Kazak President Wins “Leader of Nation” Status

Monday, 24 May, 2010

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Yaroslava Naumenko

Yevgenia Plakhina

Anton Frid

Kazakstan’s president of the last two decades, Nursultan Nazarbaev, has been accorded the title of “Leader of the Nation”, which will leave him with considerable political clout and immunity from prosecution if and when he decides to stand down.

Analysts in the country say the constitutional amendment passed on May 13 is more than just an accolade for Nazarbaev. It may be a signal that he is at least considering the option of not running for election in 2012, and wants cast-iron guarantees if he does so.

Nazarbaev has ruled Kazakstan continuously since he was elected president of the newly independent state in 1991. Before that, he was Communist Party first secretary – the top job in any constituent republic of the Soviet Union.

In a speech to the Senate or upper house of parliament the day the bill was passed, Rozakul Halmuradov, one of those who proposed the change and a member of Nazarbaev’s Nur Otan party, said the lifetime title represented an acknowledgement of the current president’s contribution.

“We should learn from civilised countries to respect and honour our own leader,” he said. “In civilised Europe, kings are highly honoured as heads of state.”

Opposition journalist Sergei Duvanov takes a different view, saying, “The country is on the verge of introducing a constitutional monarchy.”

As Leader of the Nation, Nazarbaev would have the right to a final say on domestic, foreign and security policy matters after he leaves office. Also included in the package is personal immunity from arrest and prosecution, and immunity for immediate family members and property.

Other legislation was simultaneously amended to match the new constitutional provisions, and new offences against the president were introduced such as defacing pictures of him and presenting a distorted version of his biography.

The whole legislative package now goes to Nazarbaev himself to be signed off.

The idea of investing Nazarbaev with some kind of continuing authority after he leaves office has been around for a while. Analysts interviewed by IWPR say what is interesting about it is the timing, and the granting of immunity to Nazarbaev and his family.

They note that the changes come shortly after popular unrest in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, where President Kurmanbek Bakiev was deposed by mass protests, and then stripped of his immunity.

On May 4, the day before the bill went before the Kazak parliament, the Kyrgyz interim government issued a decree stripping Bakiev of his presidential immunity and instructed prosecutors to seek his extradition. Bakiev, who is now in Belarus, is accused of instructing or allowing his security forces to fire on demonstrators on April 6. Three of his brothers and his son Maxim Bakiev are also on the wanted list.

Nazarbaev’s political advisor, Yermuhamet Yertysbaev, insisted there was no link with recent developments in Kyrgyzstan.

The legislation seems to offer a blueprint for a transition of power, even though Nazarbaev himself has not made his intentions clear in public.

In an interview for the Interfax-Kazakstan news agency, Yertysbaev hinted that Nazarbaev’s departure might be on the cards.

“Theoretically it could happen this year, although I personally would definitely not want that,” he said. “When it comes down to it, the people of Kazakstan showed the highest level of confidence in and support for Nazarbaev in [the election of] December 2005, and he’s simply obliged to carry on working until December 2012.”

Although future Kazak presidents will be limited to two terms, the constitution was changed in 2007 to allow Nazarbaev to run as many times as he wants, so there would be no obstacle to him standing in 2012, and on past showing he would win an easy victory.

Alikhan Baimenov, leader of the opposition party Ak Jol, believes the authorities are considering a range of options to cover all eventualities.

“Taken together, this means that the president has started thinking about the various scenarios that are possible, not just ones that are planned for, but also the unexpected,” he said.

Maxim Kaznacheev, head of the domestic politics department at the Institute of Political Solutions in Almaty, is inclined to believe that it is not the president, but people in his entourage who came up with a plan that accommodates Nazarbaev’s own desire to stay in control forever with an awareness among the elite that the time may come for a managed transition.

“This is their vision of a gradual, soft format for transferring power to a successor,” he said. “Everyone understands that the president will never [choose to] leave office.”

He compared the concept of Leader of the Nation to what happened in Singapore, where Lee Kuan Yew was appointed first as Senior Minister and later as Minister Mentor after stepping down as the state’s first prime minister in 1990.

Kaznacheev said the political establishment in Kazakstan wanted to avoid a repeat of the Kyrgyz experience, where both Bakiev and his predecessor Askar Akaev were ousted from power, and their entire entourage went along with them.

Moves to perpetuate Nazarbaev’s power seem to run contrary to the reform pledges Kazakstan made in order to secure its current chairmanship of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In Kaznacheev’s view, the government will deal with the potential embarrassment by delaying final sign-off on the arrangement until after the annual OSCE meeting takes place this autumn. In addition, although one obvious successor is Timur Kulibaev, a son-in-law of the Nazarbaev, it could be that a non-family member else will formally hold the post of president to head off accusations of dynastic rule.

As for how the idea will go down with the public in Kazakstan, Kaznacheev said the idea had been floated for some time to gauge the reaction. “There was a wave of criticism, but trying it out has shown that the public is indifferent, or responds with humour – there hasn’t been an aggressive reaction,” he said.

However, even the best-laid plans sometimes go awry, and many of the analysts interviewed agreed that the one lesson to be learned from recent events in Kyrgyzstan, where Bakiev lost his immunity after he was ousted, is that no law can protect you if the incoming regime is out to get you.

Kaznacheev said the only real guarantee of immunity for the president and his family was to stay in power.

Andrei Chebotarev, director of the Alternative think tank, warned, “If the transition of power takes place differently from the way the president’s relatives want it to happen, no legislation is going to save them. As events in Kyrgyzstan demonstrated, any law can be annulled, even without going to parliament.”

Yaroslava Naumenko and Anton Frid are freelance reporters in Kazakstan. Yevgenia Plakhina is a journalist with Golos Respubliki newspaper.

This article was produced jointly under two IWPR projects: Building Central Asian Human Rights Protection & Education Through the Media, funded by the European Commission; and the Human Rights Reporting, Confidence Building and Conflict Information Programme, funded by the Foreign Ministry of Norway.

The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of IWPR and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of either the European Union or the Foreign Ministry of Norway.