Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

  The viewer had a point. I’ve asked colleagues and friends to show me where Kazakhstan is situated on a topographical map. Their fingers move confidently east from Europe, but then hesitate over the Himalayas or Siberia. They know that if they reach the Pacific or Indian Oceans, they’ve gone too far. They’re not sure.

  The confusion is surprising because, at over one million square miles, Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country in land area in the world, larger than Saudi Arabia, Mexico, or Indonesia. Its northern border with Russia is 4,350 miles long. You could fit all of Western Europe (and a couple of Balkan republics for good measure) into it. It’s more than twice as large as the other four Central Asian republics put together, and more than ten times the size of the United Kingdom.

  It may be even larger, according to government boosters. It’s all a question of how you present it on the map. Like other countries, Kazakhstan uses cartography to emphasize its size and geopolitical importance, placing itself squarely in the middle of maps of Asia.

  MAP 6.1 Kazakhstan (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)

  Expanding Kazakhstan

  In January 2011, I was in the concert hall at Eurasian National University (ENU) in Astana to hear Dr. Kerri-Ann Jones, US Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, speak about the role of women in science. Dr. Jones was on a visit to promote bilateral relationships in biotechnology, renewable energy, health, environment, and science education.

  I tried to listen, but my eyes kept wandering to the backdrop on the stage—a graphic map of Kazakhstan. The country looked roughly the right shape, but appeared to have been rotated on its axis to occupy most of the horizontal frame, pushing China and Russia to the geographic fringes. From where I was sitting, it looked larger than China (which is more than three times the size of Kazakhstan). To the north, it stretched almost to the Arctic Sea; to the west, European Kazakhstan reached across Ukraine and Russia, stopping only a few map inches short of the Baltic Sea. I wondered if I’d missed the international news. Was Kazakhstan about to exploit Arctic oil reserves? Were Kazakh troops on the Polish border?

  Being a big country has disadvantages. In Kazakhstan’s case, the main one is the low population density (an average of fifteen people per square mile). Of course, in remote and barren areas there may actually be no people per square mile, or just the occasional herder passing through. Just over half the population now lives in cities, and more are moving from rural areas. The size of the country makes transportation and communication difficult and costly. Because air travel is expensive, most people use the train for long-distance travel. On the map, Almaty looks pretty close to Taraz (Zhambyl), an ancient city in the southeast, but it’s twelve hours by train. It’s eighteen hours from Shymkent, the main city in southern Kazakhstan, and twenty-three hours from Kyzlorda in the Aral Sea region. From Uralsk in the far northwest, it’s fifty-four hours by train to Almaty, almost twice the time for a trip from Uralsk to Moscow (thirty hours).

  Another disadvantage of looming large on the world map is that it’s difficult to escape notice when international organizations, think tanks, and Western journalists provide rankings. When data are presented in a table or list, all countries are equal in size, but on a map the perceptual proportions change. Depending on what is being measured, Kazakhstan appears as a large blob with some level of color saturation in the explanatory chart. Kazakhstan has roughly the same population as Burkina Faso, one of the smaller states in the geographical melee that is Francophone West Africa, or Malawi, a sliver of a country wedged between Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique. Burkina Faso and Malawi may rank high or low on various indices, but you don’t notice them unless you’re really looking. It’s difficult to avoid Kazakhstan because it takes up so much space.

  With a growing economy and booming natural resources sector, Kazakhstan ranks high on macroeconomic indices and usually earns good marks for the business and investment climate, although corruption knocks it down a few pegs. That’s the kind of map the government likes to reprint in brochures and advertising supplements in Western newspapers. On human rights and press freedom, Kazakhstan languishes in a lower-tier, mildly saturated category on the maps of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, and Freedom House. The government dismisses such rankings as Western bias and a misunderstanding of “Asian values” where peace, stability, and central authority are valued more highly than personal freedoms.

  Government budgets have increased, but so has the gap between the rich and the poor, between the upwardly mobile middle class of Astana and Almaty, living in modern apartments, shopping at upscale malls and ordering takeout sushi, and residents of provincial cities and villages, living in draughty khrushchevkas or single-story houses, and scraping out a living. Although the government has invested heavily in elite higher education institutions such as Astana’s Nazarbayev University, underpaid teachers in village schools struggle to give their students the basics. Medical and social services in many provincial areas are inadequate.

  On a positive note, Kazakhstan excelled in a September 2011 News-week/Daily Beast survey of data from 165 countries to determine which offer women the most rights and best quality of life. The index weighed factors including justice, health, education, economics, and politics. Kazakhstan ended up in the second tier, along with the United Kingdom and Germany. It’s difficult to reconcile the ranking with a 2012 Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) survey of 80 countries to determine which “provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe, and prosperous life in the years ahead.” In other words, which are the best and worst countries to be born into today? The EIU linked the results of subjective life-satisfaction surveys—how happy people say they are—to more objective determinants including income, health, crime, education, and trust in public institutions. Kazakhstan finished in the bottom tier, just ahead of Pakistan, Angola, Bangladesh, and Ukraine. Kazakhstan’s government and business community point to economic and social data that tell a different story on quality of life.1 There’s plenty of data to go around and support any argument, positive or negative, so Kazakhstan boosters and detractors can continue to feed their agendas and color their maps appropriately.

  Kazakhstan likes to position itself as the heart of Eurasia, a bridge between continents and civilizations. Geographically, it’s much more Asia than Europe, but the region west of the Ural River in the northwest is in Europe. This allows Kazakhstan to play on several political stages, as a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (along with China, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) and, more importantly, as a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a body of 57 states that works on a range of security-related concerns, including arms control, human rights, national minorities, democratization, policing, counterterrorism, and the environment. To the chagrin of human rights and press freedom advocates, Kazakhstan chaired the OSCE in 2010, despite not passing promised reforms and enacting a repressive Internet law.

  Being part of Europe means Kazakhstan can compete in European sports competitions. Football matches are usually lopsided affairs, although in 2013 Shaktyor Karaganda beat Scottish champions Celtic 2–0 at home before losing 3–0 in Glasgow. In the 2014 World Cup qualifying group, Kazakhstan won only once—a come-from-behind home victory over that other football powerhouse, the Faroe Islands—although it managed a 0–0 home draw with Austria. The team would do better in an Asian group. Kazakhstan walloped Pakistan 7–0 in Lahore in 1998, and Nepal 6–0 in 2002. But, as in politics, Kazakhstan wants to play in the big leagues. It does better in boxing, wrestling, weight-lifting, cycling, skiing, and horseback riding. And in the winter sport of bandy, Kazakhstan is the team to beat.

  Every country needs to establish its place in the world, and President Nazarbayev has used soft diplomacy, public relations, and foreign direct investment, rather than military force, to try to make Kazakhstan a world leader. However, the digitally en
hanced map was one more example of the harder-we-try-the-less-convincing-we-look strategy.

  Kazakhstan spends lavishly on hosting international sporting events, conferences, and concerts, most of them in Astana. It eagerly welcomes foreign visitors—politicians, diplomats, educators, and entertainers. It has contracts with lobbyists in Western capitals and international public relations companies, produces glossy English-language magazines, and regularly buys advertising supplements in Western newspapers to promote investment and signature annual events such as the Astana Economic Forum. At the foreign ministry, young multilingual press assistants scour the foreign media, monitoring and summarizing all reports on Kazakhstan. In 2014, it launched a competition, sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a luxury hotel, and Air Astana, to reward what it called “high-quality and objective international journalism” about the country. It attracted forty entries from twenty-three countries. Predictably, the winners were all puff pieces about the energy sector, national traditions, and interethnic harmony with titles such as “The Fairy Tale of the Steppes.”2 There was no mention of official corruption, rigged elections, or social unrest, but then the media that report on such issues did not bother to enter the competition.

  The country’s “sultan of spin” is former British Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. Nazarbayev and Blair, who first met in 2006, renewed their relationship in January 2011, a few months before Kazakhstan’s presidential election, when Blair visited Astana. Blair was followed by Alastair Campbell, the former Downing Street media consultant, and Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff. Another close associate, Sir Richard Evans, former chair of the UK defense firm BAE Systems, chairs the Kazakh state holding company Samruk, which owns the national rail and postal services, KazMunayGaz (KMG), the state oil and gas company, the state uranium company, Air Astana, and financial groups.

  In October 2011, Blair, through his PR firm Tony Blair Associates, reportedly signed a contract worth $13 million a year to advise Nazarbayev on social and political issues, although his press team says he makes no money from the deal. In an interview for a promotional video produced by state television in April 2012, Blair called Kazakhstan’s progress remarkable and said that Nazarbayev had “the toughness necessary to take the decisions to put the country on the right path” and “a certain degree of subtlety and ingenuity that allowed him to maneuver in a region which is fraught with difficulties.” Blair called Kazakhstan “a country almost unique . . . in its cultural diversity and the way it brings different faiths and cultures together.”3

  Human rights activists criticized Blair’s involvement. Blair, who “prevented the genocide of Kosovan Muslims and defended the rights of Sierra Leoneans, is now the counsel of oil-rich dictators,” lamented Mike Harris of the London-based Index on Censorship. Steve Swerdlow of Human Rights Watch told the Daily Telegraph: “Tony Blair is in a better position than most to know that a country that violates fundamental human rights is not a good environment for economic investment.”4

  Blair is the celebrity in a concerted strategy to burnish Kazakhstan’s image. A report by Deidre Tynan for EurasiaNet.org lists three other major PR firms—BGR Gabara, Portland Communications, and Berlin-based Media Consulta—with contracts to promote Kazakhstan through outreach to government officials, the business community, and media. Some activities, such as infomercials on global satellite TV channels, are routine, what many governments do to promote investment and tourism. Other activities are more subtle. EurasiaNet.org reports that Web records show that Media Consulta inserted two new sections on Nazarbayev’s Wikipedia page, titled “Dialogue between Religions” and “Preventing Global Nuclear Threats,” and made changes in other sections and in the entry for Kazakhstan. The goal, wrote Tynan, is “to counter any negative perceptions” and to “shape an image as a modern, open and investment-friendly nation.”5

  As Ken Silverstein revealed in an investigative report for Salon.com, Central Asia’s strongmen—particularly Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov and Nazarbayev—employ a range of tactics. “These include making contributions to think tanks, universities and nonprofit groups, and setting up business associations that advocate for better ties with the U.S. but aren’t legally defined as lobbying organizations,” wrote Silverstein. In 2008, the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University, headed by leading Central Asia scholar Professor S. Frederick Starr, “published three upbeat reports on economic and political developments in the country without mentioning that the Kazakh government had paid for them through one of its Washington lobbying firms, APCO Worldwide,” reported Silverstein. The US-based Institute for New Democracies and the Center for Strategic and International Studies held a Washington conference “stacked with pro-Nazarbayev viewpoints” and were paid $290,000 to write reports about democratic reforms.6

  And then there was the election that wasn’t.

  The Can’t-Win Candidate

  What’s it like to run against an incumbent president with a 90 percent approval rating? In March 2011, I spent a couple of hours with Melis Yeleusizov, one of Nazarbayev’s three challengers in the April election.7

  Yeleusizov was head of the Tabigat (Nature) Ecological Union, an NGO he founded after independence. I had no problem arranging the interview. After a couple of calls to his campaign HQ in Almaty, he called me back himself. We met in Astana after a sparsely attended press conference at a shopping mall. He looked exhausted after a road trip north to give a speech at a college, and was already on his third cup of black coffee. After the interview, we walked outside, and I took a photo of him in front of Bayterek, the national monument. There was no security. As far as I could tell, his Astana campaign organization consisted of two people and an SUV.

  FIGURE 6.1 Mels Yeleusizov, the “can’t win candidate” in Kazakhstan’s 2011 presidential election

  By Kazakhstan standards, Yeleusizov was a political veteran, having run for president in 2005 when he got just 0.28 percent of the vote and in parliamentary elections. “I don’t miss any elections—it’s my credo,” he said. His main asset was his name recognition, bolstered by media coverage of his environmental advocacy. “People know me because they have seen me on TV. People know the Communist party, but I’m better known than its candidate,” he said. For the campaign, he said he was relying on a loose coalition of environmental groups, and volunteers who “appear from time to time.” He talked about his plan to visit all regions, but admitted that the one-month campaign period would limit his appearances.

  As an independent, Yeleusizov lacked a party organization. He was also short of money and time. Kazakhstan’s size and scattered population centers make television the most effective medium for a national campaign, but Yeleusizov did not have the money to buy commercials. The government allocated each candidate about $42,500—enough, according to Yeleusizov, to buy six thirty-second spots on TV in Almaty. He wasn’t planning to buy any. His advertising plan consisted of roadside billboards—two each in Almaty and Astana, and one in each region. He didn’t even have a campaign poster. By contrast, on the first official day of campaigning, members of Nazarbayev’s Nur Otan (Ray of Light of the Fatherland) party plastered posters listing the president’s achievements and priorities—with the slogan “Forward, Together with the Leader—Let’s Build the Future Together”—on apartment blocks, shops, and bus stops across the country.

  Nazarbayev called the election after a bizarre series of events. Kazakhstan’s parliament had already made him exempt from term limits. A group of supporters led by university rector Yerlan Sydykov took the president-for-life argument more seriously: why bother with elections when everyone knows what the result will be? In short order, they gathered over five million signatures (about 55 percent of the electorate) on a petition to hold a referendum to abolish presidential elections and extend Nazarbayev’s term to 2020. The proposal was endorsed by the parliament. Nazarbayev bashfully vetoed the measure, but the parliament, dominated by Nur Otan, overrode the veto. Western g
overnments were horrified, and Nazarbayev knew that he stood to lose more in international standing than he would gain in job security. On January 31, the Constitutional Court ruled against the proposal. Nazarbayev needed to send a positive signal to referendum supporters and reassure the international community about the country’s democratic credentials so he called a snap election almost two years ahead of schedule.

  “Nazarbayev is a clever man,” said Yeleusizov. “He didn’t want to lose his voters, and he needed to calm down the opposition. All the European and OSCE leaders supported the election decision.” While Yeleusizov and the candidates from the Communist People’s Party and the right-wing Patriots’ Party were scrambling, Nazarbayev said he would not personally campaign and asked Nur Otan’s regional offices not to hold public events. Instead, he said he would focus on the country’s business. His Ak Orda (White House) strategy provided plenty of positive media coverage.

  So why was Yeleusizov running when he had no chance? “It is not to become president because I am 100 percent sure Nazarbayev will win,” he said. Yeleusizov said he wanted to boost his name recognition and test the waters to see if voters were ready to accept an environmental political party. He described his campaign as “a kind of training—to give me experience.”

  “It’s all just a play—and the opposition candidates are puppets,” said Dr. Zhas Sabitov, a senior lecturer in political science at Eurasian National University in Astana. “They have no chance of winning, and they don’t want to win.” The main audience, according to Sabitov, was the international community. It was not even a new play. The 1999 presidential election had featured a similar cast, with a Communist, a right-wing military leader, and an ecologist running against Nazarbayev. “It’s just a remake, and the 2011 candidates are all playing their roles,” said Sabitov.