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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Kazakstan
Index
From the onset of independence, President Nazarbayev sought
international support to secure a place for Kazakstan in the world
community, playing the role of bridge between East and West, between
Europe and Asia.
Almost immediately upon its declaration of independence, the republic
gained a seat in the United Nations, membership in the CSCE, and a seat on
the coordinating council of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO--see Glossary). The United States and other nations also gave
Kazakstan quick recognition, opening embassies in Almaty and receiving
Kazakstani ambassadors in return. Its status as an apparent nuclear power
got Kazakstan off to a fast start in international diplomacy. President
Nazarbayev became a signatory to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty
(START) and its so-called Lisbon Protocol by which Belarus, Kazakstan, and
Ukraine pledged to eliminate nuclear weapons in the 1990s. In addition,
Nazarbayev was able to negotiate US$1.2 billion in prepayment by the
United States against sale of the enriched uranium contained in
Kazakstan's warheads, as well as another US$311 million for maintenance
and conversion of existing missile silos. Equally important was that the
nuclear warheads prompted the United States to become a party to
negotiations concerning the warheads between Kazakstan and Russia. The
United States eventually became a guarantor of the agreement reached by
the two countries. In May 1995, the last nuclear warhead in Kazakstan was
destroyed at Semey, completing the program of removal and destruction of
the entire former Soviet arsenal and achieving the republic's goal of
being "nuclear free."
Under the leadership of Nazarbayev, who maintained personal control of
foreign policy, Kazakstan eagerly courted Western investment. Although
foreign aid, most of it from Western nations, began as a trickle,
significant amounts were received by 1994. In practice, however,
Nazarbayev was ambivalent about moving too fully into a Western orbit.
Turkey
In the period shortly after independence, policy makers often discussed
following the "Turkish model," emulating Turkey in incorporating
a Muslim cultural heritage into a secular, Europeanized state. Turkey's
president Turgut Özal made a state visit to Kazakstan in March 1991
and hosted a return visit by Nazarbayev later the same year. Soon
afterward Nazarbayev began to echo Turkish talk of turning Kazakstan into
a bridge between Muslim East and Christian West. In practice, however, the
Turks proved to be more culturally dissimilar than the Kazakstanis had
imagined; more important, Turkey's own economic problems meant that most
promises of aid and investment remained mostly just statements of
intentions.
China
As Turkey proved itself a disappointment, President Nazarbayev began to
speak with increasing enthusiasm about the Asian economic "tigers"
such as Singapore, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), and Taiwan. Among
the republic's first foreign economic advisers were Chan Young Bang, a
Korean American with close ties to South Korea's major industrial
families, and Singapore's former prime minister, Li Kwan Yew.
The most compelling model, however, was provided by China, which
quickly had become Kazakstan's largest non-CIS trading partner. The
Kazakstani leadership found the Chinese combination of rigid social
control and private-sector prosperity an attractive one. China also
represented a vast market and appeared quite able to supply the food,
medicine, and consumer goods most desired by the Kazakstani market.
However, the relationship with China has been a prickly one.
Kazakstan's fears of Chinese domination remain from the Soviet era and
from the Kazaks' earlier nomadic history. A large number of Kazaks and
other Muslims live in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China, just
over the border. Direct rail and road links have been opened to Ürümqi
in Xinjiang, and Chinese traders in Kazakstan are prominent in the
thriving barter between the two nations. However, China is plainly nervous
about any contact that would encourage separatist or nationalist
sentiments among its own "captive peoples." For its part,
Kazakstan has expressed unease about the large numbers of Chinese who
began buying property and settling in the republic after the end of Soviet
rule. Kazakstan also has reacted angrily but without effect to Chinese
nuclear tests at Lob Nor, China's main testing site, located within 300
kilometers of the common border.
The Middle East
Nazarbayev was hesitant to court investment from the Middle East,
despite high levels of Turkish and Iranian commercial activity in Central
Asia. Unlike the other Central Asian republics, Kazakstan initially
accepted only observer status in the Muslim-dominated ECO, largely out of
concern not to appear too "Muslim" itself. Over time, however,
the president moved from being a professed atheist to proudly proclaiming
his Muslim heritage. He has encouraged assistance from Iran in developing
transportation links, from Oman in building oil pipelines, from Egypt in
building mosques, and from Saudi Arabia in developing a national banking
system.
Russia and the CIS
Most of Kazakstan's foreign policy has, not unnaturally, focused on the
other former Soviet republics and, particularly, on the potential
territorial ambitions of Russia. Since Gorbachev's proposal for a modified
continuation of the Soviet Union in late 1991, Kazakstan has supported
arrangements with Russia that guarantee the republic's sovereignty and
independence, including a stronger and institutionally complex CIS.
As the CIS failed to develop a strong institutional framework,
Nazarbayev attempted to achieve the same end in another way, proposing the
creation of a Euro-Asian Union that would subordinate the economic,
defense, and foreign policies of individual member states to decisions
made by a council of presidents, an elective joint parliament, and joint
councils of defense and other ministries. Citizens of member nations would
hold union citizenship, essentially reducing the independence of the
individual member republics to something like their Soviet-era status. The
proposal, however, met with little enthusiasm, especially from Russia,
whose support was crucial to the plan's success.
Nazarbayev pursued bilateral trade and security agreements with each of
the former republics and in September 1992 unsuccessfully attempted to
have Kazakstan broker a cease-fire between Armenia and Azerbaijan that
also would set a precedent for settling interrepublic and interregional
strife in the former republics. Nazarbayev also participated in the fitful
efforts of the five Central Asian leaders to create some sort of regional
entity; the most promising of these was a free-trade zone established in
1994 among Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakstan (see Foreign Trade, ch.
2).
Kazakstan also has contributed to efforts by Russia and Uzbekistan to
end the civil war in Tajikistan. Kazakstani troops were part of a joint
CIS force dispatched to protect military objectives in and around the
Tajikistan's capital, Dushanbe. Although Nazarbayev and Uzbekistan's
President Islam Karimov warned in 1995 that their countries soon would
consider withdrawal if peace talks made no progress, the multinational CIS
force remained in place in early 1996.
Data as of March 1996
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