Kazakh President Seems Headed for Reelection

In many countries, Shanyrak might be the kind of place where a revolution is born. Probably not here.

Hundreds of miles to the north in Astana, the capital of this sprawling nation on the Central Asian steppes, there is a white tower cradling a shimmering globe meant to symbolize a golden egg in the tree of life. The golden egg, everyone knows, is Caspian Sea oil, the reason that some new suburbs in Kazakhstan are beginning to look like Beverly Hills.

In Shanyrak, though, the only eggshells in evidence are scattered among mounds of reeking garbage piled like dikes, fortifications in a community’s losing battle against the sea of mud that comes with every rain.

Electricity? Most often not. Authorities say much of Shanyrak is illegal, and they shut off the power as soon as residents find a way to string lines up to the power poles. Water? Only what people can haul in themselves.

A recent attempt by authorities to bulldoze one of the miserable houses built near a gas pipeline prompted a near-riot. Another protest, when 1,000 people complaining of inadequate housing marched Oct. 6 on the nearby city of Almaty, resulted in 67 arrests.

But pick your way through the milk cartons and cattle and you may well wind up at the door of someone who voted for President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, one of a handful of ex-Communist leaders who still preside over the now-independent republics of the former Soviet Union.

“I came here five years ago in a very poor state, and now I have everything,” said Abkhadir Nayzabayev, 70, who one recent afternoon was poking among the garbage piles for firewood.

A Kazakhstan native who lived in neighboring Uzbekistan for several years, Nayzabayev, said he would vote for the incumbent. “Eight of us live here in this three-room house. We don’t have electricity,” he said. “But where we came from, it’s worse. They have no water. They have no bread. Whatever you might want, they don’t have it. Here, there’s work, at least.”

Kazakhstan voters will go to the polls Sunday to decide whether to give Nazarbayev, a former steelworker who has been Kazakhstan’s president since shortly before independence in 1991, another seven years in office. The opposition claims his administration has left much of the country in poverty while he, his family and friends have accumulated billions from oil wealth.

Pollsters say the odds are that Nazarbayev, 65, will be around a bit longer. The only question is whether he trusts his popularity numbers enough to allow his nation a democratic vote.

After two turbulent years that have seen popular revolutions in three former Soviet republics after questionable elections, attention is focused on Kazakhstan.

Opposition leaders say some polls show that the leading opposition candidate, Zharmakhan Tuyakbai, is running barely four points behind the president and pulling closer. They are expected to stage protests if vote counts are rigged, as they have been in most elections. In 2004, the opposition won only one seat in parliament amid reports of fraud.

Tuyakbai complains that the campaign already has been far from fair. Opposition politicians have little access to television. And twice since October, a newspaper that printed stories about the pending prosecution in New York of American James Giffen, accused of acting as a liaison for millions of dollars in oil bribes to senior Kazakhstan officials, saw most of its 100,000-copy press run seized and destroyed because it allegedly libeled the president.

Last month, one of Tuyakbai’s leading allies, former Cabinet minister Zamanbek Nurkadilov, was found dead in his home. Authorities have tentatively called it a suicide.

But analyst Yermurat Bapi, editor of the Dzhuma Times, said in an interview that Nurkadilov told him in late October that he had uncovered an incriminating document that he planned to make public the day after the election.

“He said, ‘This document will be called the impeachment document,’ ” Bapi said.

Nurkadilov’s wife, popular folk singer Makpal Zhunusova, said her husband was far from despondent.

“They don’t want to investigate this case properly,” she said. “There are so many secret deaths in our country. Usually, it’s car accidents. Heart attacks. And now, they begin to shoot.”

Tuyakbai said that though he doubted the official explanation of Nurkadilov’s death, it was too early to call it a political killing.

“A person cannot shoot himself twice, and then move to another place, and then inflict a mortal wound on his head, and then lie down on the floor and put a bed sheet on himself, and place a handgun on top of it below his chest, and spread his arms, and be seen in such a way by the first witnesses. I don’t believe it,” he told Western journalists.

Compared with its more violent authoritarian neighbors, Kazakhstan has been an oasis of calm and prosperity. Oil, robust foreign investment and a vigorous program of economic overhaul have allowed Nazarbayev to raise pensions and salaries even as he cut Soviet-era benefit programs, a move that sparked large protests when it was attempted last year in Russia.

Sabit Zhusupov, president of the Institute for Social and Economic Information and Forecasting in Almaty, the former capital, said in an interview that alleged election impropriety was unlikely to spark a revolution, as it did in Ukraine a year ago.

Opposition leaders are making many promises to voters who are simply struggling to survive, he said. “People understand that you can promise whatever you like, but whether it will be realized -- the people don’t believe it,” Zhusupov said.

“You could have the fairest election in the world here, and [Nazarbayev] gets 70% of the vote -- or more,” said a Western diplomat. “The president’s got really broad and deep support here. There’s very strong optimism about the future.”

In part, Western leaders may be engaging in a bit of wishful thinking. Nazarbayev has proved a reliable ally for the U.S. military, dispatching troops to Iraq and backing away this year from a joint resolution of Central Asian nations demanding a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. bases in the region.

“In April 2000, [former U.S. Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright came here, she tried to teach us how to build democracy, and even pointed out to our president which people should be in the government and which should not,” presidential advisor Yermukhamet Yertysbayev said in an interview. “The president said in a very tough way, ‘It’s none of your business, and don’t interfere with us.’ ”

The current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, brought a different message when she visited in October, he said. “She said the economy of Kazakhstan is an engine for the entire Central Asian region. She said America will not teach other countries, especially [post-Soviet] countries, how to build democracy, that every country has its own traits. I think the U.S. administration has experienced a serious change of its views on the democracy issue in the post-Soviet space.”

In Almaty, in an office with peeling vinyl floors and broken fluorescent light fixtures, Kakhar, a youth activist movement, and the Young Professionals Society of Kazakhstan are training 150 young people a day to act as election observers.

They have been unable to do more, they said, because nearly all international non-government organizations rejected their grant requests.

“What is at stake is power, money and oil. Unfortunately, the young people understand quite well that the international organizations put their stakes on the oil, but not on democracy,” said Bakhytdzhan Toregozhina, Kakhar’s founder. “It’s very disillusioning.”

In Nazarbayev’s view, Kazakhstan’s cooperation with NATO, its economic growth and its plans to soon join the World Trade Organization are what have convinced the world that his nation of 15 million deserves a seat at the international table.

“We were on the crossroads between Russia, China and the Muslim world, and our only alternative was to move out ahead of the neighboring countries, to become rich,” said Yertysbayev. “The result is, in the last 10 years, Nazarbayev has created a modern state.”

The question is, can Nazarbayev imagine his state without himself at the helm?

“They keep saying that without Nazarbayev, the country could be plunged into cataclysmic depths,” said Galina Dyrdina, deputy editor of the Respublika newspaper. “But transition of leadership is a normal thing. We survived Stalin’s death. We survived Brezhnev’s death. Really, the only way to get rid of them is to bury them.”

In Shanyrak, residents acknowledge that they haven’t seen many of the benefits of Nazarbayev’s oil boom. But Kanat Murynbayev, 31, says the small house he built for his wife and daughters here was a wish come true, even if it’s on land that’s not exactly legal.

“I will vote for President Nazarbayev. We don’t believe the others,” he said. “It will take time for them to get their bearings. It will take time to enrich themselves. It will take time to enrich their relatives, and the time for them to think about us may never come.”