Oil Good, Democracy Kaput

Kazakhstan makes the West and its idle chat about democracy and human rights look foolish. With a farcical intrigue, the Central Asian country just did away with elections.

First, the country’s 70-year-old president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, vetoed the results of a term-extension referendum; then he drummed up a people’s initiative of over 5 million votes, empowering him to remain in power until the year 2020; and finally, he forced a constitutional change through parliament, making that initiative equal to a referendum.

This autocrat of the steppes, whose nation possesses huge oil and natural gas reserves, is being forced by his own people to rule for life. Now if that isn’t true democracy, what is?

And all this took place shortly after Kazakhstan held a one-year rotating chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and put together a pompous summit meeting in Astana.

It was the United States and the European Union (and Germany in particular) that had declared this would jump-start democratic reforms in the Central Asian nation. The only thing it actually did was to enrich the Kazakh ruler and the cult of personality that surrounds him.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who obediently visited Nazarbayev in December, showed just exactly what the West deemed important in relations with Kazakhstan: oil, gas and the country’s geopolitical proximity to Afghanistan.

The pretended indignation over the phony Kazakh referendum now expressed by the United States and Germany is nothing but hot air; Kazakhstan supplies both the desired raw materials as well as a northern supply route for the Afghan war.

And a far worse despot than Nazarbayev will darken Europe’s door as early as January 24, when Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, travels to Brussels.