[Nettime-bold] Internet and Media Palace Frenzy in Kazakhstan

[Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>]

Check Out This Weird Media Coup in Kazakhstan.  Note
"Internet Terrorism," American Lawyers, and Drug Arrest Angles *8-/

>From RFE/RL Central Asia report


CENSORSHIP, SOLIDARITY, AND SACKINGS IN WAKE OF ALIEV'S
RESIGNATION. A week of political drama in Kazakhstan began with the
resignation on 14 November of President Nursultan Nazarbaev's son-in-
law, 38-year-old Rakhat Aliev, from his post as deputy chairman of
the National Security Committee (NSC). Unfolding events offered
tantalizing glimpses of a Byzantine power struggle going on between
the government and opposition, between the center and the provinces,
and within Nazarbaev's family itself.

    On 10 October Deputy of the Mazhlis (the Kazakh parliament's
lower house) Tolen Toqtasynov publicly accused Aliev of abuse of
power for using the NSC to monitor the activities of opposition
political parties, while he secretly owned or controlled the majority
of the country's print and electronic media outlets -- among them
Kazakh Commercial Television (KTK-TV) and the popular newspaper
"Karavan" -- together with his wife, the president's eldest daughter,
Dariga (see "RFE/RL Central Asia Report," 18 October 2001).

Aliev denied the allegations, which he claimed were politically motivated.
He said the man ultimately behind the campaign against him was the
38-year-old governor of Pavlodar Region in northern Kazakhstan,
Galymzhan Zhaqiyanov, for whom Toqtasynov was merely a front man (see
"RFE/RL Newsline," 19 October 2001). Zhaqiyanov controls media
instruments of his own; both he and Aliev have been using their
outlets to criticize one another for a long time. Aliev, who became
deputy security chief in 1999, previously was a senior official of
the Kazakh tax police.

    On 14 November parliamentary deputies called on Aliev to give
an account of his activities and those of the NSC at a session of the
Mazhlis. They also pressed NSC Chairman Marat Tazhin to make sure
Aliev turned up, Interfax-Kazakhstan reported. But Tazhin, far from
supporting the deputies' demands, ordered his subordinate not to
appear before the Mazhlis.

According to Kazakhstan Today news agency, Aliev had said he was perfectly
willing to appear before the deputies since he had nothing to hide.
Forbidden to do so by his boss, however, Aliev suddenly submitted his
resignation to President Nazarbaev on 14 November. Furthermore, he said that
he intended to sue Tazhin through his lawyers in the United States, RFE/RL's
Kazakh
bureau reported the following day.

    Nazarbaev accepted his son-in-law's resignation on 15 November
and promptly appointed in his place a 45-year-old ex-KGB official,
Major General Nartai Dutbaev, who among other posts had run the NSC
department in Pavlodar Region, Interfax-Kazakhstan said.

Many observers were surprised to see the president apparently turn against
a member of his own family, especially given the level of nepotism in
state structures: Dariga runs the state news agency Khabar, while his
other son-in-law, Timur Kulibaev, is head of one of the country's
largest banks. 

To explain the timing of Nazarbaev's change of heart
toward Aliev, it may be significant that, according to some sources,
Aliev's marriage with Dariga is on the rocks.

Moreover, Nazarbaev was later quoted as telling journalists that he had
discovered that Aliev simply had "too many enemies" and thus was a
liability, RFE/RL reported on 17 November.

Russian newspapers have been speculating for
months that a battle to succeed Nazarbaev is underway among members
of his family, with Aliev and Dariga leading contenders and perhaps
rivals. 

Head of the opposition Orleu movement Seydakhmet Quttyqadam
offered another perspective on possible shifting political alliances
when he pointed out that Aliev belongs to the Middle Horde, while
Nazarbaev belongs to the Great Horde (see "RFE/RL Kazakh News," 15
November 2001). The three Kazakh Hordes (Great, Middle and Small) are
a legacy of nomadic society that are thought to function like clan-
networks through which political patronage is channeled.

    Meanwhile, Aliev's whereabouts on the day his resignation was
accepted were unknown, with rumors flying that he had been placed
under house arrest. Significantly, Dariga did not step forward to
defend him. 

But Aliev's sister, Gulshat, who happened to be in
Lebanon on 15 November, held a press conference in Beirut at which
she said that his life was in danger and asked international
democratic institutions to follow his case. In a nice twist, she said
she was afraid her brother might be unlawfully persecuted, and that
she would engage American lawyers to help defend his human rights,
Kazakhstan Today reported.

    Almost immediately after Aliev tendered his resignation, KTK-
TV, owned by the Alma-Media Holding company that he had been accused
of secretly controlling, shut down for two days and only showed a
color test card. 

   On 16 November, all copies of the weekly newspaper
"Karavan," also a part of Alma-Media, were recalled from the
distributors and the newspaper's operation was suspended. On the same
day, the staffs of both the TV station and the newspaper issued a
joint statement protesting the suppression of press freedom by Kazakh
law-enforcement agencies, which the journalists described as "the
practical introduction of censorship."

    In response, they announced that they had established an independent
union called Solidarnost ("Solidarity"), in order "protect press freedom and
democratic principles," RFE/RL's Kazakh bureau reported. They further
demanded that police stop tapping journalists' telephones and intercepting
their mail, and that the government stop using trumped-up charges to
shut down independent media.

    The Ministry of Culture and Information responded that
allegations of censorship and interference were untrue and
represented "a deliberate attempt to misinform the public," Interfax-
Kazakhstan reported on 17 November. The government had exerted no
pressure on KTK-TV and the channel had suspended broadcasts of its
own volition, the ministry said.

    When KTK-TV returned to the air late on 16 November, it
reported that the building of Kazakhstan TV Channel One, the
Kazteleradio (Kazakh TV and radio) building, and the Kok-Tobe
broadcasting tower in the city of Almaty were effectively being
seized by the Interior Ministry, as the private security firms
normally responsible for guarding them were in the process of being
replaced by squads of police armed with assault rifles. These
included special antiterrorist units from the NSC, the report said.

Allegedly, the transfer had been mandated by a government decree of
10 November whereby strategic installations throughout the country
should pass under state protection as security against terrorist
threats. However, KTK-TV said, no one had actually seen the document
and nobody at the Interior Ministry would tell journalists what it
said. 

    But Khabar TV reported on 16 November that Almaty's heating
plant, water supply system, television tower, and telecommunications
companies all fell under the rubric of strategic facilities and were
being taken over by state guardsmen.

    There had been earlier hints of tighter government controls
with the detention on 14 November of Daniar Ashimbaev, a famous
Kazakh journalist and one of the founders of the Moscow-based,
Aziopa.ru Internet publication, which has criticized Nazarbaev's
regime harshly. 

     Ashimbaev himself is believed to be a supporter of
Aliev. The day that Aliev resigned, Ashimbaev was arrested in Almaty
for illegal drugs possession after 0.05 grams of heroin and six
tablets of ecstasy were allegedly found on his person (see "RFE/RL
Kazakh News," 16 November 2001).

    Aliev resurfaced in public on 17 November, appearing on KTK-TV
to issue a brief statement. First, however, Nazarbaev delivered a
television address from his presidential office in which he said that
Aliev's decision to resign had been perfectly correct given the
circumstances -- which he did not specify -- and announced that he
had appointed him to be deputy head of the presidential guard
service. 

    He continued to say that he would always stand up for those
media outlets "that obey the law" and wrapped up his address with an
irrelevant promise to support small and medium-sized businesses.
Aliev then spoke to the cameras, complaining that he had been the
victim of libelous accusations but insisting that he had proven his
innocence in court and the slanderers had been punished. It was
unclear what accusations and what decisions in his favor he was
referring to.

    The heat is not off Aliev yet, though. Zhaqiyanov, the governor
of Pavlodar Region, told TAN-TV on 16 November that Aliev was
responsible for a political crisis by trying to gather all
Kazakhstan's power structures and media outlets into his hands, and
said that national leaders still owed parliament an explanation of
what was really going on in the country.

   Zhaqiyanov also seems to have provided the main impetus behind a new
political movement called Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan, whose formation
was announced in Almaty on 18 November, Khabar TV and Interfax reported.
Among the other seven founding members were such senior political figures as
Deputy Prime Minister Oraz Dzhandosov, Deputy Defense Minister
Zhannat Ertlesova, and Mazhlis Deputy Toqtasynov, who made the
initial accusations against Aliev in October.

   The group's platform is to initiate new reforms since, in its view,
"democratic reforms in Kazakhstan have stopped." Deputy Finance Minister
Kayrat Kelimbetov, who told Khabar TV on 19 November that he would be
joining the movement, said more specifically that more power should be
devolved to parliament and local legislative bodies from the executive, and
that more regional officials should be elected rather than appointed.

    At a press conference on 19 November, the managers of KTK-TV
and "Karavan" revealed that for three months both media organs had
been under strong pressure from unidentified financial and political
interests to distort their coverage of certain public figures in
Kazakhstan, Khabar TV reported. The TV and newspaper had suspended
operations the previous week, the director of Alma-media said, in
order to resist insistent demands and offers of bribes to smear local
"famous people and politicians," which included "the president's
family members." To help insulate them from such pressure in the
future, the two media outlets were selling 20 percent of their shares
to an American oil magnate, RFE/RL's Kazakh bureau reported on 20
November.

    To cap off a politically memorable week in Kazakhstan, Prime
Minister Qasymzhomart Toqaev appeared on KTK-TV on 20 November to
deliver a long, rambling statement that began with a defense of the
government's economic record but quickly turned into an attack on
insidious forces who were trying to undermine the country from
within, practicing "Internet terrorism," "pretending to be concerned
about democracy," "aiming at redistributing property" -- and who were
eventually identified as Pavlodar Governor Zhaqiyanov, Deputy Defense
Minister Ertlesova, Labor Minister Alikhan Baymenov, and his own
Deputy Prime Minister Dzhandosov, all of whom were important members
of the newly founded Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan.

    Singling out Pavlodar Region for criticism of its poor economic record,
Toqaev called on the president to impose discipline and order in the land
with a strong hand and to sack immediately the four public figures he
had named. Otherwise, threatened Toqaev, "I will resign myself."

   By way of impressing on his listeners the need for social order at a
time of terrorist threat, and the kind of instability that could
overtake the country without a firm leader at the helm, he said that
Kazakh security organs had uncovered two assassination plots against
Nazarbaev in the last three months alone. He offered no details or
corroboration.

    On the morning of 21 November, some of the leaders of
Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan whom Toqaev had attacked arranged a
meeting at the National Press Club in the Kazakh capital, Astana, to
which they invited the prime minister to discuss or clarify his
statement of the previous evening. Toqaev did not show up, at which
point spokespeople for the new movement told journalists that they
could no longer work in the government with him -- thus effectively
forcing Nazarbaev to choose between him or them. He showed no
hesitation in his preference, with the presidential press service's
announcement a few hours later that Governor Zhaqiyanov, Deputy
Defense Minister Ertlesova, and Deputy Prime Minister Dzhandosov had
all been sacked.


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