On Wednesday the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington, DC, think tank, a panel discussion was held on the recent elections in Kazakhstan titled “After the Kazakhstan Elections: U.S. Policy in the Caspian and Central Asia.” The panel consisted of Heritage scholar Dr. Ariel Coen, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Matthew Bryza, National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia Angela Stent, and Brookings scholar Dr. Fiona Hill.
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Deutsche Welle continues its excellent Turkmen coverage with a report on the country’s deleterious nationalist policies. Over the past few years, President Saparmurat Niyazov has steadily ramped up a series of policies that have had the tacit aim of promoting the ethnic Turkmen population. Not least among these is the association of Islam with the national identity, complemented by the persecution of other religions. A particularly recent high-profile case was that of a Hare Krishna devotee arrested and sentenced to seven years in jail for illegally crossing the border. Cheper Annaniyazova was, in fact, convicted on three charges, though the details of the third charge has not been divulged. Likewise, the Russian Orthodox Church has not been spared undesired attention, with secret police applying pressure on parishioners to discourage them from attending services. As IWPR reported:

Niazov’s latest attempt to squeeze the church came in May this year when he offered to transfer the country’s 12 parishes from the Tashkent and Central Asian diocese to the Russian Patriarchate. Some analysts suggested that under such an arrangement, the parishes would become autonomous and could eventually become fully independent, allowing Turkmenbashi to exert yet more influence and control.
“The Turkmen Russian Orthodox Church has long been a ‘puppet church’. The foremost religious figure is a Turkmen state representative, who follows ‘the wise and far-sighted policies’ of the great Turkmenbashi,” said a member of the Russian community in Turkmenistan.

The IWPR also recently carried a report on difficulties facing national minorities seeking public sector employment. Most notoriously, all candidates are required to possess exhaustive knowledge of Niyazov’s mystical guide to correct living, the Rukhnama. More pressing, however, are the language requirements that effectively penalise ethnic Russians, Jews, Armenians and other assorted minorities. As IWPR reports:

The most insidious method [of discrimination] is the maglumat , or personal information form, on which job applicants must note details of relatives including their spouse and children, siblings, parents and even grandparents, as well as their own curriculum vitae.
Many of those who have gone through the process say the form is being used to implement a policy of ethnic discrimination, with well-qualified people refused work simply because they are not of Turkmen ethnic origin.

The need for authorities to know about family background also attests to another layer of discrimination based on tribal associations. Unsurprisingly, the beneficiaries of such a policy are the largest tribe, the Tekke, of which Niyazov is a part and which is distributed throughout the Turkmen territory, though primarily in the Mary and Ahal velyats. It is clearly problematic to establish how rooted and significant such issues are in contemporary Turkmenistan, especially as seventy years of Soviet rule has diluted communities’ tribal awareness. Indeed, those parts of the population most attached to the legacies of tribalism are by definition the least urban and consequently the least educated.
This impulse for tribal, if not ethnic, openness does however go against the spirit of instructions issued by Niyazov in the mid-nineties discouraging government functionaries from declaring their tribal affiliations in fear of causing resentment (Izvestiya, May 20, 1994). Either way, the posturing and discriminatory polices may be no more than a domestic fig-leaf designed to instil national solidarity, largely based on fear, it should be added.
The minute Russian community still bears a monopoly of expertise in numerous industry areas, probably the major contributing factor in their decision to stay put. In the meantime, there are also, in the urban centres, large numbers of mixed race married couples, often with mono-national Turkmen children. However, for all that, life is becoming harder, as DW reports:

President Saparmurat Niyazov’s domestic policies are marked by distinctly nationalist tendencies. But what exactly is it that lies behind these diplomatic formulas?
As has already repeatedly noted by human rights groups and Turkmen specialists the issue is of regular discrimination against national minorities in the republic. But how is this manifested?
In today’s program [this extract is from a transcript of DW's Central Asia Focus program] we will not interview experts, officials, or high-ranking sources. Though we do not wish to generalize, the people taking part are residents in Ashgabat who have direct knowledge of the situation in which national minorities in this country live. The first issue touches upon the matter of the Russian-speaking population.
Our interviewees, who have agreed to speak to us by telephone, are impartial observers in that they are not strictly speaking a national minority, but people for whom Russian became a second native language during the Soviet Union.
Our first interviewee is Leila, a child-minder in an Ashgabat kindergarten

Leila: It has become very tough for Russian speakers. Anyone who was financially secure and had relatives in Russia has already left. Those left behind are the helpless and the old. They’re living in misery now. Russian schools have almost all been shut down – there are one or two classes where Russian is still taught, though the students are still obliged to converse in Turkmen. The situation is, you could say, catastrophic. The children are not being educated; they just get sent off to the cotton fields. There are no Russian teachers, just Turkmens. Children are beaten at school, and the schools operate in appalling conditions.
The Russians are deprived of their privatized homes. This is what Russians call lawlessness. I know that when Russians go abroad for work or study, the Turkmens seize the opportunity to occupy their property. The house management committee agrees with the local authorities to appropriate the apartments, they then sell them for a healthy fee and pocket the cash. When the true owner returns they are left on the street. This has happened to a lot of people. As for the state apartments, there is far too much to say about them.

DW: And what’s the situation with employment for non-Turkmens?

Laila: They won’t hire. That’s unless you’re prepared to pay a $200-300 bribe. But you just give them $300 dollars, work a month and then they fire you. People are afraid to do it. Initially, people sold their apartments to get some work, but now they’re afraid – they’ll work for a month, but the money spent isn’t worth it. Those who can, work at the market, those who can’t sell what possessions they have. I’ve known such people.

The second interviewee, Gulya, is also a teacher. She says that the nationalist policies were not adopted by Niyazov in recent times, but already in the 1990s.

Leila: I have been working in a pre-school establishment for 15 years. Our kindergarten had a Russian orientation before. We had Russian-speaking children of various nationalities, but we also had Turkmen children speaking Russian. Then they shut it down, and later it began to operate only in Turkmen. In my class parents came to me to ask me to speak to the pupils in Russian, so that they could continue to speak the language. I did so, but I got into trouble for it. They told me to my face, “Just forget Russian.”
That was in 1995 and the situation hasn’t changed since then. They also required us to go to work in the green Turkmen national dress, including the ethnic Russian women.

DW: Gulya, can you tell us about the current position of national minorities. I don’t mean just the Russian speakers, but also other people living in Turkmenistan.

Leila: They’re suffering a great deal. All of them have been sacked, including those who have been working for us for 20 years. Among them are Tatars and Uzbeks. I have a lot of neighbours who I know this has happened to.

As Gulya explains, inequality is also evident in important sectors such as the health service, which is also in a catastrophic state. Cases where patients have been brought for emergency treatment only to be left on the street, outside the clinic, no longer surprise many Turkmens.

Gulya: One night, my elderly mother was taken to hospital for emergency treatment. When we went to visit her in the morning, we found her sitting in the street. We asked her why she was not in the ward. She said, “The doctor took me out of the ward and threw me onto the street. He told me that I had not paid money.” She said she had told the doctor that her children were due to arrive with the money.

But if Turkmens can still help their ill relatives by giving bribes to find them a place in hospital,
according to our interviewees doctors refuse to even speak with the so-called “aliens”.

These last couple days have been very important for Kazakhstan as well as the region as a whole. Obviously there is a huge amount of information about the election already. Here are links, summaries, and excerpts to some of what’s out there:

• The answer to the big question (was it fair?) has been mixed. As Ben posts, the Caspian Information Centre’s team of British parliamentarians has judged the elections to be, “the freest, fairest and certainly the most transparent election to have occurred in Kazakhstan’s brief history as an independent state.”
• No sooner had the Centre’s team announced their verdict than they were attacked for “whitewashing a rigged election” because of petroleum interests in the region (and implicitly because of alleged oil-money flowing into the organization).
• CIS observers concurred with the Caspian Information Centre, declaring that the elections were held without serious violations.
• The OSCE took a dimmer view of the affair, and declared it flawed, calling on Kazakhstan to “make further steps towards developing open, democratic political structures in Kazakhstan, which could become a beacon for democracy in the region.”
• Russia certainly sees no problem with the election. The OSCE immediately took criticism from Moscow, and President Putin wasted no time in calling Nazarbayev to personally congratulate him.
• While there is great controversy over how flawed the election was, all seem to agree that it is better than anything Kazakhstan has seen in the past. One editorial argues that Kazakhstan “is now the one bright shining example of free market economics in Central Asia and offers the only real prospect in the region form gradual but real democratic development as well.”
• Immediately following the election, Nazarbayev pledged to pursue broad political and economic reforms, perhaps in an attempt to fend off the mostly negative press.
• Finally, there have been no reports of demonstrations or people taking to the streets as the authorities had feared.

Registan also has a good roundup of news on the election, as does KZ Blog. You can never have too many roundups for momentous events like this…

Apparently Tajikistan’s state-owned airlines has become so woefully bad that foreign diplomats decided to take action.

The ambassadors of the United States, Britain, France, Japan, Turkey, and Switzerland wrote an open letter to President Imomali Rakhmonov on Friday asking him to address Tajik Air’s most glaring service problems.

They complained about difficulties buying tickets, getting onward connections, the lack of compensation for delays and cancelled flights, decrepit airport facilities, and the need to increase “respect for passengers”.

Amusingly, the one aspect of airline travel universally loathed was reported to be quite good on Tajikistan Airlines: the food.

The Caspian Information Center has sent out their take on the elections. As I couldn’t find it on their website yet, I enlose it in the extended entry.

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It is aleady over 15 years since Soviet Union started to disintegrate, leaving behind eight new independent states in Central Asia and in the Caucasus.

The republics gaining independence in 1991 believed they got it for real. But the reality shows that no country can live on its own, there is always the need for some integration with other countries and most choose to be an ally with someone anyway.

The ties of the Central Asian countries to Russia are obvious. Not only did the Russian culture leave a deep mark on all Central Asian societies due to centuries of a ‘mutual’ history, the migration flow back and forth is also a reminder that there is still a lot of interaction between the two entities.

In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan you wouldn’t get lost if you spoke only Russian and the schools on every level function mostly in Russian. However, there is usually some alternative to study the subjects in our native languages.

But the question is: How much is it worth to study in our language in order to become a good specialist in one profession. What kind of schools are there for the citizens of the region?

There are of course private schools that may offer a varied number of subjects, but I really wonder what kind of problems are solved by the ministries of education in the countries of Central Asia, when it is quite unclear what kind of educational system the countries follow. So, what is it with the Russian influence?

In public we still speak Russian. English is not available for the majority of the population since it needs, besides a strong commitment, money to learn it.

So, is going to Russia for education the way forward for citizens of Central Asia in order to catch up with advanced subjects. Can they become best specialized in the field like that?

What can the Russian educational system offer to Central Asian citizens studying in Russia?

I believe they still offer the Soviet way of passing the exams, putting grades on “zachotka,” and learning most of the assignments by heart. Is this a really effective way of accumulating knowledge? This what we had at schools in the Soviet Union and for most still have at higher education institutions.

For sure, it is quite costly to study in an English-speaking institution, most of which are obviously abroad.

Could Central Asian citizens face an alternative to that in the East, in rapidly developing China? I believe it is not available over there since the “Chinese Wall” is still in place, by which the Chinese want to protect themselves from outsiders. It is clear so far that China is not going to be open to share the knowledge they possess.

Then, can we develop our own standards of education and not further rely on any other systems? What can the citizens of Central Asia do in order to understand that educational system is by and large ignored due to issues like oil and gas?

But isn’t it dangerous if only some people can afford to get the best education on how to sell oil and gas while the rest remains with a mediocre understanding of the issues at stake, mostly due to an unreformed education system?

KZ Blog has posted some impressions from throughout election day. This bit is especially interesting:

Kahar, the youth movement, was out on Arbat, the pedestrian street in front of TSUM with alarm clocks, stopping passerbyers saying, “It’s time to wake up.” They were pushing people to vote. Nothing like this could ever happen in Astana.

The American Bar Association Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (ABA/CEELI) took some heat from the Tajik newspaper “Jumhuriyat” on November 26 for promoting “dangerous” western values.

US Ambassador Richard Hoagland quickly struck back, demanding that the newspaper apologize not only to the United States, but to President Rakhmonov and the Tajik people for publishing a deceptive article designed only to disrupt US-Tajik relations.

That same day (December 1), Tajik President Rakhmonov stated, “Cooperation with the US is the main trend in the foreign policy of the Tajik government,” indicating that relations are good and satisfaction is high.

What exactly is going on here? Some things don’t seem to quite add up.

• “Jumhuriyat” is a state-owned newspaper. We can therefore assume that the Tajik government exerts at least some control over its content, so demanding that the newspaper apologizes to its owners seems a bit odd.
• ABA/CEELI gets most of its money from USAID, and is primarily devoted to combating corruption, training judges, and strengthening legal systems, although it does dabble in gender issues and human rights. If Tajikistan is worried about another revolution owing success to western-funded NGOs, ABA/CEELI is a strange target, given the other NGOs at work in the country. A good judicial system and strong rule of law can benefit a country whether or not it is democratic.

Doubtless this is a multifaceted political exchange with aspects I am not aware of, but here is my interpretation of what is going on:

The Tajik government is getting nervous about the western money pouring into the various NGOs because the recent revolutions in the region, and strikes out ABA/CEELI through the state newspaper, “Jumhuriyat” as a warning. The US embassy takes its time to respond, but ultimately speaks out against “Jumhuriyat” instead of the Tajik government, even though both sides know who controls it. The US is perfectly safe in doing this, because should Tajikistan take open offense, they will be admitting to the world that the state-run media espouses utter propaganda. Even if basically everyone knows this, public acknowledgement of this fact would be an embarrassment. The Tajik government knows that there is little the USG can really do about the situation, and therefore says nice words about the United States. This in essence sends a clear message to NGOs without openly challenging the US.

There is an article in the New York Times today about exactly this issue across Central Asia.

According to this exit poll, Nazarbayev will win the elections by an even bigger margin than expected:

The RIA-Novosti and Interfax news agencies said an exit poll by a Russia-based political consulting firm showed Nazarbayev leading with more than 87 percent of the vote.

We also hear first voices of discontent:

‘There were multiple violations of the law,’ said Aidos Sarimov, a spokesman for the runner-up, Zharmakhan Tuyakbai, who according to the exit poll won just 9.58 pct.

‘We intend to use all potential, possible legal mechanisms to protest these violations,’ Sarimov told reporters in the state’s biggest city Almaty.

According to Sarimov, voter lists were falsified and the official turnout of 75.5 percent was inflated.

People are still casting their ballots in Kazakhstan, where President Nazarbayev is so confident he’ll win another 7-year term that he’s already organised the party:

Amid allegations of official and opposition misdeeds, Nazarbayev is so confident of victory over his four challengers that he has scheduled a gathering with supporters at a sports complex in the capital Astana on Monday morning, just minutes after election officials plan to announce preliminary results.

There is already a semi-excuse in case not everything goes according to plan:

Central Election Commission chairman Onalsyn Zhumabekov claimed this month that purported election observers had prepared statements alleging voting violations that they would submit to cast doubt on the poll’s legitimacy.

Here in London, the Caspian Information Center (which has sent their own team of observers to Kazakhstan) is slated to publish their verdict on the elections on Monday. Also, the OSCE will announce their impressions during a press conference tomorrow.

The OSCE could be too critical in its assessment than to let Kazakhstan head the organisation in 2009:

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which will monitor the elections with 465 observers, directed criticisms towards the Kazakh administration. The organization claimed only a few articles from the “correction list” were realized, which they sent to the Kazakh administration to hold elections in the international level.

More soon.