey, however, suggests that Astana’s goal may be overly ambitious.
The bureaucratic hoops that people sometimes have to jump through to complete routine business in Kazakhstan are legendary. Frustrated by years of dealings with what they say are high-handed officials, one group of citizens has turned in desperation to the old Soviet method of samizdat to draw attention to their plight, Respublika reports.
Distributors of samizdat bypassed the Soviet censors by photocopying material and circulating it by hand. Now this group of inhabitants of two settlements outside Almaty, Bakay and Akbulak, have published a samizdat book to detail their twists and turns through the corridors of bureaucracy as they seek to complete the paperwork for land plots and property they say they’ve owned for up to a decade.
The book has a suitably surreal title: The Ordeal in the Land of Nurat, combining the name of President Nursultan Nazarbayev with that of Borat, the “Kazakh” hero of the famous film that lampooned a fictional Kazakhstan as a bizarre and insane place. The title also plays on the name of a trilogy by Russian writer Aleksey Tolstoy, The Ordeal, about the trials and tribulations of the October Revolution and the Civil War. In this case, the ordeal they describe is about becoming mired in a Kafkaesque nightmare as they strive to obtain their title deeds from recalcitrant officials.
The authorities had denied blocking LJ, but observers were skeptical. As a motive for the government to deny access, they pointed to the LJ blog of Rakhat Aliyev, the disgraced former son-in-law of President Nursultan Nazarbayev who fell out with the president in 2007, was divorced by his daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva, and was later sentenced to 40 years in prison in absentia on charges he denied.
Now, all of a sudden LiveJournal is accessible again in Kazakhstan – but Aliyev’s journal can’t be seen here, or anywhere else for that matter. In a twist that’s most convenient for Astana, Aliyev’s blog was suspended by LiveJournal itself on November 9.
Visitors to his page now see a sign saying “Suspended Journal” and an incongruous picture of a goat wearing an eye patch and a skull and crossbones hat. “This journal has been suspended,” a message says. “Its contents are no longer publicly visible. LiveJournal cannot discuss the reasons for a journal suspension with anyone except the journal owner.”
Kazakhstan’s presidential election may be two years away, but political passions are already starting to build. The announcement by an opposition leader who happens to be from an ethnic minority group that he will challenge incumbent Nursultan Nazarbayev in the 2012 vote has already provoked a storm of protest from nationalists.
