I saw this story yesterday, mentioning again the US position that a fair election will prove Kazakhstan the leader in Central Asia, and briefly considered posting about it. But it’s not particularly notable in any way other than that it shows the US is (intentionally or not) playing to Kazakhstan’s desire to be recognized as a mature and valuable member of the international community.
But suddenly, the story becomes a little more interesting with the news that Kazakhstan has denied the CIS Elections Monitoring Organization permission to observe the presidential elections. (CIS-EMO is different from the regular CIS observer missions.)
Deputy Prosecutor-General Askhat Dautbaev explained that Kazakhstan allows international organizations to monitor its elections, but he said the CIS-EMO is “a foreign NGO registered in Russia in accordance with that country’s laws,” Khabar reported.
“We made a mistake [in originally accrediting CIS-EMO],” Kazakh TV1 quoted Election Commission Chairman Onalsyn Zhumabekov as saying.
Is this a slap at Russia for signing the new defense treaty with Uzbekistan? Perhaps. But perhaps it’s taking advantage of an opportunity to keep to a minimum the number of “phony” observers around for the election.
Update: A point worth making that I forgot about earlier is something mentioned at neweurasia a while ago. Nazarbaev is fairly certain to win handily in a free vote and fixing the vote clearly does much more harm than good.
Also, the ODIHR’s latest interim report on the election (PDF) just came out.
This post was written by...
Nathan Hamm – author of 2974 posts on Registan.net.
Nathan is the Founding Editor and Publisher of Registan.net, which he launched in 2003. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan 2000-2001 and received his MA in Central Asian Studies from the University of Washington in 2007. Since 2007, he has worked full-time as an analyst, consulting with private and government clients on Central Asian affairs, specializing in how socio-cultural and political factors shape risks and opportunities and how organizations can adjust their strategic and operational plans to account for these variables. Nathan is currently seeking research, analysis, and consulting opportunities. He can be contacted via Twitter or email.
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ENEMO is not in anyway afilliated with Russia, though it certainly has Russian monitors in its delegations. It is a coalition of democratic election monitoring NGOs from Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the caucasus. Its monitors — who are more knowledgeable about about the ways NIS elections get stolen that westerners and usually speak the local language — played a critical role in all three Ukraine elections and were active in Kyrygzstan’s election as well. They are not analogous to the CIS “monitors” who came to AZ to monitor and reaffirm official results. IT receieves a lot of US funded and should absolutely not be put in the “phony” category. That’s why it got its accrediatation pulled.
Great, but ENEMO isn’t who RFE/RL is talking about. Anytime an election monitoring organization that gives the Russian version of events shows up, it gets a little confusing. Perhaps this clears things up a bit.
If they’re the same, I’d expect Moldova to be mentioned on the ENEMO website.
would be very coindicental if it’s not the same. ENEMO just got their credentials pulled over the weekend.
I trust RFE/RL not to make the mistake. I can’t find anything on ENEMO getting their Kazakhstan credentials pulled (but it’s late and I’m not looking incredibly hard).
As far as I get from the news, they haven’t had their credentials pulled but they are looked at unfavorably. And they don’t get to monitor this on. the indicated list of observers is here