ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Voting was underway in
Kazakhstan Sunday for a referendum to overhaul the constitution after deadly
unrest in January ended the founding leader Nursultan Nazarbayev’s three-decade
grip on Central Asia’s richest country.
اضافة اعلان
The bloodshed — which grew out of peaceful protests
over a spike in car fuel prices — left more than 230 people dead and prompted
authorities to call in troops from a
Russia-led security bloc.
The drive for a “New Kazakhstan” in the wake of the
violence has come from the man that Nazarbayev hand-picked to replace him as
president in 2019, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. Tokayev, 69, describes the snap
referendum as a shift from “super-presidential” rule that will strengthen
parliament. But it is the absence of special privileges for 81-year-old
Nazarbayev that is the most eye-catching change to the constitution.
Prior to January’s crisis,
Tokayev was widely seen
as ruling in the shadow of Nazarbayev and his super-rich relatives. Even after
stepping down as president, Nazarbayev retained the constitutional title of
“Elbasy”, or “Leader of the Nation” — a role that afforded him influence over
policymaking regardless of his formal position. The new constitution does away
with that status.
Another amendment prevents relatives of the
president from holding government positions — a clear nod to the influence of
Nazarbayev’s family and in-laws, who lost powerful positions in the aftermath
of the violence.
‘Never any justice’
Polling stations in the
largest city Almaty saw a slow trickle of voters in cloudless, breezy summer
conditions.
Ayan, an 18-year-old student voting for the first
time, said he welcomed the former president’s removal from the basic law. “He
has his place is in our history textbooks, but all citizens should be equal in
the constitution,” he said, after casting his vote at his university, where a
small group of activists protested for the release of political prisoners and
against the vote.
In the capital
Nur-Sultan, named for Nazarbayev, a
46-year-old businessman called Bolat told AFP that he did not intend to
vote. “It’s a formality to cement the
position of the current leadership. The result will be the same,” he said. The
constitution is almost certain to pass, and there has been no visible “no”
campaign.
Leadership struggle
Kazakhstan’s New Year crisis
remains poorly understood, with a days-long internet shutdown at the peak of
the unrest helping to further obscure the events. Protests stirred in the
oil-producing west over a New Year fuel price hike, but it was Almaty — 2,000
kilometers away — that became the epicenter of armed clashes, looting and
arson. Nur-Sultan, which was called Astana prior to 2019, remained largely
untouched.
Tokayev blamed the
violence on “terrorists” seeking to seize power and issued a “shoot-to-kill”
order to Kazakh troops. But the arrest on treason charges of a Nazarbayev ally
who served as national security chief at the time fueled speculation that a
leadership struggle was at the heart of the violence. After stability was
restored, Tokayev criticized Nazarbayev for allowing inequality to fester,
while crediting his mentor’s state-building achievements.
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