CIC Special Briefing - President Nazarbayev: His Policies and Programme

Nursultan Nazarbayev, the son of a shepherd, became President of Kazakhstan in 1990 and was elected to his first term of office in 1991, having been Prime Minister and President of the Supreme Soviet of Kazakhstan during the later stages of Communist rule. He is currently serving his second seven-year term in office, and has recently announced that, at the age of 64, he is prepared to stand for a third term in 2006.

Nazarbayev was born in 1940 in a mountain camp South of Almaty. Until the introduction of Kruschev's 'Virgin Land' programme, his family followed a nomadic existence, spending the summer in the mountains and the winter in the steppes. Collectivisation brought considerable hardship to the family and his first memory was not of the Ala Tau peaks towering above the village of Chemolgan, to which the family later moved, but of hunger as he queued for bread as a small boy. His education was in engineering at the Technical School in the newly built city of Temirtau, where one of the Soviet Union's biggest steel plants was under construction. Nazarbayev was to spend 20 years at the plant, first as a steel worker, then as a Communist Party official. He rose steadily through the Party hierarchy, becoming Party Secretary at the plant in 1972, and a member of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan seven years later. In 1984, one year before Gorbachev came to power in Moscow, Nazarbayev was appointed Prime Minister.

Nazarbayev's reputation is that of a determined and dynamic pragmatist who grasped more quickly and completely than most ex?communist leaders that in the wake of Soviet collapse economic advance could only be achieved by means of a functioning market economy and political pluralism combined with stability. Particularly during the days following independence, he was at pains to stress the dangers faced by a multi-ethnic nation caught up in a tumultuous historical process that had caused chaos elsewhere. Radical reform was vital, but if its unfortunate side effects were not to render the country ungovernable, it had to be directed in a way that acknowledged the realities of the post-Soviet era.

Unlike the transitional societies and economies of Eastern and Central Europe, Kazakhstan could not draw on pre-Soviet traditions of decentralised economic and political decision-making or of civil society, since these had never existed. Neither, at the time, did Kazakhstan enjoy close ties to the West. But without stability there could be no prospect of attracting the investment from the US and Europe which was essential to exploit his country's huge natural resources.

In his autobiography, the Kazakh President has written: "Democracy is knocking at the door of Kazakhstan. But we have to prevent it blowing through like a tornado. Each country has to do things in its own way."

Nazarbayev has consequently sought to ensure that his ambitious programme of change does not threaten social stability or exacerbate relations between religious and ethnic groups, and that reform is implemented in a way that respects the nation's cultural heritage: "At every opportunity I try to persuade every Kazakh that our main treasure is social stability and the absence of inter-ethnic discord and bloodshed."

The Kazakhstan President also moved quickly to build external relations by means of a pro-active foreign policy that has helped secure assistance with border security and the creation of modern armed forces.

In 2000, setting out the government's economic aims and priorities in a thirty-year plan, the President confirmed his commitment to the on-going programme of economic free-market reform. This was followed by a speech in 2001 which included the commitment to double GDP by 2010 and to further increase capital expenditure by that date.

In June 2003, one of the remaining parts of the privatisation jigsaw was completed when the President signed the Land Code that, for the first time, will enable the sale of farmland to private holders.

More recently, a five-point programme announced in his annual address to the Nation on 4 April, 2003, the President included the following:

§ Measures to modernise and streamline government, including decentralisation, a new distribution of powers between national, regional and local levels, and greater use of local elections.

§ The introduction of new election procedures in order to ensure transparency, openness and competition.

§ The strengthening of civil society through assistance to non-governmental organisations and political parties.

§ A new law intended to strengthen the political and economic freedom of the media, and to provide a dialogue between the media and government.

§ Improvement of law enforcement, with the aim of protecting the rights and freedoms of citizens, and the "humanisation" of the criminal code involving a moratorium on capital punish-ment, the introduction of trial by jury, and a commitment to ensure that arrest will only take place by court order.

In his speech, the President also announced increases in pensions, a 50 per cent rise in the wages of public service employees, and a series of tax-cutting measures to take effect from 2004.

In the long run, Nazarbayev's place in history will rest on his success in steering his country from single-party Soviet state to market-based economy and multi-party democracy. The process continues, but has already produced major benefits in terms of much raised living standards, political liberty and human rights - all of them achieved without exciting tensions that could have undermined stability and even independence.

His success thus far may be explained by the fact that he grasped two things very clearly. The first was that there could be no viable alternative to free market democracy, and that while change would need to reflect national mores and the country's ethnic complexities, it would need to be both far-reaching and embraced enthusiastically.

Nazarbayev's second insight was that the need for change could not be allowed to produce a mood of national introspection. The key to success in economic and political reform was foreign investment and technical assistance. This would most likely be forthcoming if its privatisation and economic reform programme met internationally acceptable criteria. Similarly, Kazakhstan's security would be most effectively guaranteed if, in addition to modernising its armed forces, it gave up its nuclear weapons and sought good relations with the US, as well as with its two biggest neighbours, Russia and China. This policy was underwritten by active membership of a series of overlapping security organisations.

Nazarbayev's domestic policy has served to reinforce foreign policy goals, while active diplomacy abroad has enhanced internal stability - a precondition of successful economic and political reform. Few political leaders have had to cope simultaneously with the problems of independence, the transition from a command economy to a market economy and from communist dictatorship to liberal demo-cracy while living through an oil boom. So far Nazarbayev has risen to the challenge. Continuing success should ease the tasks of his eventual successor.