Kazakh President Chimes in on ‘Present’ Controversy – The Diplomat

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has weighed in on the newest iteration of an outdated canard: That Kazakhstan, earlier than the Soviet Union, was nothing near a state. In a state-run newspaper this week, days earlier than the nation’s parliamentary elections, Tokayev wrote underneath the headline “Independence — A Most Treasured Factor” that “no one from outdoors gave Kazakhs this huge territory as a present.”

In December, a pair of Russian politicians stirred the proverbial pot. As RFE/RL’s Bruce Pannier defined final month, the incident started with December 10 feedback from Vyacheslav Nikonov, a Duma deputy, on a TV program devoted to the signing of the Belovezha Accords on December 8, 1991. The accords successfully dissolved the Soviet Union, changing it with the Commonwealth of Unbiased States. (Enjoyable reality: Kazakhstan was the final of the USSR’s republics to declare independence; it did so on December 16, 1991). 

Nikonov commented that when the Soviet Union was created in 1917, “Kazakhstan merely didn’t exist as a rustic, its northern territories had been mainly uninhabited,” and that areas “additional down south [in present-day Kazakhstan], many of the territories had been mainly given as a present to [the Kazakhs] by the Soviet Union, by Russia.”

On December 12, the Kazakh Ministry of Overseas Affairs summoned the Russian cost d’affaires to a gathering with Deputy Overseas Minister Marat Syzdykov. Press readouts say that Syzdykov “expressed bewilderment” about Nikonov’s feedback, handed over a word, and urged the Russian aspect to take measures to forestall such statements that might “trigger critical harm” to bilateral relations.

The subsequent day one other Duma deputy, Yevgeny Fedorov, on a YouTube program agreed with Nikonov’s feedback. Fedorov stated Kazakhstan was a “huge reward from Russia.”

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“It’s one factor {that a} form Russian particular person gave you a present and also you admire it and are mates with him. However one other factor is if you happen to spit on him, as on this case the Kazakh Overseas Ministry did [on Russia],” he added, referencing the Kazakh ministry’s summoning of the cost d’affaires. 

This explicit pot was most dramatically boiled by President Vladimir Putin in 2014 when he remarked that “the Kazakhs by no means had any statehood” earlier than the collapse of the Soviet union in 1991. On the time he was additionally attempting to heap reward on Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, whom he credited with creating “a state in a territory that had by no means had a state earlier than.” The backhanded praise, aired amid the continuing Ukraine disaster, stung Kazakh satisfaction and anxious some that Russia may disrespect Kazakhstan’s sovereignty in an identical vein.

As for the newest feedback, RFE/RL reported that “Some Kazakh opposition activists have claimed the Russian lawmakers made the remarks to spice up help for the ruling Nur Otan get together’s nationwide unity platform forward of parliamentary elections scheduled for January 10.” Whether or not that’s true or not might be unknowable, however whether or not Nikonov and Fedorov are in on such a scheme or not “unity” is actually a core political theme in Kazakhstan. 

Unity has been one of many central themes of Kazakhstan’s post-1991 politics. It is a thread woven throughout the states of Central Asia, which after the collapse of the Soviet Union moved in several however parallel methods to determine sovereignty and management over their all of the sudden individually impartial territories and peoples. A strict definition of unity can be a helpful excuse for limiting liberties by vilifying these seen as appearing in opposition to the pursuits of unity — whether or not precise separatists or simply nascent political opposition. 

It’s no shock that in his article, Tokayev underscored that political reform is an extended course of (critics would say the tempo is glacial): “We should do that fastidiously and step by step, with out shaking the foundations of the nation or undermining its prosperity and unity.” 

There may be, after all, as Pannier outlined final month, loads of legitimate suspicion about Russian motives, notably after the annexation of Crimea, enflamed additional by a sequence of nationalists from Russia who’ve steered seizing Kazakh territory or in any other case disparaged the state’s independence. Land is a persistently delicate and explosive subject in Kazakhstan, as demonstrated by the waves of protests in 2016 touched off by rumors that reforms within the land code had been merely cowl for promoting off Kazakh land to the Chinese language.

Embedded additionally on this combine are ignorant, racist, and (dare I say it) colonial notions concerning the Kazakh steppe as some huge, clean, empty canvas, and its folks as wandering aimlessly throughout a barren panorama till the civilizing forces of Imperial Russia, and later the Soviet Union, arrived with modernity in hand. None of that’s so easy or so true, any educated trendy historian will inform you, however such beliefs are baked into stereotypes about not simply Kazakhstan, however Central Asia extra broadly. (And related constructs bedevil varied communities all over the world — such because the American fantasy that the North American continent was basically empty, untouched, and uncivilized when the pilgrims landed).

However on the finish of every episode of traded insults and diplomatic notes over Kazakh sovereignty one factor is obvious: Regardless of how offensive some discover such feedback, Kazakh-Russian bilateral relations stay sturdy and heading in the right direction. This makes observing the dance of offense and satisfaction — a swirl of politics, ignorance, and nationalism — all of the extra fascinating.