Central Asia: After the strongmen

Turgun Syzdykov, a 68-year-old former farm mechanic, stood in front of a small crowd in the northern Kazakh city of Pavlodar last month and praised the president for the country's achievements. Outpourings of devotion for Nursultan Nazarbayev are not unusual in Kazakhstan, where he is known officially as "leader of the nation" and unofficially as "papa". What is more remarkable is that Mr Syzdykov himself was running for president.

With Mr Syzdykov and another little-known figure as opponents, Mr Nazarbayev won the recent elections with 97.7 per cent of the vote, extending his 25-year rule over Central Asia's largest economy and the world's top uranium producer. A month earlier, President Islam Karimov of neighbouring Uzbekistan won 90.4 per cent of votes in similarly uncompetitive elections.

"Elections are a game they all have to play," says Daniil Kislov, editor of the independent Fergana.ru news site. "It's theatre. Pure artifice."

But if the barely believable voting numbers are a pantomime, underlying it is a real drama. With every passing election, the question of who will succeed the two septuagenarian strongmen, each of whom has ruled his country since before the break-up of the Soviet Union, grows more urgent.

The answer will shape the future of a region delicately balanced between Russia, China, Afghanistan and Iran, which supplies more than half of China's gas imports and whose collective oil reserves are twice the size of Brazil's.

The prospect of a political transition is also a threat to stability: the existence of a large ethnic Russian minority has raised fears of a "Ukraine scenario" in Kazakhstan; in Uzbekistan, any loosening of Mr Karimov's hold on society could open the door to radical Islam.

"These presidents have done spectacularly well at maintaining stability and preserving their regimes," says a European diplomat. "If you take them away, what happens next?"

The question comes as Central Asia faces one of the greatest economic challenges in its post-Soviet history amid recession in Russia, falling energy prices and cooling growth in China. In Kazakhstan, which shares 4,250 miles of border with Russia, the rouble's drop has triggered a surge of imported Russian goods, hollowing out local industry and sparking criticism of the newly established Eurasian Economic Union with Russia, Belarus and Armenia.

"Local firms are suffering because who would buy cars in Astana when they could go to Russia?" says Agris Preimanis, chief Central Asia economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, who predicts the Kazakh central bank will allow further weakening of the currency - on the heels of a 19 per cent drop in February 2014.

Rakhat, a confectionery company, in March announced 286 lay-offs, citing increased competition from lower-cost Russian goods. ArcelorMittal's Kazakh unit, one of the country's top employers, said it would cut wages by a quarter, only to reverse the decision after pressure from unions and local government.

In Uzbekistan, the effect of the Russian downturn is being felt through the more than 2m migrant labourers - nearly a tenth of the total Uzbek population - who work in Russia and send money home.

According to Russian central bank data, remittances from Uzbek migrants in Russia fell 43 per cent in dollar terms in the final three months of last year from a year earlier. "Everyone is worried," says a businessman based in the capital Tashkent.

The prospect of a mass return of migrant workers from Russia or widespread lay-offs at home could threaten Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan's hard-won social stability. Kazakhstan's government, fearful of a repeat of bloody clashes between striking oil workers and police in 2011, is closely monitoring reports of unrest around the country.

This febrile economic and social backdrop would seem to be the worst possible environment for the first handover of power since independence. Erlan Idrissov, Kazakhstan's urbane foreign minister, says economic and political concerns were behind the government's decision to hold presidential elections a year earlier than scheduled.

"We believe the climax [of economic and political turbulence] is not yet reached," he told the Financial Times on the eve of the vote. "We are expecting some challenging times to come."

Nonetheless, there are growing signs that both countries are preparing for change at the top. Neither Mr Nazarbayev, 74, and a former steelworker, nor Mr Karimov, 77, is in entirely good health. Mr Karimov has disappeared from public view for weeks at a time, including during the run-up to March's elections. Officials say Mr Nazarbayev, while not obviously unwell, appears to be slowing down.

At Mr Nazarbayev's behest, the university in Astana that bears his name is researching a modern-day "elixir of life". "I read somewhere Nursultan Nazarbayev is doing something to promote his life to 200 years. If it happens I personally will be very happy!" says Mr Idrissov before adding: "This is a joke."

Even so, Mr Nazarbayev has begun talking in public about succession. "I've led Kazakhstan for many years already," he told a gathering of Kazakh women in March. "Maybe it's time to change the scenery, as they say in the theatre."

Dosym Satpayev, a Kazakh political scientist who heads the Almaty-based Risk Assessment Group, says last month's election may have been Mr Nazarbayev's last. "During this term, Nursultan Nazarbayev will organise the project of succession."

Central Asia's presidents are often criticised as authoritarian, corrupt and repressive. Nonetheless, the prospect of their departure fills many foreigners and locals alike with dread.

Succession is "the highest political risk issue" for foreign investors in Kazakhstan, says Livia Paggi, Central Asia and Caucasus analyst at risk consultancy GPW. "He has managed to hold the country together, and the real fear is what comes after Nazarbayev."

There is no precedent for a transfer of power in either Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan - both countries have had just one president since independence, making Nazarbayev and Karimov two of the world's longest-serving leaders.

Academics and officials point to several examples of power transitions in former Soviet countries as likely models. First, an inheritance of the presidency by a family member, as occurred in Azerbaijan in 2003, when an ailing Heydar Aliyev passed the presidency to his son, Ilham.

In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan there is no clear family heir to the presidency, and the expectation of an eventual handover of power has triggered a struggle for the presidents' loyalties among their children and families.

Even if the next president is not a relative, family is likely to play an important role in any succession, says Andrei Grozin, director for Central Asia at Moscow's CIS Institute. Both men "are concerned about their own security, the security of their families, and of their money", he says.

A second model of transition was demonstrated in Russia in 1999, when an ailing Boris Yeltsin publicly endorsed Vladimir Putin as his successor, who duly won the subsequent election.

Observers say a similar managed transition is likely to be the preferred option of Kazakhstan's president. "He will have a plan. He knows what the dangers of not having a plan are," says a long-time adviser to Mr Nazarbayev.

A growing consensus among executives and analysts holds that Mr Nazarbayev may step aside during the course of his current five-year term, passing the presidency on to a curator figure who would balance the interests of business and political elites as well as of Russia and China. One such figure is Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the speaker of the Senate and the constitutionally mandated successor should the president die or become incapacitated.

A third possible model for transition was demonstrated when Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan's egomaniacal dictator, died suddenly in December 2006. With no obvious succession plan, the country's political elites proposed Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, a little-known figure who was a dentist by profession, as a compromise candidate.

Such a backroom deal looks plausible in Uzbekistan, where Mr Karimov shows no signs of relinquishing power voluntarily. Observers expect a circle of three men to call the shots: Rustam Inoyatov, the head of the security services; Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the prime minister; and finance minister Rustam Azimov - seen as the most western-friendly of Mr Karimov's likely successors. "A few people will discuss among themselves and there will be a decision. Some elections will be held soon after, and the person who needs to, will win those elections," says Mr Kislov.

There is, however, a fourth possibility: unmanaged chaos.

Mr Putin last autumn threw Kazakhs into a panic when he took a question at a highly choreographed event. "Do we need to expect a Ukrainian scenario if Mr Nazarbayev leaves the post of president?" Mr Putin's answer, which implied that the existence of a Kazakh state was intrinsically linked to Mr Nazarbayev, did little to reassure. The "Ukrainian scenario" centres on Kazakhstan's Russian minority, which accounts for one-fifth of the country's population of 17m. If Mr Nazarbayev's successor were to take a nationalist turn, Kazakhs worry a newly expansionist Kremlin could intervene in northern Kazakhstan under the guise of protecting the Russian population. The head of one of Kazakhstan's largest companies warns that the Russian minority is "a potentially explosive thing if you don't handle it properly".

Mr Nazarbayev's response has been to propose reforms aimed at strengthening Kazakhstan's institutions and making the country less vulnerable to nationalist sentiments. Some analysts say he led Kazakhstan into the Eurasian Economic Union to prevent any future leader from pulling too far away from Russia.

"We do have concerns but I hope we will not be caught unprepared," says Mr Idrissov. "We have developed a number of measures to safeguard ourselves politically and economically."

A perhaps greater threat to the region comes from radical Islam, especially in Uzbekistan, the region's most populous country. Up to 4,000 Central Asians have travelled to Syria to fight with Isis, according to an International Crisis Group estimate. Religious organisations are tightly controlled in Uzbekistan, but that could change if clan warfare re-emerges after president Karimov's death, warns Alexei Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, a think-tank.

"The weaker clan can turn to Islam," he says. "For Uzbekistan the moment of transition is much more problematic because of Islam."

As one European diplomat with responsibility for the former Soviet region says: "My biggest fear is that Uzbekistan becomes the nextAfghanistan."

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