As Nursultan Nazarbayev celebrates his second decade of running Kazakhstan (he rose to power in 1989, two years before declaring independence from the USSR) through a nice big visit to the nuclear wasteland of Semey(palatinsk), there comes to light a few more scandals shaking his government.
Courtesy our friends at neweurasia.net, we learn that three days ago, Nazarbayev ordered the firing of Danial Akhmetov, the first civil Minister of Defence in the history of Kazakhstan. Apparently a successor has not been named, which indicates it may have been a hastily-made decision. It seems likely he, too, will be embroiled in a corruption scandal.
Neweurasia.net also reports on an amusing-seeming public shouting match between Nur Otan leader Tatiana Kvyatkovskaya and KazAtomProm Vice-President Sergey Yashin. Yashin seemed to have gotten angry over Kvyatkovskaya’s accusations and denunciations of KazAtomProm’s former leadership, especially disgraced former President Mukhtar Dzhakishev (Yashin had planned on defending Dzhakishev).
I’m curious: what role do the new corruption laws play in all of this? Are they possibly creating an environment in which accusations are acted upon too quickly, with everyone else rushing to denounce the accused? We’ll have to see, and we’ll know for sure if any of Nazarbayev’s close friends or family actually get ensnared. Otherwise, it could simply be a consolidation of sorts before Kazakhstan’s assumes its chairmanship of OSCE next year… something that is decidedly less noble.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 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
For information on reproducing this article, see our Terms of Use
