Bahytzhamal Bekturganova
President of ASiP
ALMATY, Dec16
(Specially for the GLOBE)
Early elections scheduled for January 10, 1999 is the fact to have nominally come true. Let’s wait for its calendar affirmation. Mass city-dwellers are gradually losing interest to the event. Routine days full of different current concerns, pre-New Year cares are crawling. One rarely recalls the Parliament’s hasty decisions, the ex-premier’s failure to measure his strength with the Kazakhstani Leviathan. Everything is clear to everyone. It seems one should be the Communist Party’s leader to feed illusions of excessive expectations to get support of 70 percent of voters whose lives directly depend on the President’s personality.
It is of doubt that one will vote for the leader-dilettante in the conditions when any moment our “home” problems can get aggravated affected by the global and Russian crisis.
People well aware of hard times to fall upon Kazakhstani economy support Nazarbaev’s candidature.
Many expect political situation in the country after presidential elections will be far more “hot” than on their eve. Compared to this autumn, that of 1999 promises to be troubled. This in part is connected with the forthcoming parliamentary elections, new re-distribution of portfolios in the governmental cabinet, local elections. “Political instability zones” are rather to crop up around these issues.
The President will have to work in “tensed zones”. Efficiency of his reforms will require him to make unpopular and painful decisions. In this way he subjects himself to long-termed hazard: easy victory at the elections will bring him disappointment and displeasure of voters with aggravation of the situation in the country.
ALMATY, Dec 14 (AFP)
A candidate criticized for being a stooge of President Nursultan Nazarbayev lashed out Monday at the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for recommending that the Central Asian country postpone its presidential polls.
«We don’t go into someone else’s home with our own rules, and therefore we regard this as our problem,» Gani Kasymov said about the OSCE’s recommendation that Kazakhstan delay elections due on January 10 until preparations could be made to ensure the vote was fair and open.
Kazakhstan has moved its presidential polls forward by a year, a step which the OSCE says will boost Nazarbayev’s re-election chances by not giving his opponents much time to mount their campaigns.
Kasymov, who heads the state customs committee, has been attacked by the local press for not being a genuine opponent of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, but rather a fake candidate put in the race to make the elections appear democratic to outsiders.
During the campaign, Kasymov’s antics — he threw a vase of flowers at a journalist on live television and beat up a man outside a crowded Almaty bazaar in front of television cameramen — were widely thought to have been staged.
Observers further doubt Kasymov’s command of the Kazakh language.
Kasymov said his main criticism of Nazarbayev, who is tipped to win the election, is the president’s choice of government officials.
«All three governments let him (Nazarbayev) down, including the current one, and, more precisely, they deceived him about the real situation in the country,» he said.
The governments also were responsible for selling Kazakhstan’s strongest enterprises to foreign investors and leading the country to the edge of an economic abyss, he said.