Kazakhstan's Aliyev sacked after challenging leader
26 May 2007 14:58:47 GMT Source: Reuters
(Writes through with Aliyev sacked) By Maria Golovnina ALMATY, May 26 (Reuters) - Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev sacked his son-in-law, diplomat Rakhat Aliyev, on Saturday after Aliyev challenged the Kazakh leader by declaring he intended to run for the presidency. The president dismissed Aliyev, his daughter Dariga's husband, from the post of ambassador to Austria after ordering the police to investigate him on suspicion of kidnapping two senior bankers. Aliyev, a powerful businessman and politician, said he fell out with Nazarbayev because of his political ambitions, and accused the veteran leader of the Central Asian state of trying to silence him . "This hastily organised case is truly 'important'. Its 'importance' lies in the attempt to remove me from the political process in the country," Aliyev said in a statement on the Web site of the Kazakhstan Today news agency, which he controls. "A few months ago I told Nursultan Abishevich (Nazarbayev) that I had decided to run for the presidency in the next elections in 2012 ... Shortly after that conversation the Nurbank case happened." Nazarbayev, in power in the oil-rich state since 1989, signed constitutional amendments this week allowing him to stay in office for life. His current term expires in 2012. Aliyev is accused of abducting two executives of Nurbank, a mid-size Kazakh bank he controls. A Kazakh embassy official who answered the telephone in Vienna could not say where Aliyev was. The authorities have taken Aliyev's KTK television channel off the air and closed his Karavan newspaper for three months for violations of Kazakh law -- a move criticised by the U.S. embassy in Kazakhstan. MONARCHY Aliyev has accumulated considerable political and business clout in the ex-Soviet state where clan divisions and family connections play a key role in politics. Analysts believe the amendments and the Aliyev case are part of a broader drive to consolidate power in the hands of Nazarbayev, whose country hopes to join the world's top 10 oil-producing nations in a decade. But Aliyev, who once proposed setting up a monarchy in Kazakhstan, has no profile as an opposition politician at home where the opposition, led by the Real Ak Zhol party, accuses both him and Nazarbayev of corruption and nepotism. "It is clear that in current circumstances, using democratic slogans to move the matter into the world of politics is the only possible way for a person who has a bad name in the country," wrote the liberal Central Asia-based Web site neweurasia.net. Aliyev, 44, defended his case, saying he had changed his views after meeting European politicians. "I think the effective usurpation of the (presidential) post by one person, turning elections into a farce for foreign monitors, a gradual rollback of democratic achievements, are not helping our country, to say the least," he said. (additional reporting by Raushan Nurshayeva in Astana)
