Before Elections, Kazakhstan Does a Little Campaigning

On a hunting trip to Zambia, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) bagged a cape buffalo. He missed the crossfire of a House debate on Iraq troop withdrawals. (By Mary Schwalm -- Associated Press)

If you're an ex-commie dictator looking to burnish your image, it's probably a good thing to make extra sure that the international community thinks your country's parliamentary elections next month are fairly run.

It surely makes sense that Nursultan Nazarbayev, ruler of oil- and gas-rich Kazakhstan since just before it broke from the Soviet Union in 1991, would want to get the "right" people on the monitoring group, which is being run by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

So the country's newly arrived envoy here, Erlan Idrissov, sent out a letter about a week ago to several hundred of "our friends" in Washington asking them to sign up to be on the monitoring team. (The United States gets to appoint 20 percent of the OSCE observers.) Kazakhstan, which is hoping to chair the OSCE in 2009, "believes it would be ideal" if the monitoring team "consists of experienced and knowledgeable representatives capable of making broad-based, well-balanced and forward-looking observations," Idrissov wrote. No hard-line human rights folks?

"Needless to say that a personal knowledge of Kazakhstan and understanding of the challenges of building new institutions and political culture in a young society are important to be an objective observer," he said. "Having been told that you are such a person who does care about the sustained economic and political growth of Kazakhstan, I decided to write to you to ask" you to sign up.

But hurry, the deadline's today.

We think this is a neat move, but there are those who, predictably, think otherwise. "I've never heard of a country trying to stack an OSCE mission with 'friendly' election observers," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. "Kazakhstan is obviously more interested in manipulating the image of its elections than it is in actually improving them."

Not so, an embassy spokesman said -- there is no effort to stack the deck with pro-regime business or lobbyist types. In fact, the spokesman said, "we're avoiding them."

Did we mention the oil? The gas?

New Look for the NSC

---

James Jeffrey, former Army Ranger and Vietnam vet and former No. 2 in the embassy in Baghdad and now principal deputy assistant secretary of state (notably handling the Iran portfolio), is moving over to the White House National Security Council to be chief deputy, replacing J.D. Crouch.

Meanwhile, Judith A. Ansley, senior director for European matters, is going to be deputy national security adviser for regional affairs. This completes NSC chief Stephen Hadley's reshuffling of recent months, which has included bringing on Iraq czar Gen. William Lute.

The Iran portfolio probably will be picked up at State by Iraq coordinator David Satterfield and Jeffrey's deputies.