Last week, our friends at neweurasia.net posted a letter from U.S. Congressmen Darrel Issa and Charlie Melancon in which they nominated Nursultan Nazarbayev for the Nobel Peace Prize. In a follow up story, Joshua Kucera quite rightly noted the authoritarian’s problematic relationship with civil liberties and press freedom. In the story, however, one of Issa’s aids made a very compelling argument:
But Issa and Melancon’s nomination letter focuses exclusively on Nazarbayev’s decision to give up nuclear weapons, said Frederick Hill, a spokesman for Issa. “This is not a lifetime achievement award,” he said. “This is not intended to gloss over the problems that exist in Kazakhstan in terms of backsliding on democracy and the human rights record. But when they do something significant in the area of nonproliferation, it’s important that we recognize that.”
Indeed, several past Peace Prize winners have had less than stellar records – Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, Mikhail Gorbachev and Frederik Willem De Klerk, for example. But the Nobel committee honored each for a specific achievement.
Hill argued that Nazarbayev’s nomination might encourage Kazakhstan to improve its governance. “When you talk about democracy in Kazakhstan, it’s actually a reason to do this nomination, because it sends a message: when you do good things you will be recognized,” he said.
This is a bit like saying, “well everyone else is doing it!” In fact, Kazakhstan really doesn’t need any more lauds at the moment—its nomination to chair the OSCE was hugely controversial, a move many thought diminished the reputation of the organization. While that point is certainly up for debate, and the Nobel committee certainly has nominated its share of thugs, that doesn’t make this nomination a good idea—especially when Kazakhstan is learning the very valuable lesson that you can make empty promises without consequence, there already is no incentive to obey the international community.
On a darker note, this is an excellent example of the way lobbying interests can distort foreign policy. Kucera does a great job of highlighting the specific business interests of both Issa’s and Melancon’s districts in Kazakhstan, but it goes a step further. Ken Silverstein recently hyperventilated about the role of lobbyist groups in pushing a false image of these countries. One of the companies he highlighted was APCO Worldwide, which Kazakhstan hired in 2007 to promote its image in the U.S.
Given the relationship of both Issa and Melancon to APCO—Issa has been showing up at APCO-hosted events for years, and Melancon has hired their associates—it doesn’t seem unfair to speculate as to whether or not there might be another motive behind their push. There is no concrete evidence to support this, of course, but the delicate intertwining of competing interests certainly looks bad. There is no doubt there are legitimate interests to be served by closer ties between the U.S. and Kazakhstan; but if James Giffen (whose story formed the partial basis for the 2005 movie Syriana) is any indication, then corruption is also not too far off from Kazakhstan’s international dealings.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust