[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 38 (Thursday, March 30, 2000)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E469-E471]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       A PROCLAMATION RECOGNIZING THE DEVELOPMENTS IN KAZAKHSTAN

                                 ______
                                 

                     HON. MARSHALL ``MARK'' SANFORD

                           of south carolina

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, March 30, 2000

  Mr. SANFORD. Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring to my colleagues 
attention the nation of Kazakhstan. This young nation has emerged, 
under the leadership of its President Nursultan Nazarbayev, as a 
bastion of democracy and free market economics in Central Asia. I am 
entering into the Record two articles written recently by R. Emmett 
Tyrell, Jr. of the Conservative New Service who just returned from 
Kazakhstan reporting on that nation's ethnic and cultural diversity, 
its free media, and its strategic importance to the United States.

[[Page E470]]

  I recommend these two articles to my colleagues and ask them to join 
me in saluting Kazakhstan's struggle to right itself after 70 years of 
Soviet repression.

                        The Forgotten Republics

       Astana, Kazakhstan.--This is the capital of Kazakhstan, 
     once one of the feared republics of the Union of Soviet 
     Socialist Republics, and the proving ground for much of the 
     USSR's nuclear weaponry. Now it is a vast region--in terms of 
     territory, the ninth largest nation on earth--populated by 
     anti-Communists, many trained in Moscow. It was my pleasure 
     the other day to visit the President's office and interview 
     one of the country's most ardent anti-Communists, the 
     President himself, Mr. Nursultan Nazarbayev, a co-conspirator 
     with Mikhail Gorbachev in the decomposition of the Soviet 
     Union. Somehow Nazarbayev landed on his feet.
       Entering the President's newly constructed offices with two 
     other American journalists for a televised interview, I am 
     reminded of how earnest the Yank journalists traveling abroad 
     are in displaying their high journalistic standards. Was it 
     Dan Rather who, at the beginning of an interview with the 
     President of a recently constituted African republic, asked--
     pen poised above his note pad--``Mr. President, how exactly 
     do you spell your name?'' Oh, maybe it was not the earnest 
     Dan. But surely some American at large in the faraway has 
     popped such a question.
       The journalists with whom I travel are not quite so self-
     conscious. In fact, we did not even ask Mr. Nazarbayev for 
     his card. We remembered him from the last days of the Soviet 
     Union. Now he is trying to bring stable, capitalistic growth 
     to his country, to develop its rich natural resources 
     (especially oil), to maintain cordial relations with the 
     United States, and to ensure the development of a democratic 
     regime in a country that was recently Communist and before 
     that a collection of unstable principalities--mostly Moslem--
     governing nomadic tribes. This last goal is somewhat 
     controversial. The President's critics, here and abroad, 
     doubt his seriousness about making Kazakhstan democratic. Yet 
     some of his critics abroad are obviously ill-informed.
       A representative of the Helsinki Commission recently 
     alleged that Kazakhstan has only two cardboard parties. It 
     has four, apparently quite vital, political parties 
     contending in the parliament alone. I have interviewed 
     representatives from three, the last being an affable 
     Communist, Professor (what did you expect?) Serikbolsyn A. 
     Abdildin, chairman of the Kazakhstan Communist Party. We 
     exchanged banter about the greatness of Marx. He was speaking 
     of Karl, I of Groucho--though I also have a very high opinion 
     of Harpo--who was a manifestly superior thinker than Karl, 
     and whose philosophical errors led to at least a couple of 
     hundred million fewer deaths. Professor Abdildin still thinks 
     nothing of the hundred million or so whom Moscow's Marxists 
     put to death. Mistakes were made, but now on to his new 
     ``social agenda.''
       On the outskirts of Astana there is a sobering monument 
     that has been raised to the Kazakhstani victims of the Soviet 
     concentration camps. Nazarbayev's government threw it up 
     immediately following Kazakhstan's independence--there are 
     not many Kazakhs in doubt as to the barbarism of ``Soviet 
     times,'' a barbarism that many Westerners missed.
       Though Nazarbayev is coy as to precisely why he came to 
     disrelish the Soviet system and what brought about its fall, 
     he has pushed pretty hard to eliminate it. He does say--as do 
     most sophisticated Kazakhs--that by the 1980s he could see 
     that, in economic terms, Marxism was a disaster. There can be 
     no doubt he favors the market. ``The planned economy,'' he 
     tells us, did not respond to market conditions, which reminds 
     me of all the progressive American economists who told us 
     ``the market'' was a fiction of Milton Friedman's 
     imagination. Let them consult the President of Kazakhstan and 
     his Moscow-trained allies who are welcoming American 
     corporations along with what he calls ``small and middle-
     sized'' businesses.
       Nazarbayev returns to the theme of democracy. He complains 
     that a State Department human rights report critical of his 
     government is fraught with errors, errors that he insists our 
     Ambassador has acknowledged. He wants his country to be ``a 
     strategic partner'' with the United States. And the expresses 
     concern over terrorists at his border who claim to be Islamic 
     fundamentalists. Nazarbayev sees them less as pietists than 
     as terrorists
       I cannot say with utter confidence that Kazakhstan is a 
     completed democracy. It has a multiplicity of political 
     parties competing among the electorate and in parliament. It 
     has religious tolerance. Islam and Christianity are practiced 
     in public. There is a free press gaining strength, though how 
     free it is remains a question to me. It does seem that 
     Kazakhstan is well on its way under Nazarbayev to economic 
     development along market lines and to some sort of democracy 
     that is a long way from its recent Soviet past. Many of 
     Nazarbayev's critics in the West were not nearly so vocal in 
     their denunciations of the Soviet Union's democratic failures 
     as they are of Nazarbayev's alleged failures.
       What can he do to escape their complaints? My advice is for 
     him to announce that he is returning to the Communist fold. 
     Furthermore, he is re-arming his nuclear weapons. Under him, 
     Kazakhstan, once the fourth largest nuclear arsenal on earth, 
     became the first nation in history to disarm its nuclear 
     force. Now he is the target of the West's perfectionists. 
     They never treated his Soviet predecessors so rudely. And the 
     only people I have met in Kazakhstan who share their critique 
     are an Islamic Kazakh nationalist and the amusing Professor 
     Abdildin.
       And allow me one final report. As Vladimir Putin makes his 
     way to the Presidency of Russia, I have been asking prominent 
     Kazakhs, many of whom visit Moscow frequently, as Kazakhstan 
     remains part of the Commonwealth of Independent States, if 
     his election might prefigure a return to Russian bellicosity. 
     The Kazakhs, having suffered two centuries of Russian 
     aggression, have more reason to fear such a turn of events 
     than most peoples. Economic conditions in Russia will not 
     allow renewed Soviet expansion, they tell me, and the 
     Russians know it. Maybe the Russians do not even yearn for 
     such grim days. Mr. Putin, however, strikes me as an unusual 
     world leader. He is tight-lipped in public. The roll of his 
     shoulders when he walks should remind us that he is a 
     conditioned athlete, a practitioner of the martial arts. One 
     hopes he gets sufficient exercise in the gym.

              [From the Washington Times, March 24, 2000]

                       American Model for Kazakhs

                         R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

       ASTANA, Kazakhstan.--I am freezing here in the snow-covered 
     capital of what was until 1991 one of the fearsome republics 
     of the now-defunct U.S.S.R.
       Kazakhstan had a large army, the fourth largest nuclear 
     arsenal in the world, and a loyal Communist Party, 
     propagating the word that the West was corrupt, overrun with 
     gangsters and a constant threat to Kazakhstan's benevolent 
     socialist society.
       Today I am traveling along the potholed streets of that 
     advanced society. Here, in the new Kazakh capital not far 
     from the Russian border, and a few days ago in Almaty, an 
     older and even bleaker city, I see the grim dilapidation of 
     the banks of government housing, the aged infrastructure, and 
     the sad victims of Soviet communism trudging the streets, and 
     I remember.
       Was it not John Kenneth Galbraith and like-minded 
     progressive economists who told us as recently as 1985 that 
     the Soviet economy was a robust competitor to the West? It 
     was, and when a few months later Mikhail Gorbachev pronounced 
     the Soviet economy a disaster, his remarks, you can be sure, 
     made no dent in Mr. Galbraith's arrogance.
       Were Professor Galbraith with me today what would his 
     retort be to the dozen or so bright, optimistic government 
     officials rattling off their programs for using the market 
     economy to extract from Kazakh territory the valuable 
     minerals and oil their communist predecessors wasted or 
     ignored? Today's government officials, mostly the products of 
     Moscow's universities during what they call ``Soviet times,'' 
     all say that by the 1980s they recognized the futility of the 
     communists' ``command economy.''
       When in the early 1990s they had an opportunity to break 
     with the Soviet Union, they did. They set off on the present 
     program of economic development with free and global markets. 
     They became the only nation ever to give up its nuclear arms. 
     Western democracy became their model, and they opted for the 
     American social system.
       The American model of the melting pot that allows ethnic 
     and religious pluralism is important to Kazakhstan. In 
     ``Soviet times,'' its vast unpopulated territory, covering 4 
     times as much land as Texas, was used by Moscow to dump 
     millions of peoples the Soviets deemed undesirable. Along 
     with the indigenous Kazakhs, there are Germans, Koreans, 
     Poles, Crimean Tartars,
       Josef Stalin encouraged millions of idealistic Russian 
     communists to come here after World War II to fortify the 
     U.S.S.R.'s southern border against China and against Muslim 
     fundamentalists who have lived in Central Asia for 1,000 
     years.
       In the 1960s, millions more Russians came as part of 
     Moscow's Virgin Lands policy to make Kazakhstan more 
     profitable.
       The consequence was environmental catastrophe. Nuclear 
     experiments that included Moscow's first hydrogen bomb and 
     other military experiments have rendered many areas of the 
     country health hazards. The agricultural and industrial 
     programs of the Virgin Lands imbecility left 20 million tons 
     of industrial waste polluting the countryside and the Aral 
     Sea drying up. Denied its water from rivers that were 
     diverted to irrigate futile cotton plantings, the seabed has 
     become a scab on the Earth.
       Cleaning up from ``Soviet times,'' is a major burden on the 
     government made all the more difficult by Russia's refusal to 
     explain the nature of its military experiments. So, too, is 
     maintaining a socially cohesive society, through that 
     challenge seems easier. Everywhere one looks, one sees a 
     society divided, essentially into two ethnic groups; the 
     Russians, who look like Western Europeans and compose 38 
     percent of the population, and the Kazakhs, who look Asiatic 
     and compose 51 percent of the population. Yet there seems to 
     be little friction between these populations. Both seem bound 
     together in contempt for the old Soviet system and hope for 
     their country's future.

[[Page E471]]

       The Russian zealots who came here as colonists after World 
     War II, and in the Virgin Land program have now mostly 
     returned to Russia, 2 million tired and aged idealists 
     looking, looking for retirement back home and graves in 
     Russian soil--another of communism's sad chapters.
       The elected president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, 
     an erstwhile collaborator of Mr. Gorbachev's in perestroika, 
     shares the hopes of other government officials. In 
     interviewing him, I note he repeatedly speaks of his faith in 
     free markets, democracy and a ``strategic partnership'' with 
     the United States. Kazakhstan with its
       Equally important are the oil and other resources that 
     Kazakhstan has in abundance and that American companies are 
     developing. Some observers back in the States are critical of 
     Mr. Nazarbayev's claims to democracy and perhaps even to 
     friendship with the West. Their suspicions are 
     understandable. Many in this government were trained by 
     Moscow's totalitarians.
       Yet from my observations, this developing country now has 
     at least four highly competitive political parties, nearly 
     1,000 media organs mostly privately owned, the freedoms of 
     our Bill of Rights, and commendable tolerance.
       Moreover, Kazakhstan has something its critics in the West 
     lack, the zeal of converts. In asking scores of Kazakhs how 
     they came to their free-market and democratic values, the 
     interviewer learns the Kazakhs were amazed by what they saw 
     in the West as their closed society developed cracks in the 
     1980's. President Nazarbayev says he saw the Soviet system 
     ``could not compete'' with the West economically. He and his 
     younger political aides developed the convert's zeal to move 
     their country to the model that was so manifestly superior to 
     the Soviet model.
       And, I ask my Kazakh hosts, how did those cracks develop in 
     the closed society? They answer that the arms race launched 
     by President Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union. Meanwhile 
     the Reagan administration's public information agencies got 
     word of democracy and freedom through the cracks. Mr. 
     Reagan's boasts about America being a ``shinning city on a 
     hill'' resonated with those who today are leading Kazakhstan 
     to Western prosperity.
       Yet Mr. Reagan's eloquence had its limits. It never 
     impressed John Kenneth Galbraith.