Yearbook 2007
Kazakhstan. According to
CountryAAH, Prime Minister Danial Akhmetov and the entire
government resigned in January. Karim Masimov was appointed
as new Prime Minister. Chinese and was expected to have
significance for the growing trade with China.
At the beginning of the year, 21 health workers were
brought to trial in the city of Tjimkent in the south
accused of having spread the virus through blood transfusion
through negligence. Over 120 children had been infected and
ten children had died. The defendants were found guilty.
Parliament voted in May for a constitutional amendment
that allows the president to stand for re-election
indefinitely. Then a power struggle within the Nazarbayev
family broke out in front of an open curtain. President
Nursultan Nazarbayev dismissed his son-in-law Rakhat Alijev
from the ambassador's post in Austria and ordered a criminal
investigation into the suspicion that Alijev was behind the
kidnapping of two leading bankers. In addition, a television
station and newspaper belonging to Aliyev and the
president's daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva were closed. Aliyev
accused the president of trying to silence him because he
planned to run for office. Aliyev applied for asylum in
Austria but was tried in K. in his absence.
In June, President Nazarbayev disbanded the parliament
and announced new elections until August so that a new
parliament could confirm the constitutional changes. The
president's daughter demanded divorce from Rakhat Aliyev in
an attempt to maintain his political influence. She was
nevertheless removed from the party leadership in the
presidential power party Nur Otan (the Fatherland) and was
not placed in an elective place before the parliamentary
elections.
The president's party received 88 percent of the vote and
took all 98 seats that were at stake in the parliamentary
elections (nine seats are elected). Thus, there was only one
party in Parliament's second chamber. According to the OSCE,
40 per cent of the polling stations observers lacked
transparency in the voting count. The largest opposition
party, the National Social Democratic Party, considered that
the election was dominated by cheating and criticized the
OSCE for not rejecting the election result but instead
saying that K. is moving in a democratic direction after
all.
During the year, 29 men and one woman were brought to
trial in Karaganda in central K. for radical Islamism. In
the closed trial, they were accused of ethnic and religious
hatred and of being part of the banned Islamic organization
Hezb ut-Tahir. Many of the defendants claimed innocence and
said that literature found in their homes had been placed
there.
In October, a couple of government-critical websites were
blocked, causing Internet users to condemn K. for abuse of
freedom of expression.
In December, President Nazarbayev in Moscow signed an
agreement to build a gas pipeline from K. via Turkmenistan
to Russia. The agreement was seen as a hardship for the EU
and the US, hoping for a lead through the Caspian Sea and
Turkey to the west.
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