The pan-European process that was given the go-ahead at the Helsinki Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe in August 1975 will mark its 35th anniversary in 2010 and the signs are that congratulations on this occasion will be received by Kazakhstan as the country that will preside over the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in that year. For the first time in the history of this organization, its rotating chairmanship will go to a country that is not only Asian, but which also has a controversial list of problems with democracy and human rights – the areas that the OSCE traditionally places high on its agenda.

According to Muratbek Imanaliev, a former Kyrgyz foreign minister and current president of the Bishkek-based Institute of Public Policy, the accession of Central Asian countries to the European regional security organization in 1992 was “a historical and political caprice prompted by events of the early 1990s and by certain predilections of leading powers.” The Kazakh path toward chairmanship of the largest European organization has been full of twists and turns and it reflects not so much the rise of the country’s national statehood, as the rivalry between Russia and the West for energy resources in the Caspian basin and Central Asia, plus the competition between Moscow and the Kazakh government for positions in energy markets and in the territory of the former Soviet Union.

RAKHAT ALIEV’S CAVALRY CHARGE

In February 2003, Rakhat Aliev, Kazakhstan’s ambassador to Austria and to the OSCE, made a request at a session of the OSCE Permanent Council to consider Kazakhstan as an aspirant for the organization’s rotating chairmanship due to begin in 2009. Quite naturally, Aliev, a son-in-law of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, was not viewed as a regular diplomatic official, yet few people took his request seriously, as Astana’s relationship with the OSCE was more than simply strained at the time.

Back in 1999, Nazarbayev openly accused OSCE representatives of meddling in his country’s domestic policies after he had undergone sharp criticism for extending his presidential powers in an early election. He said in an interview with the Habar television channel that OSCE officials were acting like Soviet-era functionaries who would come to Kazakhstan from Moscow for inspections. Nazarbayev also made it clear that his country did not consider membership in the OSCE indispensable.

The U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment endorsed Resolution 397 in September 2000, voicing concern over the situation with human rights and democracy in Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, and calling into question their membership in the OSCE in the future.

Kazakh Foreign Minister Yerlan Idrisov responded in November of that same year as he addressed the eighth session of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Vienna. He accused the OSCE of giving much more attention to human dimension issues in detriment to military, political, economic and ecological issues. His conclusions sounded tough: the evolution processes in the OSCE did not meet Kazakhstan’s requirements and the organization handed down predominantly negative, biased and tutorial assessments of the situation in the country.

Relations seemed to have returned to the old track and ambassador Aliev’s unexpected statement was drowned in oblivion. In October 2003, Kazakhstan’s mission to the OSCE released a confidential memorandum On Reforming OSCE Operations in the Regions. The six-page document accused the OSCE of being overly bent on human rights. It also said the organization had “focused the bulk of its attention on human dimension issues in separate regions” and had “erroneously rejected dialog on these problems with the authorities of the countries in question, concentrating instead on independent assessments, often based on subjective judgments and unverified information.”

The memorandum leveled sharp criticism at OSCE country missions, whose members mostly contacted non-governmental organizations and human rights groups. Kazakhstan recommended forming missions in coordination with the authorities of each country in question and limiting their mandates to twelve-month periods with the possibility of extending them only through a decision of the OSCE Permanent Council. Moreover, it was proposed that mission personnel rely on governmental structures in their work.

The document emerged in the run-up to Nursultan Nazarbayev’s speech at a session of the Permanent Council, scheduled for November 20, 2003. Rakhat Aliev’s efforts to rally support for the memorandum among the ambassadors represented at OSCE headquarters failed to deliver results. On November 18, the presidential press service said: “Nursultan Nazarbayev has been admitted to the Republican Clinical Hospital in Astana for inpatient treatment for a catarrhal disease, and his visit to Austria scheduled for November 20, in the course of which he planned to address the OSCE, is henceforth postponed.”

It is not clear what motives were behind Aliev’s cavalry charge on the OSCE mechanisms. The proposals called into doubt the organization’s founding principles formulated in the humanitarian “Basket III” of the Helsinki agreements. However, it should be said that the events of five years ago anticipated the major motives of a brawl between Moscow and the OSCE during the Russian parliamentary and presidential elections at the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008. One more possible reason for the breaking down of Aliev’s assault was a lack of active support from other CIS countries (although the preamble of the memorandum said it had been drafted in cooperation with the Russian, Belarusian and Kyrgyz missions). Now Moscow is trying to counteract the OSCE alone, and it looks like Kazakhstan has no plans to support Moscow – something that will be discussed below.

“THE CLEANSING TIDE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS”

Astana’s approach began to change in 2004 when Rakhat Aliev and his wife Dariga Nazarbayeva, the eldest daughter of the Kazakh president, started cooperating with U.S. Global Options, a company which collaborated with some former U.S. high-ranking administration and defense officials. Some details of this came into the spotlight in spring 2008 following publications in the U.S. media.

The Wall Street Journal claimed, among other things, that Dariga tried to make Global Options instrumental in exerting influence on the course of an investigation into a corruption scandal, which the international media has labeled Kazakhgate. Its main figure, the U.S. financier James Giffen, is suspected of corrupting the highest Kazakh state officials, including Nazarbayev.

The president himself dismissed in May 2004 the reports on his involvement in Kazakhgate. U.S. ambassador to the OSCE, Stephan M. Minikes, made an undiplomatically straightforward remark when he visited Astana several days later. His diagnosis suggested that corruption was a malignant tumor eating away at the country from the inside. He also issued a prescription against it – to plunge into “the cleansing tide of the democratic process.” As the discussion of Kazakhstan’s application for the OSCE chairmanship was getting closer, Minikes urged the country’s leadership to grasp at this “great opportunity” and to clean up its reputation by ensuring free and fair parliamentary and presidential elections, due in 2005.

Sources close to Aliev claim it was precisely then – in 2004 – that his partners in Global Options recommended that he give up confrontation with the OSCE and start looking for a “European” path for his country.

New initiatives from Russian diplomatic quarters came at about the same time. They aimed at rectifying a situation where the OSCE had the function of an “instrument” in “serving separate countries or groups of countries”. The text of a joint statement by CIS members of the OSCE, with the exception of Georgia, initiated by Moscow, was made public at a session of the Permanent Council in July 2004.

The organization was reproached for its inability “to adapt to the reality of a changing world and to ensure an efficacious solution to security and cooperation problems.” Rebukes also concerned non-observance of the Helsinki principles, such as non-interference in internal affairs and respect for the sovereignty of separate states. CIS countries proposed working out “standardized unbiased criteria” for the “assessment of elections in the entire territory of the OSCE”, to reduce the size of observer missions to fifty members, and to forbid commenting on elections by mission members before the official publication of results.

“A RARE OPPORTUNITY”

The Kazakh parliamentary election on September 19, 2005 was intended to become the most decisive argument in favor of Kazakhstan’s bid for the OSCE chairmanship. Nazarbayev himself did his utmost to lobby Kazakhstan’s interests among the ambassadors at OSCE headquarters a week before the vote. Diplomatic sources in Vienna told the author of this article at the time that Nazarbayev was given to understand that Western countries would welcome Kazakhstan’s voluntary withdrawal of its application for chairmanship. Turkey, for instance, which aspired to the chairmanship in 2007, went back on its claim in view of an insufficient level of democratic freedom in the country.

Observers from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) issued an uncompromising verdict on the election in Kazakhstan, saying that it had failed to meet the international standards specified by the OSCE, but this assessment did not discourage Astana. “Tying the decision on chairmanship to the assessment of elections does have importance, but one must also think about the prospects for democracy in Kazakhstan,” Kasymjomart Tokayev, the foreign minister at the time, said in an interview with the Vremya Novostei newspaper.

“Being a Eurasian country, Kazakhstan reflects the current character of the OSCE, as purely Asian countries of our region also have membership there,” Tokayev said. “Our country has done a lot of work in terms of moving toward democracy and it needs a bonus of some kind […]. That is why we believe that Kazakhstan is a worthy candidate for chairmanship of this respected international organization.”

In May 2008, six months after Kazakhstan had received the much-desired right to hold the reins of the OSCE, albeit in 2010 and not in 2009, the country’s State Secretary Kanat Saudabayev talked about a “rare opportunity” the chairmanship would offer “for strengthening of the dialog between the East and the West.” “When we say ‘East’ in this case, we mean both OSCE member-states located east of Vienna and countries of the Muslim East,” Saudabayev said while sharing his geopolitical findings.

However, Kasymjomart Tokayev did not feel any special enthusiasm in November 2005, a month before the presidential election. “Our intentions will not materialize overnight,” he said in a comment on Western recommendations to democratize the electoral system in Kazakhstan. “I agree that the upcoming election must be fair and free of infringements on the rights of the opposition, although I do not have any doubts about the results of voting,” Tokayev said.

The results did look stunning, as the official returns showed that 91.01 percent of the electorate had voted in favor of President Nazarbayev. OSCE mission coordinator Bruce George said the election “did not meet a number of OSCE commitments and other international standards for democratic elections.”

The prospects were far from bright for Astana until December 2006, when the destiny of Kazakhstan’s chairmanship was to be decided at a session of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Brussels. However, Britain’s new ambassador to Kazakhstan, Paul Bremmer, who arrived in Astana in January 2006, noted the importance for Kazakhstan to show its commitment to the OSCE principles during the rest of the year. He indicated that more progress could be expected in the entire field of democratization. Bremmer recalled the ODIHR report on the presidential election that had highlighted some encouraging facts and had at the same time pointed out areas where more work was still needed.

Nazarbayev personally came to Brussels several days prior to the meeting to support his country’s bid. He chose as a pretext for his visit to Belgium (his high status ruled out his presence at a ministerial meeting) the signing of a memorandum on mutual understanding between Kazakhstan and the European Union in the energy sector. After a meeting with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, Nazarbayev said it would be extremely important to rally EU support for Kazakhstan’s candidacy, since “peaceful coexistence among people of 130 different nationalities and 46 religions in Kazakhstan” presented the OSCE with invaluable experience. This statement put Barroso in a rather awkward position and prompted him to make a tough answer by saying: “I’m sorry, but the European Commission has absolutely no position on this, that’s not our need to solve.”

Despite support from Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, no consensus was reached in Brussels to award Kazakhstan the chairmanship in 2009. Britain and the U.S. voted against it, and attempts by Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht to persuade Astana to voluntary postpone its bid until 2011 (he specially went to a CIS summit in Minsk before the session in Brussels in a bid to meet with Nazarbayev’s representatives there) proved unsuccessful.

A decision was postponed until the November 2007 session that the Ministerial Council was due to have in Madrid. Germany’s expert for Central Asia and the director of the Eurasian Transition Group, Michael Laubsch, said the failure of the meeting in Brussels was “unique” for the OSCE, as this was the first instance in the 30 years of the organization’s history that its member-states would fail to reach a consensus on leadership within their ranks.

“OUR KAZAKH FRIENDS” PLAYING THEIR OWN GAME

The year 2007 started out with dramatic events in Kazakhstan. Two top managers of Nurbank – where Rakhat Aliev, who by that time had been promoted to First Deputy Foreign Minister, was the largest shareholder – were kidnapped and quite possibly killed in January. In February, Nursultan Nazarbayev dismissed his son-in-law from the post and sent him to Vienna for the second time as ambassador to Austria and the OSCE. In late May, the president issued an order “to conduct a scrupulous investigation regardless of the official position and status of the people involved” into the kidnapping of the Nurbank managers. Aliev, who was accused of taking part in this and other crimes, managed to flee Kazakhstan and seek political asylum in Vienna. Nazarbayev’s reaction to this was pretty tough – he fired Aliev from all the posts, compelled his daughter Dariga to divorce the man in absentia and placed his former son-in-law on the international wanted list.

This situation made Nazarbayev forget about the bid for OSCE chairmanship for the time being, especially as on May 21 – several days before the institution of a criminal case against Aliev – Nazarbayev signed a decree that introduced amendments to the Kazakh Constitution. They envisioned among other things “a transition from a presidential to a presidential-parliamentary form of government” and allowed him to run for president an unlimited number of times.

It was obvious that Nazarbayev’s decision to declare himself de facto president for life, which heavily undermined the chances for Astana to get the much-desired OSCE chairmanship, was dictated by a fight for power among his closest associates and Rakhat Aliev’s stated readiness to compete for the presidential post in five years.

As the next step, Nazarbayev dissolved parliament – for the third time in 17 years – and scheduled early elections for August 18, 2007. Only one political force – the pro-presidential superparty Nur Otan – proved able to get past the seven-percent support barrier at the polls, thus returning the country to one-party rule. Ljubomir Kopaj, the head of the OSCE mission to Kazakhstan, did not conceal his dismay, saying he did not know any democratic country where only one party would be represented in parliament.

However, it became clear the next day after the election that Astana had not forgotten the OSCE chairmanship project for good. Nazarbayev filled the vacant seat of the ambassador to Austria by sending Deputy Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov there. In the very same days, Rakhat Aliev sent a SOS to his former counterparts in OSCE headquarters, urging them to prevent his extradition to his native country. He insisted that he “had always fought for a democratic European choice” for his country and had put forth the ambitious idea of chairmanship in the OSCE for that purpose. But now Kazakhstan was “rapidly turning into a monarchic and de facto police state”, the martyr for democracy warned.

As the November session of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Madrid was getting closer, one more intrigue – namely, whether or not the Austrians would hand over Nazarbayev’s former son-in-law – added to the guesswork about the prospects for Kazakhstan’s chairmanship bid. Aliev defended himself in every possible way, including through blackmail: he threatened that he might provide evidence on Kazakhgate.

Kazakhstan’s State Secretary Kanat Saudabayev, a former ambassador to the U.S., paid an extremely important visit to Washington. Astana reported that the U.S. had expressed interests toward “a further build-up of bilateral cooperation with Kazakhstan in the energy sector and ramification of export routes for Kazakh energy resources.” The announcement was intended to serve as a signal that Washington did not plan to jeopardize its interests in Kazakhstan by vetoing the country’s chairmanship in the OSCE.

Foreign Minister Marat Tazhin sent a letter on November 20, 2007 to his Spanish counterpart Miguel Moratinos, the OSCE’s Chairman-in-Office, a week before the session of the Ministerial Council. It said that “Kazakhstan reiterates its firm commitments to the fundamental principles of the OSCE.” Tazhin wrote that his country “stands for the development of all three OSCE dimensions without diminishing the role and importance of any of them. [...] We must continue developing its human component in order to strengthen democracy in all participating states.” Tazhin reiterated that Kazakhstan “will continue the reforms that were launched in our country in 2007. They specifically encompass such spheres as the improvement of legal practices and the law on election, mass media, political parties [...].” The contents of the letter and the very fact that it had been sent remained confidential until the end of the Madrid meeting on November 30, when it appeared on the OSCE’s official website.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov did not know anything about Tazhin’s letter either when he sharply criticized the OSCE for continuing “to remain on the sidelines of the main developments” in the world. He unambiguously defended “our friends from Kazakhstan” against attempts to force them “to somehow additionally prove their ‘suitability,’ unlike all the others who have so far been approved without any problems for the role of ‘taking the helm’ of the OSCE.”

Unaware of the fact that the “Kazakh friends” had almost fully proved their “suitability” by then, Lavrov insisted on the adoption of new rules for ODIHR activity. Russia’s closest allies in the CIS, including Kazakhstan, had submitted a draft decision to the Ministerial Council on the adoption of “basic principles for the organization of ODIHR observation of national elections,” Lavrov said, urging others to “carefully study” a draft OSCE charter prepared by Russia’s allies.

Moscow was ready for an unconditional defense of Kazakhstan’s chairmanship bid for 2009 up to the blocking of the election of chairmen for 2010 and 2011. This meant that the organization would find itself without the troika of leaders as of the beginning of 2008 when Finland got the rotating chairmanship.

However, it was unnecessary to “plug the porthole with one’s own body,” as the Russians put it. This became clear when Marat Tazhin took the floor. He promised that his country would “duly take into account” the OSCE’s recommendations “while implementing the program of democratic reforms;” in “working on the reform of Kazakhstan’s election legislation;” in work on media legislation; and in implementing “the ODIHR recommendations in the area of elections and legislation concerning political parties.” “We consider the human dimension to be one of the most important directions of the OSCE activity,” Tazhin said, thus disproving the Russian thesis that the organization had over-focused on precisely this area.

Then he totally puzzled Moscow by saying that “as a potential Chairman” Kazakhstan “is committed to preserve ODIHR and its existing mandate and will not support any future efforts to weaken them.” Also, it “will not be party to any proposals that are problematic for ODIHR and its mandate in the future.”

The diplomatic efficiency of Astana and its Western partners scourged the pathos of Lavrov’s report at the session, and all the draft documents he had proposed were rejected in Madrid. The situation did not leave Lavrov any room to maneuver and a compromise was reached in the course of his talks with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Nicholas Burns just two hours before the end of the summit: Kazakhstan would get the OSCE chairmanship in 2010, a year later than initially planned, while Greece would precede it in 2009 and Lithuania would follow it in 2011.

It is noteworthy that, according to information the author received from diplomatic sources at OSCE headquarters, the postponement of Kazakhstan’s term to 2011 turned out to be unacceptable “for a well-known group of countries.” They would not like to see a country, on which Moscow could exert substantial influence, standing at the helm of the organization in the year preceding the presidential election in Russia.

WITHOUT ADDITIONAL OBLIGATIONS

The Kazakhs perceived the victory in Madrid as the recognition of achievements made by the country and, primarily, by its president. “Nursultan Nazarbayev’s charismatic figure and his activity are by far the biggest attractive assets of the Kazakh bid,” Russian expert Yuri Solozobov claimed in summing up this position.

Strange as though it might seem, Akezhan Kazhegeldin, Kazakh prime minister from 1994-1997 and who has been living in exile in the West for almost ten years, expresses a similar position. Kazhegeldin, who held a range of consultations with leading European politicians at the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008, is confident that Nazarbayev’s figure, as well as the fully mature Kazakh elite and population, has put the country ahead of other Central Asian states in terms of readiness for sweeping democratic reforms along the evolutionary path, ruling out dangerous revolutionary shake-ups.

However, it turned out this spring that Kazakhstan had not taken a single step toward reforms, which Tazhin had promised in Madrid, over six months. Western European OSCE member-states supported a proposal to organize the monitoring of Kazakhstan’s preparations for assuming chairmanship of the organization.

As for President Nazarbayev’s willingness for reforms, a statement he made during an interview with Reuters in March 2008 offers a bright testimony. “We have been elected as a full-fledged member of the OSCE and we do not assume any additional obligations,” he said. Subsequently, the phrase was mysteriously cut out of the Reuters newswire and only remained in the version provided by Kazakhstan’s Habar news agency. There are grounds to believe it was cut out at the mutual consent of the sides so as to rescue Astana’s Western partners from a rather awkward situation, since they regard the Madrid decision as overtures made to Kazakhstan in an expectation that it will fulfill its promises.

Of what Nazarbayev said, only the ending of his phrase became known: “I would like to create a democracy like in America, but where can I find enough Americans for that in Kazakhstan?”
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Kazakh-language website was blocked in Kazakhstan in early May and access to it was closed for a month. The government did not issue any answers to numerous inquiries from the radio’s executives. The site was unblocked only after interference on the part of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Miklos Haraszti, who sent a letter to Foreign Minister Tazhin expressing the hope that “the state Internet service providers were informed by your government that interference in providing service would violate Kazakhstan’s press freedom commitments.”

The foreign ministers of five countries – Spain, Finland and Greece as the current troika of the OSCE, as well as Kazakhstan and Lithuania that will take the helm at the organization in 2010 and 2011 respectively – met in Helsinki at the initiative of Finland, the current chairman, in early June 2008. This event did not have any precedents in the history of the OSCE and it was necessitated by a growing concern in the West over the absence of democratic reforms that Astana had promised. This time, however, Marat Tazhin did not make any promises similar to the ones he had made in Madrid. He only said that “the interests of all OSCE member-states, their correlation with the OSCE’s general agenda and relationship to the priorities set forth during previous chairmanships will be taken into account as Kazakhstan designs priorities for its chairmanship.”

It was quite apparent that Kazakh officials came to the conclusion that no one could take the right to leadership away from their country, even more so because the OSCE does not have a procedure for this.

On the other hand, Astana’s actions expose certain logic. The West will not likely want to spoil relations with Kazakhstan, thus putting in jeopardy its energy interests, in the first place, and pushing Kazakhstan into Russia and China’s embrace, in the second.

***

One will be able to put an end to the story of Astana’s ascent to the top of European security and cooperation in a year and a half from now when it officially gets down to its duties as OSCE chairman. However, there are already a few conclusions that might be of interest for Russian policies as well.

Like Russia, Kazakhstan faced a choice between fueling its conflict with the OSCE up to the point of a possible withdrawal from the organization, and trying to use it to enhance its national prestige and influence. Preference was given to the latter option, and Astana seems to be achieving its objectives so far. This success became possible because the OSCE is a political organization, first and foremost, and not a human rights watchdog, and that is why the strategic interests of member-states most typically outweigh abstract or idealistic considerations there. This means that countries presenting some interest to the leading players can efficaciously play on this.

It is also true, though, that Kazakhstan does not want to change the format of how the OSCE functions, something that Russia does. Astana will be satisfied with getting the political dividends proportionate to its geopolitical weight. As for Moscow, it is pursuing the goal of rewriting the rules of the game, and this is a far more complicated task per se. But it is equally true that Russia has incomparably more levers of influence than Kazakhstan does.

Chairmanship in the OSCE will become an important landmark in Kazakh foreign policy, and Astana will without a doubt try to use it to assert itself as a regional leader. For Russia however, this means problems rather than opportunities. An illustrative signal was seen in April when Kazakhstan ostentatiously refused to lift sanctions against Abkhazia and thus put itself in opposition to Russia. Moscow should obviously put aside hopes that Astana’s term as OSCE chairman will help it to advance its own positions.