Kyrgyzstan's experiment with pluralistic democratic rule faltered on October 12 when one party that narrowly missed getting into parliament questioned the results of the October 10 elections.
To the relief of Kyrgyz officials and foreign observers, voting proceeded calmly during Kyrgyzstan's October 10 parliamentary elections. Turnout appeared to be strong considering the country's recent troubles, with anecdotal evidence suggesting that beleaguered Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan cast ballots in larger than expected numbers.
After two decades at the helm of Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev appears entrenched in power and shows no signs of wanting to relinquish it. Just below the president, however, factional infighting appears to be roiling the country’s political waters. The clearest indicator of intrigue is recent allegations of a coup conspiracy.
He gave no more details about the suspects or how they might have been involved in the murder last December, but the arrests will inspire some hope that Pavlyuk’s killers may eventually be tracked down.
This was a particularly brutal killing: Pavlyuk was hurled to his death from the sixth floor of an apartment block in Almaty with his hands and legs bound, and many of his colleagues suspected he’d been killed for his investigative reporting. Some sources said Pavlyuk – who wrote under the pseudonym Ibragim Rustambek for the independent Kyrgyz outlet Beliy Parus, and for the Kyrgyz editions of some Russian newspapers – had arrived in Almaty chasing a story, and the discovery of an empty laptop bag at the crime scene led many to believe that incriminating material that could have pointed to the murderer's identity may have been stolen.
News that Almaty is to acquire another giant shopping mall will delight the city’s army of shopaholics, whose members throng its designer boutiques splashing out tens if not hundreds of thousands of tenge on the latest fashions. The popular MEGA chain of retail and entertainment centers is to expand its network after gaining the go-ahead from city bigwigs to build a new retail space.
Weighing in at 50,000 square meters chockablock with designer boutiques, the city’s second MEGA will be retail heaven to its image-conscious fashionistas, the ponty (posers) who love to strut their stuff at the city’s swish nightspots decked out in luxury brands.
Almaty already had US-style shopping malls such as Ramstore before MEGA first opened four years ago, as well as a host of designer boutiques strung along the smart Gogol and Furmanov Streets. MEGA, though, was bigger and better and glitzier than all of them, and the ponty took to it with a vengeance – this isn’t just a mall but a place to shop and be seen.
MEGA soon started expanding, first with a mall in Astana and then one in Shymkent in the populous south. Last year it opened another in the western oil city of Aktobe (Aktyubinsk), perhaps hoping to soak up a few petrodollars from bored oilmen’s wives.
Central Asia has been famous for its bazaars for centuries, but in recent years they have undergone radical changes. Cheap Chinese goods have been flooding into Central Asia, as Beijing’s trade surges with its neighbors to the West.
With plans afoot for Kazakhstan’s notoriously modest Leader of the Nation to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, Astana watchers are getting a creeping sense of déjà vu. After all, this is the third time that the country’s long-serving president has been at the center of a Nobel nomination bid.
This ambitious attempt comes from the Kazakh-led World Assembly of Turkic Peoples. Its chairman, Yermentay Sultanmurat, has got big plans for his president. He sees Nazarbayev as one of the world’s greatest peacemakers, fit to join the likes of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sultanmurat can list many presidential achievements that make Nazarbayev a suitable bearer of the Nobel legacy. They include peacemaking in Kyrgyzstan, which might come as a surprise to the people of that country in the face of the bitter divisions between the Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities following June’s deadly ethnic clashes.
He also cited Nazarbayev’s contribution to nuclear disarmament and his “weighty role in the development of the countries of Central Asia and the Turkic world.” Then, casting around for more reasons to promote his president as a Nobel candidate, Sultanmurat made the lofty – and rather bizarre – claim that Nazarbayev’s brainchild capital, Astana, is the “spiritual capital of the world.”
His bid follows two previous attempts to elevate the president into the ranks of Nobel winners. In 2008 two US congressmen made a bid to have Nazarbayev nominated for the prize, citing his decision to give up nuclear weapons. Not to be outdone, the pro-presidential Assembly of People of Kazakhstan has also mooted the idea in the past.
As one of Central Asia's most prestigious universities runs into trouble, conspiracy theorists are wondering if the Almaty-based establishment's problems could be linked to a rivalry with a new university that’s opened in Astana – and just happens to bear the name of President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
The Almaty prosecutor’s office found several violations at the university, he told the newspaper. “One of the most serious observations is that KIMEP does not issue diplomas of the state standard, although every higher education establishment that has a license is obliged to award students this sort of diploma,” Kalabayev said. “As a result KIMEP graduates going abroad to other countries cannot prove that this higher education establishment exists.”
Some observers are questioning the sudden emergence of this problem for a university that’s been legally operating in Kazakhstan since 1992, but Kalabayev insisted the government had been pointing to it for a decade. He said there were also health and safety issues at KIMEP, and that the student-teacher ratio was too high at 20 to 1 and should be 8 to 1.
“KIMEP categorically does not agree with this decision and this week is going to appeal these decisions in court,” KIMEP said in remarks e-mailed to EurasiaNet.org. The university added that it was “working closely with the Ministry to rectify this situation.”
Kazakhstan’s long-serving leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, will seek re-election in 2012, a close aide has revealed. The announcement appears designed to stem speculation about a possible successor.
