A press repressed
By Bob Cullen Posted Oct 1 2002
Children walk along an embankment in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana. The town received a massive face-lift when President Nazarbayev moved his administration there in the mid-1990s. – Associated Press/Alexander Zemlianichenko
Bakytzhan Ketebayev, the president of an independent Kazakhstan television network called Tan (Kazakh for “dawn”) is not sure exactly what brought on the spate of troubles that took his network off the air in the spring of 2002.
It might have been the fact that Tan covered the way the police and the Kazakhstani army surrounded the French Embassy in Almaty when Galumzhan Zhakiyanov, the leader of an opposition party called Democratic Choice, took refuge there in March. The state television station opted not to treat this as a news event.
It might have been that Tan reported in January that Dariga Nazarbayeva, the daughter of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, commandeered an Air Kazakhstan jet to take her and her entourage to a winter vacation in Dubai, thus leaving about a hundred ticketed passengers stranded at the Almaty airport. (Dariga Nazarbayeva, Ketebayev said, later explained that she thought she had chartered the plane and didn’t realize passengers were waiting to board it.)
It might simply have been that Tan was founded by a former member of Nazarbayev’s cabinet who fell out with the president and became a member of Democratic Choice. Or it might have been a combination of reasons.
Whatever the cause, Tan’s problems began when someone cut the cable from its studio to its broadcasting tower. After that was repaired, someone with a gun came along in the night and shot up the transmitting equipment. When that damage was repaired, Tan was told by Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Information that the paperwork required for it to resume broadcasting was not in order. This bureaucratic roadblock remained in effect for weeks. Then someone inserted metal pins into Tan’s feeder cable.
Ketebayev said that he had heard rumors that Dariga Nazarbayeva had been saying that Tan would be permitted back on the air later in the spring. “This was supposed to be a lesson to us,” he said. If, after broadcasting resumed, Tan did not show more deference to the president, his family and his government, Ketebayev assumed that the harassment would resume at a higher intensity. “They might create criminal cases or tax cases against us,” he said.
The repression of Tan is, unfortunately, not an isolated case. Kazakhstan is presently suspended somewhere between the complete repression of independent media that was the norm in the Soviet years and the Western standards of free expression to which it nominally subscribes. Journalists are not, as yet, bundled into black cars and sent to a gulag when they offend the regime. But independent media of all sorts are coming under increasing attack from forces loyal to the Nazarbayev family.
The family, meanwhile, is assuming personal control over many of the most valuable and influential media outlets in the country. And, though Western embassies in Kazakhstan occasionally issue statements deploring one or another infringement of press freedoms, two titans of the American media, The New York Times and The Washington Post, are discussing entering into a partnership with Nazarbayev family interests. This potential alliance makes it less than clear which side of this issue the West is taking.
The opposition press in Kazakhstan faces both overt, ostensibly legal repression and covert, thuggish repression. Typically, the harassment starts with legal pretexts.
The Ministry of Information, for instance, requires newspaper publishers to print a box with detailed information about their circulation, their staffs and where they are printed. The requirements are complicated.
It might happen that a printer is unwilling to acknowledge his connection to an independent newspaper — he is willing to print it but unwilling to be identified. Or a publisher is simply sloppy about gathering and printing all the required data. A small mistake is enough to justify the paper’s suspension for a couple of months by the Ministry of Information. That was what happened in the spring of 2002 to Respublika, a national newspaper that supports Democratic Choice. After the suspension, its offices in Alma Ata were firebombed in mid-May, and three days before, the corpse of a decapited dog was hung in front of its entrance.
Journalists are often sued for slander. Svetlana Dylevskaya, a reporter and editor for Internews, a Western-backed independent news agency, was sued late in 2001 by Rakhat Aliyev, Dariga Nazarbayeva’s husband. Aliyev, who was at the time the deputy chief of the national security service, took exception to Dylevskaya’s statement in Internews’ Web bulletin that he and his wife owned or controlled, directly or secretly, an emerging Kazakhstani media conglomerate called Khabar. He originally asked for US $120,000 in damages (in a country where a good journalist might have a salary of several hundred dollars a month). Though the monetary demand was dropped during the case’s adjudication, the chilling effect remained. “I was frightened,” Dylevskaya said.
Part of the problem is that, all too often, the work of Kazakhstani journalists hands the authorities a cudgel with which to beat them. Dylevskaya, for instance, had no documentation for her claim about Rakhat Aliyev’s stake in Khabar. The company doesn’t release the names of its shareholders. She knew that Dariga Nazarbayeva was chairman of Khabar’s board of directors, she assumed that the rumors she’d heard about Aliyev’s ownership role were true, and she published them as fact. Under American law, she might have gotten away with it because Aliyev is a public figure. Under Kazakhstani law, she needed to be able to prove it.
Another problem is that the country as a whole has about 1,000 different print and broadcast operations. Its population, however, is only about 16 million people, and its advertising market is worth only about $25 million to $30 million per year. As a result, most media cannot achieve economic independence and need a patron. Their patron might be the government, or it might be a major enterprise, like a metals factory. On top of that, many newspapers sell what is called “hidden advertising.” They write what appears to be a news story about a business. Then they charge the business to print the story. As a result, the credibility of most Kazakhstani media is low. There is little public reaction when the regime harasses a newspaper or a broadcaster.
But the most significant problem appears to be the regime’s desire to own or control the media. Khabar has amassed an impressive list of properties. It owns the state share of the national television station, as well as two other major television channels. It owns several radio stations. It owns a couple of newspapers, a printing company, a news agency called Kazakhstan Today and an advertising agency. Although Khabar does not disclose the names of its shareholders, the fact that Dariga Nazarbayeva is chairman of the board is taken as a blatant clue about where its profits are going.
Western observers have begun to speak out against the threats to freedom of the press in Kazakhstan. The media’s “working conditions are constantly deteriorating,” said Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Ambassador Heinrich Haupt in an unusually scathing statement in April 2002. “Authorities keep imposing more and more controls and restrictions on the media to the extent as to seriously threaten their ability to play their vital role of providing broad information and fostering democratic debates.”
Haupt went on to cite several specific violations of the media-freedom principles of the OSCE, including “systematic concentration of media ownership or corporate control … primarily to the benefit of groups or individuals close to the political leadership, above all the presidential family.”
His criticism was ignored, of course, by the pro-government segment of the Kazakhstani media. Those organs had another news item to feature, based on a press conference that took place in Almaty during the same week as Haupt’s statement. The press conference tended to undermine any impression that a united West was prepared to bring pressure on Kazakhstan to mend its media policies.
The press conference involved Dariga Nazarbayeva and Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, the commercial director of the International Herald-Tribune, which is jointly owned by The New York Times and The Washington Post. They announced that negotiations were underway for a branch of the Khabar conglomerate to print the International Herald-Tribune in Almaty for distribution in Central Asia, a region with a growing contingent of expatriate Western businessmen and soldiers.
Dunbar-Johnson, in a subsequent interview with Global Journalist, defended the proposed deal and denied that it implied any support for the way the Nazarbayev regime treats Kazakhstan’s own media. He noted that the deal would not go for- ward unless the International Herald-Tribune was assured that there would be no censorship of its own editorial content.
As for the propriety of associating with a regime criticized for suppression of Kazakhstani national media, Dunbar-Johnson said the International Herald-Tribune sometimes finds itself in a position of having to do business with governments whose media policies it does not endorse. “You can’t print in places like Thailand and Malaysia without some association with the government,” he said. “We would print in China if we could, and we would have to have some association with the government to do it. So would every other magazine or newspaper with a presence in Asia.”
Dunbar-Johnson said the International Herald-Tribune’s proposed deal with the Kazakhstani government would be contingent only on whether it made financial and editorial sense for the International Herald-Tribune, not on Kazakhstani policies toward the local media.