CIC Occasional Paper No. 4 - Democracy: Kazakh Style

[Please note that the following text does not contain footnotes.]

Introduction

Recent political developments have confounded criticism that Kazakhstan’s political reform process is dead.

Spring 2004 witnessed three separate developments that mark significant steps on Kazakhstan’s transition to democracy.

These were a new law on elections, the Presidential veto of an unpopular bill to regulate the mass media, and the registration of ten political parties, half of them opposed to the Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. These include the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK), which has made Nazarbayev’s removal its primary objective, and whose registration surprised most commentators, including members of the DCK itself.

Taken together these developments confound claims made by opposition politicians and outside observers that Kazakhstan’s reform programme had come to a halt or gone into reverse.

Signed on April 15th 2004, the passage of a new election law through the Kazakh Parliament followed a lengthy and unusually wide public debate involving political parties and non-governmental organisations, as well as the OSCE and the US-based National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute. Along with the Presidential veto of the media bill, the debate signalled the Kazakh government’s recognition that it can no longer be confident of its ability to limit or control public involvement in controversial issues.

In itself this constitutes a significant step in the development of political pluralism in a county that has had to grapple with entirely new political concepts, and even a new political vocabulary, following Independence in 1991.

The new election law will, among other important changes, bring about the following:

· Create election commissions on which political parties as well local officials will be represented with the aim of ensuring independence from the executive branch and of strengthening the transparency of the electoral process. By 26th May, the political parties had proposed 164,000 candidates, 80% more than required by law.

· Establish a system of sanctions and appeals for alleged breaches of the electoral legislation.

· Define the role of the media and the terms under which it is required to provide free broadcasting time and column inches for candidates.

· Change the way in which the Electoral Roll is calculated in order to reduce the risk of electoral fraud.

· Reduce the number of signatures required by those seeking to contest presidential elections, and simplify the candidate’s registration procedure in the case of Senate elections.

· Reduce the registration fees for candidates in both presidential and parliamentary elections and provide protection for elected candidates against wrongful imprisonment.

· Formalise the procedure for election counts and the announcement of the results.

In one respect, the new process will be quite literally transparent: innovations include the introduction of see-through plastic ballot boxes in order to eliminate the risk of fake ballot slips being inserted, as well as provision for the future introduction of electronic voting.

Overall, the impact of the legislation will be to strengthen the role of political parties, to throw open the voting procedure to public scrutiny and that of outside observers, and to remove unnecessary obstacles in the way of those seeking to become candidates for political office. The first tests of the new system will come in September 2004 with the parliamentary elections and in 2006 with the presidential elections.


A Victory for Press Freedom

A week after the bill became law, President Nazarbayev bowed to pressure to veto a new and complex media bill which, according to its critics, would have been used to restrict press freedom by complicating the procedure for registration of newspapers and broadcasting companies.

The decision to scrap the bill, which was announced by the President at the Eurasia Media Forum in Almaty on April 22nd, followed the Kazakh Constitutional Council’s judgement that the proposed legislation would clash with the Kazakh constitution. In the past, the Council has been criticised for its timidity, but here was a mouse that roared: faced by the most controversial items of legislation yet to come before it, the Council acted against the apparent wishes of the President and Kazakh government.

Announcing his intention to respect the Council’s decision, the Kazakh President described the development as “a major sign of democracy in our society.”

Many of those who had been the quickest to denounce the bill in the most draconian terms were equally quick to play down the significance of the President’s decision. But Tamara Kaleeva, chairperson of Adil Soz (The Just Word), which campaigned against the legislation for more than two years, found herself in the unusual position of siding with the President: “By agreeing with the Constitutional Council on the media bill, the President of Kazakhstan made a crucial step for the fate of the entire journalistic community, democracy and freedom of speech in Kazakhstan.”

The move was also warmly welcomed by Jan Kubis, the Secretary General of the OSCE and by Richard Boucher, spokesman for the US State Department, which had earlier expressed deep misgivings about the consequences of the proposed legislation.

Criticisms of the media bill and the need for an election law that would bring the standard of elections closer to international standards had featured prominently in a letter to the Kazakh President from US Secretary of State Colin Powell of November last year. In it, the US offered measured support for Kazakhstan’s bid to chair the OSCE in 2009. This is a strongly held ambition of President Nazarbayev, who regards the future chairmanship of OSCE as a symbol of Kazakhstan’s growing reputation and a just recognition of its willingness to act responsibly on the international stage. Its realisation came one step further on 17th May 2004 with a pledge of support from 54 European ambassadors to the OSCE.

Powell’s letter also pressed for the release of the Kazakh journalist and political campaigner Sergei Duvanov, who was sentenced to a seven year jail sentence for the rape of 15-year-old girl. Duvanov was released on 15th January 2004 and continues to write critically of Nazarbayev and the Kazakh government. In the circumstances, the Kazakh President is bound to believe that by showing itself sensitive to external pressures and criticisms, his country has gone a very long way to qualify for the recognition that it seeks.


The Birth of Political Opposition

Another step in the country’s road to democracy came on 4th May 2004 when Zaurash Battalova, a senior member of the Democratic Choice Party of Kazakhstan, collected the party’s registration documents from the Justice Ministry ahead of the campaign for the Parliamentary elections in the autumn.

This brings the number of officially registered parties in Kazakhstan - which has a population of 14.8 million – to ten. Apart from the Democratic Choice Party of Kazakhstan, the list includes the Agrarian Party, Ak Zhol (Bright Path), Asar (All Together), Auyl (Village), the Civil Party, the Communist Party, Otan (Fatherland), Rukhaniyat (Renaissance) and the Party of Patriots. Another three parties – the Democratic Party, the Abyroi (Honour and Conscience) Party and the country’s second Communist Party - have plans to register and are expected to do so in the near future.

Until recently, the DCK campaigned under the banner “Kazakhstan without Nazarbayev”, and its party literature includes plans to substantially reduce the powers of the Presidency.

Ayslbek Kozhakhmetov, the DCK leader who was obviously surprised by his party’s registration, said that the registration of the DCK was “a huge step forward” in the journey towards democracy, one that effectively legitimized a genuine opposition. He added: “A moral barrier has been removed. Now people see that the opposition is legal and therefore to be against the President is not a crime. It is very good…”

Earlier, DCK members had claimed that those wishing to join the party had been harassed in order to prevent it from collecting the 50,000 signatures necessary for registration, and that officials had tried to place administrative and other obstacles in its path. In the event, 86,000 people signed up, despite the fact that DCK is largely unknown outside Astana and Almaty.
As we pointed out in our most recent Newsletter , the true significance of the decision to permit the registration of the DCK lies in the fact that the Kazakh government now believes that the political institutions created since Independence are sufficiently robust to allow a role for their political opponents.

Taken together, these three developments demonstrate that the reform process, though far from complete, has not been abandoned and may continue to surprise outside observers by its scope. Nevertheless, Kazakhstan continues to find itself the brunt of criticism by Western governments and international NGOs.

The thrust of much of such criticism is that the reform process has been insufficiently rapid and that it is failing to prevent continuing abuses of human rights. Such claims are clearly resented by many in Astana who feel that the critics simply do not understand the nature of Kazakh society, or grasp the measure of what has been achieved. Some Kazakh officials point to the fact that the judgments of US officials with personal knowledge of the country tend to be far more generous in their assessments of progress than those who judge the country by a universal Western standard of democratic behavior, without any awareness of the political realities of the region, or any knowledge of the tumultuous process of change through which Kazakhstan has passed.

A measure of frustration with his Western critics was apparent in a recent article by the Kazakh President in the Washington Times: “When friends tell me that we are still not moving quickly enough I am tempted to reply: ‘Bearing in mind how far and how quickly we have traveled, how much faster would you like us to go? In steering the infant Kazakh democracy, the accelerator has been used far more than the brake. Please remember also just how long your own societies took to complete the processes on which we are now embarked’”

The root of the President's frustration derives from the assumption that Kazakhstan should be judged by the same standards as the mature democracies of Europe and North America. Non-governmental organisations such as Freedom House produce league tables that apply the same standards to Central Asia as to Switzerland, Norway or Great Britain . The US State Department, meanwhile, applies a universal standard of democratic accountability in its annual statement to Congress, its authors unabashed by the fact that it is sometimes nearly half a year out of date at the time of publication . Rather similarly, the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal collaborate to apply a common standard of economic freedom to all economies, with scant regard for historical factors in the accompanying text.

This approach, which reflects a modern obsession with measurement and quantification, is plainly unfair in several respects.

Firstly, because of the scope of such publications they tend often to be superficial in their judgement and out of date even on publication, since a much longer period than a year is required to assess significant trends. More fundamentally, however, no account is taken of the historical context. A much fairer way of measuring democratic performance would be to group states with similar historical backgrounds, rather in the manner of football clubs which are grouped in divisions reflecting their past performances but which may be relegated or promoted on the basis of results. Accordingly, Kazakhstan would be grouped with other former Soviet colonies with no experience of democracy or civil society prior to independence. In such a league table Kazakhstan would be at the top of the list.

It is also clear that there are moments in history when the State Department/Freedom House approach is of limited or negligible value. One such moment came with the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the time, the conditions for an immediate transition to democracy simply did not exist in many former Soviet territories. It was not just that the democratic machinery was absent and consequently had to be invented; the concepts of limited government, democratic accountability and civil society, which had developed in the West over centuries, had to be learned ab initio.

In these circumstances, any pretence that democracy could be established overnight would have resulted in anarchy or civil war followed in either case by a return to dictatorship. So far, the Kazakh approach of gradual democratic reform, combined with economic radicalism under the direction of a strong leader, has produced the twin blessings of rapid economic growth and stability.

Indeed, in the case of transitional states such as Kazakhstan it is not clear that the US State Department has been asking all the right questions or applying all of the right criteria.

There is another set of questions which need to be asked which have little directly to do with a state’s current conformity to democratic ideals, although in the longer term there is likely to be a close correlation between the two. Such questions have to do with a country’s external relations, its respect for international obligations, it’s ability to repay debt, its willingness to combat terrorism and international crime, and, above all, its ability to maintain internal stability. Judged by these standards, Kazakhstan scores highly and its progress in these areas, although difficult to quantify, has strengthened the prospect of democratic reform in the decades to come.


Finding the Kazakh route to democracy

The developments described earlier in this paper show that the reform process is far from dead, but that it will not necessarily conform to Washington’s view of the correct route to Western-style liberal democracy.

As America is discovering in Iraq, democracy building is a dauntingly complex and difficult exercise that requires a profound understanding of social, religious and cultural factors. Forcing the pace of change can have unintended consequences. Where progress is plainly occurring - and is also accompanied by advances in other areas – it may better to acknowledge this fact than to deliver yet another lecture.

Most educated Kazakhs – and an educated populace was one of the few benign aspects of the Soviet legacy – believe their country benefits greatly from its new cultural and economic ties to the West and from the Kazakh President’s policy of international engagement. But there are some signs of resentment that a small country in terms of population should be so frequently hectored by a large one. In the age-old game of power politics, the US is a player well as umpire. It competes in Central Asia for influence and oil with China and Russia, states that do not concern themselves with the internal conditions of other states. If, as both Donald Rumsfeld and Jack Straw have stressed, Kazakhstan is the West’s “strategic partner” in the Caspian region, might it not be in America’s own interest – and ultimately in that of Kazakh democracy - if it was treated accordingly?