By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- For years, Rakhat Aliyev and his wife, Dariga Nazarbayeva, were the power couple of Kazakhstan, building empires in media, banking and politics under the protective wing of Papa -- President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Rakhat, as everyone here calls him, was a feared mandarin-mogul, widely viewed as the scheming but untouchable son-in-law. Dariga, the eldest of the president's three daughters, was a rising power in parliament, a mezzo-soprano who set aside operatic ambitions for the cut and thrust of politicking.
Things have changed quickly in this energy-rich nation on the Central Asian steppe, where the United States, Russia and China jockey for influence and access to oil and gas.
Aliyev, 45, is now in exile in Vienna fighting a Kazakh extradition request on charges of kidnapping and other crimes. Nazarbayeva, 44, who recently divorced Aliyev, has retreated into silence and been summarily removed as a candidate for reelection to parliament in upcoming elections.
In the clannish, conspiratorial world of Kazakh politics, it is difficult to sort through the murk of allegations and counter-allegations that led to this crackup. The government says Aliyev morphed into a kidnapping thug and extortionist; he denies that and says his real offense was to tell his father-in-law that he planned to challenge him for the presidency.
According to Kazakh politicians and analysts, a single object lesson has emerged from the family debris: Kazakhstan has one, and only one, center of power, the 67-year-old Nazarbayev. "Everything in this country depends on the decision of one person, the president," said Amirzhan Kossanov, an opposition leader. "Rakhat forgot that, and now he pays the price."
The case has caused deep embarrassment for the government of Nazarbayev, a former Communist Party boss who has been in power since shortly before Kazakhstan became an independent nation with the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. He is trying to shed an image of authoritarianism and win for Kazakhstan the prestige of chairing for a year the 56-country Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The unraveling of the first family has many beginnings. The most recent dates to Jan. 18, when the government contends that Aliyev kidnapped two senior executives of Nurbank, one of Kazakhstan's leading banks. Aliyev was a shareholder at the institution, as was his father; his 22-year-old son was on the bank's board.
Abilmazhen Gilimov, then the bank's chairman, and Zholdas Timraliyev, his deputy, were allegedly tricked into getting into a car, then taken to a sauna outside Almaty, Kazakhstan's commercial capital. Gilimov later alleged that Aliyev then came to the two men and attempted to intimidate them into signing over a prized building in the city to his control.
"I can do whatever I want in this country," boasted Aliyev, according to a statement Gilimov gave to police. "Now we'll put a stamp in your passports saying that you crossed the border and that you are flying to Kiev and we'll bury you here. And then let the police and your relatives look for you in Ukraine for the rest of their lives -- they will never find you!"
The two were released after 24 hours when, Gilimov said, he managed to make a cellphone call to his family, leading a guard to let them go. Gilimov's deputy later disappeared.
"This is a fabricated criminal case," Aliyev said in a telephone interview from Vienna.
Aliyev, a physician by training, married Nazarbayeva 25 years ago. Together they rose in the business and political worlds. Nazarbayeva held a seat in parliament, ran a pro-government political party and headed a media company and the Kazakh Congress of Journalists. Aliyev developed holdings in banking and media and variously served as deputy head of the National Security Committee, the successor to the KGB; head of the Financial Police; and deputy foreign minister.
Charges of hardball tactics and corruption have swirled around Aliyev for years, as they have with other parts of the Kazakh elite, including the president himself. In a pending corruption trial in New York, an American businessman is accused of bribing senior Kazakh officials, including Nazarbayev, to secure oil rights in the country. Nazarbayev, who was not charged in the case, described the allegations as a "setup."
For years, Kazakh analysts had been seeing signs of tension between the couple and the presidential father. In 2001, rumors circulated that Aliyev had created a parallel structure inside the National Security Committee and was planning a coup.
One of the people who presented evidence to the president about this was Altynbek Sarsenbayev, according to former deputy prime minister Oraz Zhandosov. In an interview, Zhandosov, now an opposition leader, said Sarsenbayev told him that on hearing about his son-in-law's machinations, Nazarbayev fell to his knees in distress. "I can't trust anyone," said the president, according to Zhandosov's account.
Later that year, Aliyev was sent to Vienna as ambassador to Austria. This was depicted as a prize appointment, but many people saw it as banishment. Allegations of an attempted coup have never been confirmed and Aliyev denies any such plan. "That's dogma," he said. "I wanted to replace the old KGB with a new reformed special service."
The couple remained controversial. Sarsenbayev, who became leader of the opposition, was murdered in February 2006 and Aliyev and his wife began saying publicly that the National Security Committee, controlled by men loyal to the president, was involved. The chief of staff of the chairman of the Kazakh Senate was eventually convicted of organizing the murder.
With the word that the Nurbank executives had been kidnapped, opposition politicians and newspapers began campaigning for a formal investigation of claims that Aliyev was involved.
Three weeks after the alleged abduction, Aliyev was dispatched to his second Austrian posting.
On May 23, Kazakhstan's Interior Ministry unexpectedly announced it was charging Aliyev and several associates with abduction, assault and running a criminal enterprise. Bagdat Kozhakhmetov, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said in an interview that there might have been some hesitance to act earlier because of Aliyev's position. But he said the investigation didn't get off the ground quickly because elements in the Financial Police, which were loyal to Aliyev following his heading of the service in the 1990s, hid critical evidence from the Interior Ministry.
"Our president said, 'I ask you to do a very detailed, careful investigation without paying attention to the fact that he is my relative,' " Kozhakhmetov said. "We have all evidence and facts that Aliyev managed these operations."
In the interview, Aliyev said the charges stemmed from meetings with the president in which Aliyev expressed concerns about Kazakhstan's lack of democratic development and stated his ambition to succeed his father-in-law in 2012, when the president's term would end.
At the time, the pro-presidential party that controls Kazakhstan's parliament was formulating a constitutional rewrite that would effectively allow Nazarbayev to serve indefinitely. Aliyev said the changes amounted to the "establishment of a monarchy in Kazakhstan and several times I tried to talk him out of this."
Aliyev's claim of concern for democratic values is greeted with deep skepticism in Kazakhstan. "Complete nonsense" is how Zhandosov, the opposition leader, described it. A group of business leaders released a statement saying that "many of us have experienced his methods of doing business and using law enforcement agencies to apply political pressure for his own ends."
"I was part of the system," Aliyev said in the interview, noting that he did not engender much "trust or love" as head of the tax police. "But I never broke the law."
Last month, divorce papers were slipped under the front gate of Aliyev's Vienna home in the middle of the night. Aliyev said his wife, with whom he has three children, was "under pressure" to divorce him. "They destroyed my family," he said.
Nazarbayeva, contacted through a former colleague in her media company, declined to be interviewed, as did her father.
She too appears to be suffering from her father's wrath. Media outlets in Kazakhstan that she and her former husband control were suspended from operating in May, then reopened under new management. She is no longer on the ticket for reelection.
Zhandosov predicted that Nazarbayeva will reemerge in a couple of years after repenting for her reputed sins. In the meantime, a second presidential daughter, Dinara, and a second fabulously wealthy son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, appear newly ascendant in the family pecking order.
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