Gwynne Dyer on Cheney and Russia
IMBIERAS
Useful Hypocrisy?
By Gwynne Dyer
Had US Vice-President Dick Cheney declared during his visit to
Kazakhstan last weekend that "in many areas of civil society -- from
religion and the news media to advocacy groups and political parties --
the
government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of the
people," human rights groups would have cheered. But he said that in
Russia, a few days earlier. What he told Kazakhstan's dictator,
Nursultan
Nazarbayev, was that "all Americans are tremendously impressed with the
progress that you've made in Kazakhstan in the last 15 years.
Kazakhstan
has become a good friend and strategic partner of the United States."
Admiration for Kazakhstan's progress is not actually a leading
conversational topic in the United States. The man whom the Financial
Times
recently and memorably described as "the Bush administration's Lord
Voldemort" was merely engaging in a little useful hypocrisy, or so he
imagined. The question is whether it really is useful.
Cheney's blunt condemnation of the Russian government's
behaviour
certainly roused a vehement reaction in Russia. President Vladimir
Putin's
drift towards a "soft dictatorship" has the support of most Russians,
who
are still smarting from the anarchy, corruption and poverty of the
first
post-Communist decade under Boris Yeltsin. Now the anarchy has been
suppressed, the corruption is better hidden, and the economy is
growing, so
the Russian media's bitter response to Cheney's strictures really did
match
popular attitudes.
Under a headline reading "Enemy at the Gate", the Moscow
business
daily Kommersant, normally a critic of the Kremlin, said that "the Cold
War
has restarted, only now the front line has shifted." "Komsomolskaya
Pravda" asked: "What is Russia to do? Evidently it needs to strengthen
links with Belarus and Central Asia. And get friendly with China, to
counter-balance this Western might." Over-reactions, of course --
there is
no new Cold War -- but Cheney's criticisms would have been more
credible
and less offensive if he were not so obviously applying a double
standard.
Kazakhstan is expected to become one of the world's top ten oil
producers in the next decade. It is a close ally of the United States,
even sending a small contingent of Kazakh troops to Iraq. But
Kazakhstan
is not a democracy (though it observes all the forms), and Nursultan
Nazarbayev is not a democrat.
When Dick Cheney became Secretary of Defence in the
administration
of the elder George Bush in 1989, Nursultan Nazarbayev was already the
First Secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party. By 1990 he was president
of
the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and a member of the Soviet
politburo
in Moscow. And by the end of 1991 he was the president of an
independent
Kazakhstan and a keen advocate of the free market, as if his Communist
past
had been merely an adolescent foible.
Fifteen years and three "elections" later, Nazarbayev is still
president of Kazakhstan, re-elected only last December with a 91
percent
majority in a vote that foreign observers condemned as fraudulent. His
daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva, who controls the Khabar media conglomerate
and
leads the "opposition" Asar party, is widely expected to take power
when
his current seven-year term expires in 2010. ("I can't swear it will
never
happen." she says coyly.)
Nazarbayev's regime does not boil people in oil like that of
his
neighbour in Uzbekistan, President Islam Karimov (who was First
Secretary
of the Uzbekistan Communist Party in 1989). It is not as
megalomaniacal as
the regime of President-for-Life Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan,
who
has renamed the month of January after himself, April after his mother
and
May after his father. (Niyazov became First Secretary of the
Turkmenistan Communist Party in 1985.)
Among the six 'Stans, Nazarbayev's Kazakhstan is only the
third- or
fourth-worst dictatorship, but it is a far less democratic and tolerant
society than Putin's Russia. So why did Dick Cheney castigate Russia's
imperfect democracy while saying not a word about Kazakhstan's
shameless
travesty of the democratic system? Oil, obviously, but how could he be
so
ignorant of Nazarbayev's priorities?
Senior oil company executives know that you sometimes have to
kiss
the nether regions of local potentates in order to make the deals
happen,
but they generally only deliver the osculation when it seems fairly
certain
that the deal will really go through as a result. This one won't.
What Cheney wants out of Nazarbayev is commitment to pipelines
that
will move Kazakh oil and gas to Europe by routes that do not cross
Russia
-- which means pipelines under the Caspian Sea. But what Nazarbayev
wants
is a solid American offer that he can take to the Russians so that he
can
demand a higher price for his gas exports to them through the existing
pipelines. He will also take it to the Chinese and suggest that they
build
pipelines to bring his oil and gas to China. He has been playing the
game
at least as long as Cheney, and he holds a better hand. Nursultan
Nazarbayev
is holding out for the best price, and the winning bid is unlikely to
come from
the United States.
_____________________________
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries.
vkar...@yahoo.com
He may not be a democrat by Russian standards, but he sure is a
democrat by American standards. If you compare it with America's
closest allies - Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Azernbaijan, Yemen, Gerogia,
etc. - Kazakhstan stands out as a bastion of freedom and democracy.
Even compared to USA itself, Kazakhstan doesn't torture people in
prisons, it doesn't imprison journalists, it doesn't kidnap legitimate
foreign leaders, it doesn't record all telephone calls of its citizens,
it doesn't violtate UN Charter forbidding aggresssion, and it doesn't
bomb TV stations and Chinese Embassies.
Not a bad article at all. Thanks, Gintas.