There has been another arrest in the murder of Altynbek Sarsenbaiuly. As numerous news outlets are reporting, Erzhan Utembaev, the head of the Senate administration and a former deputy prime minister, was arrested yesterday according to an announcement from the Interior Ministry today.
The Washington Post reports that opposition leaders insist that Utembaev is not powerful enough to have organized the murder on his own.
Zharmakhan Tuyakbai, leader of the For a Fair Kazakhstan opposition alliance, said Utembayev’s arrest “confirmed that the traces of this political order go to the highest offices.”
The opposition alleged in a statement that Utembayev was too weak a figure to have masterminded Sarsenbayev’s murder and demanded the immediate resignation of Senate speaker Nurtai Abykayev.
“We believe Abykayev must immediately step down because he has enough formal and informal resources to influence the investigation,” another opposition leader, Oraz Zhandosov, said.
Abykayev previously headed the National Security Committee and President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s administration.
Additionally, opposition newspapers and politicians want Dariga Nazarbaeva and her husband, Rakhat Aliev, questioned in connection to the murder.
On Thursday, the opposition Aina weekly published an interview with a retired security officer who, citing sources close to the investigation, alleged that the murder had been instigated by Mr Aliyev, a government minister who is also a former senior security official.
Svoboda Slova carried an open letter to the couple, accusing them of having “personal motives to dislike” Mr Sarsenbaiuly.
It called on them to prove that they had not had a hand in the murder by testifying to investigators and “stopping persecution of disagreeable politicians and media”.
Nazarbaeva previously said the murder is part of a plot to discredit her father. Given that she does not always seem to see eye to eye with her father, I do not necessarily think that were it a plot to make her father look bad that her or her husband’s involvement would necessarily be unthinkable. On top of that, The Washington Post story reports that Sarsenbaiuly has a history with Nazarbaeva and Aliev.
In 2001, some liberal government officials, backed by Sarsenbayev, presented President Nazarbayev with a dossier on Aliyev’s alleged plans to unseat him and demanded political reforms. Nazarbayev sent Aliyev to Vienna as Kazakhstan’s ambassador to Austria and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and sacked the officials, who now make up the core of the country’s opposition. Sarsenbayev was demoted.
Nazarbayeva controls the country’s most powerful media company, which last year sued Sarsenbayev for slander. In the trial, Sarsenbayev testified about alleged violations by Nazarbayeva in building the media empire.
In my last post, I was asked how high I think this goes and how genuine I think the investigation is. I don’t have a good answer for either question. It certainly seems that President Nazarbaev has extremely strong disincentives for allowing the murder of opposition politicians even with plausible deniability, let alone plotting them himself. Perhaps Nazarbaeva is right and this is to make her father look bad. If so, how this shakes out may reveal fissures in government (along with who the president dislikes and wants to get rid of, one would assume).
As for the investigation, the involvement of the FBI leads me to think that the investigation is at least partially genuine. However, as The New York Times reports, no one knows exactly what that agent’s role is.
To increase the investigation’s credibility, the Kazakhstan government requested an American F.B.I. agent to aid the local authorities in the investigation, and promptly received one.
…The American Embassy declined to give details of the assignment but confirmed the presence of an agent.
Is the agent just window-dressing for a phony investigation to sweep an assassination under the rug? Time will (or will not, as may be more likely…) tell.
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I’ll say this: the only thing less credible than the idea that members of the administration would plan and execute such an attack when suspicion would clearly fall on them is the allegation that elements of the opposition would kill one of the best of its own solely for the purpose of discrediting the sitting president.
The opposition is already divided, and any hint that these acts could be traced back to any significant part of the opposition would so thoroughly discredit it as to make it completely ineffectual. (Some believe it already is.)
The idea that the opposition could suborn security officers for the paltry sum cited is patently ludicrous. Very likely an even more attractive reward could have been had by those approached by turning them in to the authorities.
Nathan, you’re right to be surprised. I am also surprised at how brazen and how bold this is. The establishment’s explanation of the source and motive of this act is vague and scarcely believable by anyone here. Events have moved with a quickness rarely seen in anything involving the government.
The establishment clearly believes its power base now so unassailably strong that there is no reason not to clear the board of all annoyances with no compunctions whatsoever, and that is frightening.
Damnit, I meant “the only thing less credible”.
And with my magical editorial powers, that is now what you’ve actually now said!
I kind of got the impression that’s what you meant as I read through the comment.
I think that it goes high up simply as the government network is so interconnected. If the top brass didn’t know about the planning they certainly know about who ordered it – I doubt we will see any real answers.
I feel that Nazarbaeva’s disagreements with her father are rather false; aimed at creating an ‘independent’ identity. I don’t think that she really differs from him and doubt that she could orchestrate anything high-level without him knowing.
Things are a little to hot for me to put in my opinions on this on the blog, but there are two words on the street:
1) Sarsenbayev was one of the people who divided the opposition, founding Real Ak Zhol. After a remarkably unsucessful presidential election, the opposition may have wanted to eliminate trouble-makers.
2) The speaker of the senate is the 2nd person in KZ, if the President dies or is impeached, he becomes President. Now he is being discredited by association with Orenbayev (who is powerful but an intellectual, a civil servant, a policy maker, not a frontlines political guy).
The speaker is forced to resign in the controversy, and someone who wants to be President steps into the office????
oops meant to say Utembayev not Orenbayev!!
Orenbayev is untainted by this, that was an honest mistake because the names sound similair!
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