West to weigh Kazakhstan bid, stalled progress

ALMATY, Kazakhstan

A debate on how to nudge authoritarian regimes onto the path toward democracy that has played out on both sides of the Atlantic for three years is approaching its climax, with the American vision of exclusion expected to trump Europe’s preference for inclusion.

The choice is whether to approve Kazakhstan’s bid to lead for a year the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) — the world’s largest organization for monitoring elections and human rights — despite the Central Asian’s country’s failure to uphold the democratic standards the OSCE stands for.

At stake, Western diplomats say, is whether the move will motivate President Nursultan Nazarbayev to implement the democratic reforms that he has been promising for a decade in order to achieve the international legitimacy he has vigorously pursued — or whether he will travel further down the road toward outright dictatorship.

Today in Brussels, foreign ministers from the United States, Canada, Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union — the 56 members of the OSCE — will gather as they do every year to decide which country will lead the organization in two years.

The OSCE was created in 1975 under a bargain in which Russia agreed to introduce democratic reforms and respect human rights, and the West agreed to respect the Warsaw Pact’s borders.

In fact, those borders crumbled with the Berlin Wall, and today, partly because of the OSCE’s work, nearly all OSCE members meet basic democratic standards. Most of the countries that have not are in Central Asia.

The process of selecting the country that will lead the group for a year is normally done discreetly and requires a consensus. The job, which carries some prestige, is taxing for all but the largest foreign ministries, and there is rarely open competition.

But breaking with this tradition, Kazakhstan, has been campaigning loudly since 2003 to chair the group in 2009, which would make it the first chairman of the group from a former Soviet country.

That would not be a problem if Kazakhstan followed the democratic principles that Mr. Nazarbayev promised to follow in 1992, when the nation joined the OSCE.

Human rights activists, opposition leaders and Western diplomats agree that the trend since the start of the current decade has been gradually toward less democracy and more repression.

Kazakhstan’s foreign ministry spokesmen declined to comment.

Parliamentary elections in 2004 led to a near shutout of the opposition and a presidential election in 2005 gave Mr. Nazarbayev, 67, an eyebrow-raising 92 percent of the vote. Both elections were ruled unfair by the OSCE.

In the last year or so, two prominent opposition figures have been killed on what is widely thought to be orders from high in the government.

“This is real repression,” said Bulat Abilov, a former member of Parliament and opposition leader who is facing up to 10 years in prison on charges that many independent observers think were trumped up.

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