INDEPENDENCE DAY BEING MARKED IN KAZAKHSTAN TODAY. Almaty, December 16, citizens of Almaty city gathered at the Central Square of the former capital and put flowers to the Independence Monument, marking in such a way the 7th anniversary of the Kazakhstan�s Independence. Dutch PHILIPS company isntalled a special electric device to the Independence Monument in order to keep it lighted in the night. In Astana�the capital, special official ceremony was held at the Congress Hall yesterday, December 15. President Nursultan Nazarbayev was given a floor and congratulated the nation with the Independence Day. Meanwhile participants to the December 1986 Almaty Uprise united by ZHELTOQSAN (December) organization announced about their intention to gather at the Central Square tomorrow, December 17, the day of the 12th anniversary of the Almaty events, known as the first national uprise during post�perestroyka era in the former USSR. The 1986 youth uprise was severely pressed down by KGB and the Soviet Army troops then.
PRESIDENT NURSULTAN NAZARBAYEV STARTED HIS WORKING TRIP TO WESTERN KAZAKHSTAN REGIONS. Almaty, Kazkah leader Nursultan Nazarbayev started his working trip to western Kazakhstan regions today, December 16. He is scheduled to visit Atyrau and Aqtau cities. On his way to the west Kazakhstan President Nazarbayev will drop in Qyzyl�Orda City, where he is expected to pay a visit to a newly constructed medical complex and meet with the ordinary citizens of the region at Nartay Bekezhanov�s Drama Theater. In Atyrau and Aqtau cities Nursultan Nazarbayev will be introduced with the situation at the oil and gas producing facilities.
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE SERIKBOLSYN ABDILDIN STARTED HIS TRIP TO ZHAMBYL OBLAST. Almaty, December 16, leader of the Kazakh Communists and a presidential candidate Serikbolsyn Abdildin started his visit to Zhambyl oblast in frames of his preparations for the presidential election. Zhambyl Oblast is known as the most Communists supportive region of Kazakhstan. More than 150 thousand signatures for Serikbolsyn Abdilidn�s support had been sent from that region. Communists are very active in Zhambyl Oblast and have their regular periodicals issued in that South Kazakhstani region. Before starting his trip to Zhambyl Oblast, Serikbolsyn Abdildin held press conference on December 15 in Almaty, where he said that in case if independent organizations were not allowed to have their representatives at the election committees in all the regions of Kazakhstan during the presidential races, he would step down from the election as a candidate.
(RFE/RL)
Gulbanu ABENOVA
Almaty, Dec 14
(THE GLOBE)
�Of course, it is hazardous to work at this market but we are confident of success as for Ericsson it is always a long-term construction. Along with our clients we survive both hard and fortunate years�, said the Swedish company official in Kazakhstan.
Reijo Ahola, Director General of Ericsson said that one could never say for sure if it is late or early that you come to a market, but the Russian crisis did not anyhow affect functioning of their company both in Russia and Central Asian republics.
�Even we are surprised with the level of the Russian crisis � so profound it is�, said Mr. Reding, adding that �we have lost not a single dollar in Russia�.
According to Ericsson authorities, they like officials of another Swedish company of Volvo are not feared of financial collapses in the post-Socialist states for the amount of their investments is not large.
In spite of the crisis leaking from the neighbouring state, Ericsson, according to the officials, intends to go on with the programme on development of telecommunications for �people need telecommunications�, to do that they are ready to make large investments. �This market is huge and it will be developed�, they said.
Ericsson officials told of the history of foundation of the company and its activity in Central Asia and Kazakhstan.
Ericsson is the world leader in the field of telecommunications, manufacturing systems and products for wire and mobile communication for private and public nets.
History of the company starts from 1876 when Lars Magnus Ericsson opened a workshop for repair of wireless equipment. Since that the company has become the world leading manufacturer of complex wireless equipment with huge sales outside Sweden. Yet in 1890s Ericsson was making business in different countries, including China, Russia and Mexico.
Today Ericsson, according to its officials, has a stable position at the world market with operations in more than 130 countries. Sales of equipment at the world market for fixed nets make 20% and for mobile nets - 40%. Ericsson is the leading supplier of digital mobile communication systems by GSM and D-AMRS standards.
According to Mr. Ahola, after opening of the outlet in Kazakhstan the range of operations of the company began to expand. �This region is a very important strategic market for the company�, he said.
He said that to strengthen its positions and expand its operations in Central Asia the company opened its outlets in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. In his words, for today cellular communication nets of the GSM and D-AMRS standards and public nets have already been introduced and are successfully developed in Kyrgyzstan.
At present the company jointly with its partners is taking active part in the project of introduction of the mobile cellular communication net of the GSM standard in our republic. According to Mr. Ahola, the company experts develop principally new financial and technical solutions for telecommunication nets in suburbs.
In his words, a pilot contract was signed with a small vicinity outside Almaty and yet early next year its dwellers will be able to use telephone communication with no certain telephone lines.
Concerning Ericsson�s part in the Kazakhtelecom privatization and its relations with the Turkish company which is going to introduce the GSM standards in Kazakhstan, Mr. Ahola said that their company is manufacturing and supplying equipment by GSM standards for this Turkish telecommunication company. And the issue of Kazakhtelecom privatization mostly concerns our operators who are our customers, we do not invest into it, he said.
ALMATY, Dec 15 (AFP)
The Kazakhstan parliament, after a weekend of discussions, has approved a 1999 budget with a deficit of 3.1 percent of output, the Interfax news agency reported.
Lawmakers had been expected to pass an austere budget in response to the global economic crisis, but Finance Minister Sauat Mynbayev said that the budget was �not very tough� because it was a �compromise between the government and parliament,� Interfax quoted him as saying.
The 1999 budget provides for receipts of 291.8 billion tenge (about 3.5 billion dollars) and expenditures of 354.3 billion tenge (4.3 billion dollars).
Both spending and expected receipts represent increases of about 75 percent each when compared with estimated 1998 expenditures of 202 billion tenge (2.4 billion dollars) and 167 billion tenge (two billion dollars).
Tax receipts are expected to make up the bulk of next year�s income, but Kazakhstan also expects to receive 49.7 billion tenge (nearly 600 million dollars) from privatisation.
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev already has called for a deepening of the privatisation programme, but has not announced which companies would be offered for sale.
WASHINGTON, Dec 15 (AFP)
The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday approved a 217-million-dollar credit for Kazakhstan to help it confront an economic slowdown in Russia.
�Kazakh authorities have responded appropriately and forcefully to difficult external circumstances by deepening their adjustment efforts,� said deputy IMF managing director Shigemitsu Sugisaki.
�Though there may be a delay in the revial of economic growth, the policies in place now and the ones envisaged for 1999 provide the best avenue for sustained growth over the medium term,� he said.
The Fund noted that prior to Russia�s economic downturn, Kazakhstan enjoyed a resumption in growth and a decline in annual inflation to single digits.
But in the second half of this year, the country suffered a decline in export prices and a reversal in international financing flows.
Dear Nursultan Abishevich,
It may be said (with a little strain) that I am an average Kazak, five years younger than you. I am a native Almaty dweller, I have a few diplomas including a diploma of candidate in sciences and senior lecturer�s. I am married, my husband is a doctor in sciences, professor, (his salary is US $130), we have children (30 and 13 years old), a 85-years old mother (her pension � 2,700 tenge) who has brought up for the country 5 high-class specialists of various specialities (their average salary is US $500). I am a specialist in languages and I professionally master Russian and a few western languages, like a majority of my compatriots who have grown up in a city I am a Russian-speaking Kazak mastering the Russian language than the Russians themselves, but my mastery of my native Kazak language is the worst, however sad it is. Nevertheless, nobody can say of me that I am neither Russian nor Kazak, for I am, the same as you, a Eurasian keeping like the apple of my eye and giving over to children, both to my own and others� (my students) the valuable knowledge of the European (including Russian) and Turkic cultures.
My outlook has been brought up by the Soviet school (which was giving the world-best education) and by my Communist father, a man known in the whole Republic in 1960-1970s. I have never been a Communist myself, though they proposed me more than once to join the Party, because my position of a head of chair implied the membership in the USSR Communist Party. In the Soviet time, due to my �enlightenment� regarding the realities of the western life and due to my inborn frankness I could not travel abroad. It was not announced officially, but each time I was about to go to study or to undergo a training abroad they refused by referring to some Jesuitical grounds: �the documents were lost�, �the terms were mixed�, etc. In our family, like in many other families, all kinds of thing happened � there was joy and misfortune, but never, in spite of the important nomenclature position of my father there was no duplicity and hypocrisy in our family. In our childhood we even did not suspect that our father was someone important, for we lived in a small way, there were no luxuries in our life, there were no talks, in the presence of the children, at least, about my father�s job.
In the Soviet time, due to my �enlightenment� regarding the realities of the western life and due to my inborn frankness I could not travel abroad. It was not announced officially, but each time I was about to go to study or to undergo a training abroad
The only thing we have learnt since our childhood is that any human must learn, work, live an honest life, first of all for himself, and, at the outcome � for the state. Not everything turned out as my father wished it: one of our brothers now lives overseas with his family, another one is a jobless drunkard gradually turning a vagabond� We have close relatives who live in Kazak settlements of all locales. There is a Russian kelin among our kin. She lives in Moscow with two children, and though she is divorced with our nephew we are keeping in touch with them, for the children are ours, they have a Kazak surname, and, besides, our Russian kelin is very kind and brought up in such a way as to give odds to any urban Kazak woman as regards the observance of our national traditions. Among my closest friends who are like my sisters there is a Korean, a Kazak, and a Russian. I am telling you all these so as it to be clear that the problems of various layers of citizens of our country are understood by me and are close to me. I am not a politicised woman, but, in my quality of a citizen of a sovereign state, I am interested to know everything that happens in the country and world-wide: sometimes, I go abroad, but, mainly I receive information from the Kazakstani, Russian and foreign mass media. No analysis of the political, economic, social, and cultural situation in Kazakstan is the subject of the present letter; I will touch these as necessary. On fact is very important: I, in spite of my education and my more or less political edification, have, like many former Soviet people, a paternalist mentality (I see nothing bad in that). This is explained by the ethnical particularities of the organisation of our ancestors� life generated in course of centuries. It is also true that I, like all the Kazakstani, in practice, an not by word of mouth, preserve with care and augment within my powers our chief wealth, i.e. peace and accord that had also been created over a few centuries based on tolerance and complimentarity by the peoples that live in Kazakstan. We appreciate your efforts of a far-seeing politician when you attempt to spread the ideas and the experience of Eurasianship all over the post-Soviet area.
I wanted to meet with you long ago, first � to talk to you, to exchange opinions, and later � to tell you things that are not (for reasons I ignore) reported to you� I am sure that You do not neglect such meetings, for I know that the opinion of any citizen of the country you are responsible for is very important to you. It is a pity you are so much overcharged with work and you must be content with pre-arranged meetings or with meetings organised for some purpose necessary to the state. Through the newspaper, which I consider the most professional and unbiased, I am appealing to you, my dear and yet beloved President and I ask you to read this letter to the end.
In the early 1990s the most edified citizens of Europe who had never heard of Kazakstan before today, hearing the words �I am from Kazakstan� say �O-o-oh! Nazarbayev! Almaty! Caspian�. In 1993 I hang a big portrait of you in my study, which, in spite of the movement of my office, was taking its place of honour on the tora
My attitude to you has suffered and is still suffering an evolution that is not too complex, though illustrative (inasmuch as many citizens of the same social origin and status feel the same as me). When you became the President I was simply in love with you � my young country represented by you, step by step, overcoming difficulties, at the same time as all of us, was growing up, growing wiser and stronger, having at first excited the interest and afterwards conquering the respect of the astonished sceptical world community. It was justified � the recognition of Kazakstan as a full international subject, the RK membership in the UN, OSCE, EU, OEEC, and in other important international institutions, well, no need to say that � everybody acknowledges you as a genius of external policy!
In the early 1990s the most edified citizens of Europe who had never heard of Kazakstan before today, hearing the words �I am from Kazakstan� say �O-o-oh! Nazarbayev! Almaty! Caspian�. In 1993 I hang a big portrait of you in my study, which, in spite of the movement of my office, was taking its place of honour on the tora. In that portrait the state of your mind of the time of perestroika is very well painted: calm and keen mind, assurance and no fear of the future, small cunning in intelligent eyes � all these called for confidence in you.
The words �yet� are present in my letter not by chance.
Quite recently, at the outcome of an intense internal struggle, I have taken your portrait off the wall.
Your erudition, readiness and capability to learn - whether to ski down from the mountains, whether to bear suits with chic, whether to be a reformer - is worth admiring. How proud of you I was, of the way you excellently countered the questions (many of them with dirty tricks) put to you by Russian journalists, who are to such or such degree bearers of the imperial attitude to the peoples of the former Soviet republics: �Kazakstan will never more by a �younger brother� to anybody�, the phrase pronounced with dignity and resolution, caused the admiration of not the Kazaks alone, but also the Russians� as well as the admiration of the representatives of the other ethnic groups of Kazakstan. At that time I was yet happy that my country is headed by someone who is armed not only by the knowledge of the modern society, but also so much excellently mastering both Kazak and Russian that we, my husband and I, have always called each other to the TV set to enjoy together your admirable speech, whether in Russian or in Kazak � you are equally fluent not only in these two languages at the lexical, grammatical and stylistic level, but you are also a narrator and even an actor of genius � nobody can like you keep a pause, cast particular look or give a necessary modulation to the voice � the nature and your parents, beyond all doubt, have created a child that is exclusively gifted and marked with a pre-destination of the fate. After OMIR-OZEN broadcast dedicated to you we got even stronger convinced that you are worth of great respect and even of admiration.
The words �yet� are present in my letter not by chance.
We could digest... the play in the Parliament ... for we are ... who have always trusted you and found justifications for you
Quite recently, at the outcome of an intense internal struggle, I have taken your portrait off the wall. That portrait had always accompanied me as a symbol of my confidence in you as our Head of State. Foreigners were always astonished at seeing your portrait in my study; they were astonished at the attitude of a simple citizen, not a public servant, to her president. I was proud of the fact that not the Americans alone put their right hand upon the heart at hearing the anthem of America. I took the portrait off� This gesture is not evidence to my definite disenchantment in you; there were joy and disenchantment, triumph and vexation, pride and offence for you�
The amendments-and-additions-to-constitution play in the Parliament, the request that you be a candidate for presidency �we could digest all these, for we are citizens with paternalist mentality who have always trusted you and found justifications for you � the situation is hopelessly bad, the crisis is pressing without mercy, it is dreadfully difficult to keep the tenge rate at a decent level, the production is still recessing, the people is rolling down to destitution, due to which the opposition � pensioners and communists � are more and more active � we have to hurry up, otherwise someone else will come to power and unpredictable thing will start: civil war, etc. We do not want the famine, but, first of all, we want to live without war.
When the presidency nomination play began you did one thing I would never expect from you: you got frightened
The foreigners who have made investments (the amount of which is usually exaggerated, but that is comprehensible too) guaranteed by you, they also want to work under the conditions of stability, and, preferably, with the lowest risk. In this way, everybody sees in your course and in your program a guarantor of stability, first of all. And we, all of us, understand that you are not an ideal, especially your economic policy isn�t, the privatisation called to the point �prikhvatizatsia� (�grabbing�) by the people is worth a lot! Or the infernal pension reform! But such are the costs of progress of countries that are on the �way of development�. I am cheesed-off with the Soviet-style communism as against my mother who is in a nostalgic mood. One thing is clear: there is no alternative to you under the present conjuncture and under the given disposition of political forces in the state. When the presidency nomination play began you did one thing I would never expect from you: you got frightened.
A great deal of people � much more than you think � think over what is taking place in the Republic. A great deal of people are aware not only of the fact that you place �world-eighth in terms of personal wealth�, but also of the fact that your failing �rival� A.M.Kazhegeldin while at helm made not simple finance, but weeler-dealer finance to his personal benefit though to the detriment of us, the taxpayers. The fact that this was not proclaimed from every housetop does not mean that nobody knows that. Yet, counting money in somebody else�s pockets is neither easy nor gratifying. My President, you did not believe us, who believed in you with all the above reserves, you did not believe people who would not for the world vote for nobody but for you. Soviet-fashion and Soviet-stuff collective letters entreating you to become our President, the compulsion of parents in schools to sign in your favour � these are not worth a man like you. I took off the portrait when Gani Kasymov walked onto the stage. Gani Kasymov is a rather ordinary person; any other man in his place, if promised a pardon for his customs pranks as a reward for �actor�s partnership�, would have displayed wonders of actor abilities, and he even could not throw the vase properly.
I feel shame at you, I feel shame at your advisers who have invented this farcical play and have chosen a wrong candidate to act in particular. I read newspapers and do not see much of things happening around me. But the contingent of Gani Kasymov, shoppers choking at exaction, poor sick children and old people talk about different categories (food, cloths, money for medical treatment), and the KTK is publicly humiliating them not to yours but Gani Kasyov�s pleasure. I am saying that because I can suppose that in the euphoria of a �people�s popularity� he really may think that he deserves to be the President. If anyone like him is elected President, I will immediately leave the country, however, I have nothing more valuable to date than my Motherland (my parents, children, job, nature � are my Motherland). Everything that has happened needs to be thought over � you, having participated personally in such ignominious actions, have decreased your rating considerably. And the last events associated with your name, the appeal of the President to the Supreme Court to �let off� Mr. A. Kazhegeldin, were unprecedented and discreditable.
An acquaintance of mine, a person welcoming your reforms, having nothing to do with communists ever, told me that he would vote for�
S. Abdildin!
You have showed that a public establishment may compromise if a very important person is applying. It makes no sense that the answer was negative, as it was expected, for this a spectacle too, which had to testify to the democracy in this country. But, in fact it showed that the Law depended on the first person at power. I am sure that if you had proposed to let A. Kazhegeldin participate in the electioneering, the said instance would not have speculated even for a second. These events are just dreadful. The economic decay in this country is less dreadful for the state by its further consequences. These events can lead to unordinary decisions of those who are mostly on your side. An acquaintance of mine, a person welcoming your reforms, having nothing to do with communists ever, told me that he would vote for�S. Abdildin!
I have come to a conclusion that you do not have a sufficient information on the situation in the country (a freedom must be given to independent mass media),
Your councillors � not the image-makers alone, but also strategists and tacticians � receive their salary for nothing (other people should be found, who have no �small man�� complexes and who will have no fear in telling you the truth, though bitter), and you personally got the fear that is invariably generated by unlimited power (regardless of the ways and methods of its achievement).
My President, you are not a tsar, not a god, though they write it in mass media that you are almost a messiah of him, you are a human and your strength is that we, the Kazakstani, we understand that �nothing of what is human is strange to you�. You also may make mistakes and err, including for reasons that do not depend on you. It is not too late to set in your favour not the close �electorate�, but the hundreds of thousands of citizens of the state wherein you work as the President.
Takezhan Shalduarova.