THE KAZAKH TIGER IN CENTRAL ASIA

President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the leader of Kazakhstan since 1989, won the country’s Dec. 4 presidential election hands down. The Central Election Commission reported he got 91 percent of the votes. Gallup and International Republican Institute exit polling says he got only 83.2 percent. Either way, no Orange Revolution there.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and even Russian observers — altogether 1,600 of them — noted some isolated electoral violations. The government controlled access to state-run TV channels. But campaign clips from all candidates were aired regularly and opposition newspapers and Web sites were mostly uncensored.

There were five contenders for the office of the Kazakh presidency, including the former parliamentary speaker, Zharmakhan Tuyakbai, and Alikhan Baymenov, the former labor minister and a communist relic. They all complained of widespread electoral violations. It is possible that, as the Soviet habit goes, local officials inflated the vote to look good in the capital despite explicit instructions from above not to.

To put the Kazakh elections in perspective, it is important to note there were no democratic procedures there during the Russian czarist or the Soviet times. Seen in this light, the Kazakh elections were among most open in Central Asia.

What makes Kazakhstan unique are its real economic achievements, fueled by high oil prices. Kazakhstan today is as one of the more positive available examples of post-Soviet market development, including Western access to oil and gas resources, which Russia increasingly rejects.

Historically, Kazakhstan was populated by Turkic-speaking Muslim nomads who traced their origins to the Genghis Khan’s Mongols. In the 19th century, they were subjected to unmerciful colonization by Russian and Ukrainian peasants. Russian military forts, not unlike those of America’s Wild West, squeezed the native people out of their pasturelands.

Under the Soviets, genocidal collectivization starved a third of the Kazakh people to death. Kazakhstan became a vast Gulag province, a nuclear arms testing range and a location for mining that was brutally destructive to the environment.

In another wave of Slavic colonization, Moscow planted huge collective wheat farms in what the Soviets called the "virgin lands." Kazakhstan also boasted the main Soviet space launching site — the Baykonur Cosmodrome, and the first missile defense testing range in the world — ecological disasters both. Not a lot to start a democracy.

In 1991, Mr. Nazarbayev and the Kazakh elite faced a challenge: to transform a nuclear dumping ground for Gulag prisoners and radioactive waste into a modern state. They largely succeeded. Today, Kazakhstan’s gross national product has quadrupled to $7,800 a year purchasing parity — close to the average of Eastern Europe.

Over the past five years, Kazakhstan has reached 9 percent annual growth. Improved living standards among the broad population provided the basis for Mr. Nazarbayev’s electoral victory.

Kazakhstan today follows an Asian tiger economic model and is doing well. Twenty years after their independence, South Korea was under a military dictatorship and authoritarian strongmen ruled Taiwan and the Philippines.

Granted, Kazakhstan may not yet have attained Western European democracy. But the country held contested parliamentary elections last year, and the current presidential elections had more than 1,000 foreign and domestic observers.

Mr. Nazarbayev ships 3,000 students annually to study in the West, primarily in the United States. When they return, they quickly move up the corporate and bureaucratic ladders, making the Kazakhstani management and bureaucracy one of the best in the post-Soviet space. Most likely, democracy will come with generational change.

In contrast, Kazakhstan’s regional competitors to the south — Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan — are ruled by oppressive dictators Islam Karimov and Saparmurat Niyazov (self-named Turkmenbashi, "father of all Turkmen"). Both countries are economic basket cases.

To date, the United States has maintained good relations with Kazakhstan. Mr. Nazarbayev sent a small contingent of troops to fight side-by-side with the U.S. in Iraq.
However, Washington now faces the serious challenge of building and maintaining its relations with Kazakhstan and Central Asia generally.

Russia and China, the two principals of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that sandwiches Kazakhstan, want to squeeze America out of the region. They have already convinced Uzbekistan’s Mr. Karimov to give the U.S. and NATO the boot.

Kazakhstan exports about 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil, with projections of some 3 million by 2012. The country is a strategic asset the U.S. can ill afford to lose.

Russia and China are already competing over the direction of future Kazakh oil exports. Moscow controls two west-bound pipelines and Beijing is inaugurating an east-bound line on Jan. 1. The U.S. would like to see oil from the giant Kashagan field flow west, connecting with the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which links the Caspian Sea with the Mediterranean and is to first carry crude in early 2006.

While is important to promote democracy in the region, it is also crucial not to lose site of the energy and the geostrategic role of Kazakhstan and other countries of Eurasia. The presidential elections mark an important milestone in the post-Soviet development of Kazakhstan.

In his third term, Mr. Nazarbayev will do well to concentrate on his country’s institutional development and fight corruption to assure his legacy as Kazakhstan’s founding father. The U.S. should encourage democratization while building a thriving relationship with this Central Asian tiger.

Ariel Cohen is senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and author and editor of "Eurasia in Balance" (Ashgate, 2005).