Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask

by Francis Beckett

  Nazarbayev also dreamed of his country being seen by the Western world as a Central Asian Singapore, modern and productive. A spokesman for Tony Blair said he was not involved with President Nazarbayev’s campaign for the Nobel Prize. He said, ‘Tony Blair has helped put together a team of international advisers and consultants to set up an advisory group for the Kazakhs, with a team of people working on the ground. The work they are doing is excellent, sensible and supports the reforms they are making. The Kazakhs also engage with a number of other former European leaders.’

  It seems likely that Blair persuaded the Kazakh President he could open his way to the global establishment, to the fabled British establishment and even to the British royal family. While members of the royal family, such as Prince Andrew, have indeed been regular visitors to Astana, the Kazakh capital, and they have done business deals with Kazakh tycoons, the great and the good remain wary of Kazakhstan.

  Nazarbayev has been prepared to pay generously for the access afforded by Blair. Needless to say his fee is not disclosed but the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph and other newspapers have put it at £7 million a year, and that is almost certainly a good ballpark figure. Our understanding is that Blair was paid £8 million for the first year of the consultancy and £7 to 8 million for the second year. The Blair organisation was not helpful in quantifying the fee. ‘We don’t and have never confirmed value of contracts – it’s commercially confidential information. So the figures bandied about are often wrong,’ we were told by Blair’s spokeswoman, Rachel Grant. It’s a rather more polite expression of the usual Blair formulation: we’re not telling you, but, whatever you calculate, you’re wrong. But she did confirm that there is a fee. It pays for ‘the cost of running the project – including a team of advisers on the ground, who are experts in political, social and economic reform.’ She also agreed that the fee does provide a profit for Tony Blair Associates – not, she wanted to point out to us, to Tony Blair personally, but to his company. ‘Profits go back into running the business’ was how she put it.

  While, as of now, Blair continues to receive his pay cheque, rumours surface constantly that the contract may not be or has not been renewed. These may grow louder as those close to the President ask if Blair was a luxury funded by the high price of oil, a luxury that cannot now be afforded as the price collapses and the country’s budget feels the strain.

  Blair’s value is not restricted to his own advice. He also comes with a familiar entourage of public-relations people and fellow travellers. The Kazakh government has hired PR companies including the leading UK firm Bell Pottinger – founded by the arch Thatcherite Lord (Tim) Bell – to present a modern economy and a haven of religious tolerance.

  The roles of Blair and Bell are in some ways analogous, albeit their political histories are diametrically opposed. The famous right-wing PR man has helped many clients with difficult histories such as Thaksin Shinawatra, the ousted Thai premier; Asma al-Assad, the wife of the President of Syria; Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus; Rebekah Brooks, after the phone-hacking scandal broke; the repressive governments of Bahrain and Egypt; the polluting oil company Trafigura; the fracking company Cuadrilla; the Pinochet Foundation during its campaign against the former Chilean dictator’s British detention; and the much-criticised arms conglomerate BAE Systems.

  Other partners in the Blair consulting machine working with Kazakhstan are Tim Allan and the Portland PR company that Allan founded; Alastair Campbell, the former Blair PR chief who famously ‘sexed up’ the memo on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; and Jonathan Powell, who we have come across before. Powell runs a mediation charity but has said his work for President Nazarbayev is not part of his charitable activities. Asked about his work for Nazarbayev, Powell said, ‘I’ve got nothing to say about that. I suggest you talk to Tony Blair’s office about that.’ Blair’s office confirmed to Ken Silverstein that Blair had put in a good word for his colleagues at Portland for the Kazakh account, and they got it on his recommendation. Portland, says Silverstein, is also lobbying for Nazarbayev in the United States.1

  Another player in Kazakhstan from the Blair ménage is his wife Cherie, whose legal firm Omnia Strategy is being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for a few months’ legal work by Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Justice. Omnia was hired to conduct a review of the country’s ‘bilateral investment treaties’. The first stage of the review, which was expected to take as little as three months, is worth £120,000, sources have told the Sunday Telegraph. A second phase of the project is understood to be worth a further £200,000 to £250,000 for another three to four months’ work. Omnia Strategy also has an option to complete a third stage of the legal project for the Ministry of Justice.

  THE CLIENT

  So who is Blair’s friend in Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev? The man who sits on the other side of the table when Blair offers his advice and negotiates his fee has been called one of the ‘ultimate oligarchs’ of the post-Soviet Central Asia states. Bruising, ruthless, visionary and greedy, he was a man with whom Blair could not only work, but openly admire.

  Nursultan Äbishuly Nazarbayev was born in 1940 to a poor family in rural Kazakhstan at a time when the country was a Soviet republic. He worked his way up the greasy pole, first in the Young Communist League and then the Communist Party, becoming a full-time worker for the party. He was undoubtedly effective, at one time complaining about bureaucracy and inefficiency. It was a message that resonated with the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who ensured that he became general secretary of the party in Kazakhstan in 1989, when the country was still a Soviet republic but on the brink of independence. He was chairman of the Supreme Soviet (head of state) from 22 February to 24 April 1990. Nazarbayev was elected the nation’s first president following its independence from the Soviet Union in December 1991. He was the sole candidate and won no fewer than 91.5 per cent of the votes.

  He was determined that things should stay that way. So, when opposition political parties called for the formation of a coalition government in 1992, holding demonstrations, Kazakh security forcibly put down the protest. Opposition parties played little role over the subsequent years. This was democracy more in form than reality.

  The election due in 1995 was abandoned, in favour of a referendum in which the electorate extended his presidential term by five years. He was re-elected in January 1999 and again in December 2005 – the election before which the leading opposition candidate Zamanbek Nurkadilov was said to have shot himself twice in the chest before shooting himself in the head.

  Nazarbayev duly won another seven-year presidential term by an overwhelming majority of 91.15 per cent (from a total of 6,871,571 eligible participating voters). This incurred criticism from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe as falling short of international democratic standards. It found that an election requires two or more candidates running in opposition. A single candidate is not an election but a referendum.

  On 18 May 2007, the Parliament of Kazakhstan approved a constitutional amendment that would allow Nazarbayev to seek re-election as many times as he wished. This amendment applies only to Nazarbayev – the original constitution’s prescribed maximum of two presidential terms would still apply to all future presidents of Kazakhstan. This was seen as guaranteeing Nazarbayev a lifetime presidency. One commentator described Kazakhstan as operating a ‘soft dictatorship’. He said that that Nazarbayev ‘is not himself happy with the arrangement and he was heard saying that it was a mistake. He wanted to be a senior official at the UN, not president.’

  In May 2011, the Kazakh Parliament approved a constitutional amendment that made President Nursultan Nazarbayev ‘leader of the nation’, thereby granting him and his immediate family permanent immunity from prosecution. The amendment also gave him the lifelong right to make final decisions on foreign and security policy matters. Defacing pictures of the ‘leader of the nation’ and misrepresenting his biography were made criminal offences.
In September, Nazarbayev indicated that he would run for another term in office in 2012.

  Nazarbayev appeared now to develop grandiose ideas of his importance and employed Blair to make them real. We see The Economist commenting, ‘When he hired Mr Blair in October 2011, many thought he might be seeking help to win himself a Nobel Peace Prize, on the basis of his having handed over to Russia the nuclear weapons that were stored in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic at the collapse of the Soviet Union.’ This idea was reputedly planted by one of Nazarbayev’s one-time favourite businessmen, Alexander Maskievitch, the former Kyrgyz academic who jointly founded the partially state-owned company ENRC. The Economist went on to observe that, shortly after Blair joined Nazarbayev’s team, its security forces opened fire on protesters.

  The assumption of a lifetime presidency appears to have been the final straw for his son-in-law, Rakhat Aliyev. He had just been appointed ambassador to Austria and the country’s representative to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) when, amid a welter of allegations of corruption, false imprisonment of a journalist, kidnapping of bankers and the like, he was stripped of his position. Kazakhstan requested that Austria extradite him, and the President apparently unilaterally forced him to divorce his daughter Dariga, who had had three children with Aliyev. His daughter subsequently said that Nazarbayev had pressurised her to agree to the divorce. Aliyev wrote a book called The Godfather-in-Law, accusing the President of having opposition leaders murdered. He also exposed the corrupt and abusive Nazarbayev household. He later fled to Malta.

  The scene was set for a long-running feud between father and former son-in-law and this has been waged in Washington as well as London and elsewhere. Nazarbayev is said (by the New York Times) to have paid lobbyists millions to rebut the allegations by Aliyev. Aliyev had occupied high office inside Kazakhstan, including in the tax office, and had made a massive fortune. He had also acquired documents and evidence that he publicised widely, following the breakdown of relations with the President.

  Aliyev’s public-relations campaign discredited the carefully crafted image of the father of the nation, contrived by the former Soviet heavyweight Nazarbayev as he sought to be loved by his nation. The backdrop for some cosy counterblast, headed by Blair but partnered by many other image-makers, was established. The Kazakhstan’s ambassador to the US, Erlan Idrissov, wrote in a letter published in the New York Times in response to the newspaper’s article, ‘Kazakhstan has indeed hired consultants, including in the United States. This is to explain its position, as is accepted practice, and to respond to critics of the President who continue to perpetuate the fiction that Kazakhstan is a dictatorship.’

  The country splurged out on PR campaigns in the US with a task force organised by two Washington think tanks – the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Institute for New Democracies – receiving $290,000 from the Kazakh government to write a series of reports assessing the country’s progress towards democracy, according to Central Asian affairs website eurasianet.org. Another group of lobbyists received $9 million.

  The wise leadership of the leader was hailed as worthy of protection from all the slings thrown at it by Aliyev. Margarita Assenova, executive director of the Institute for New Democracies, was quoted as saying that ‘the people credit the wise leadership of Nazarbayev for peace, stability, economic development and ethnic harmony in Kazakhstan. They want this to continue.’ The OSCE, for its part, criticised the results, saying that ‘reforms necessary for holding genuine democratic elections have yet to materialize.’

  Blair’s place in the Nazarbayev ‘family’ of deferential cronies was cemented during a state visit to the UK in 2000, when Blair famously gave him Leo to cradle. Nazarbayev, who remarked on the importance of family ties, visited again in 2006 and paid his respects to Blair. But it was not until 2011 that Nazarbayev finally paid his dues to Blair by hiring him as his adviser.

  The onset of ill health – as demonstrated by a visit (intended to be kept secret but leaked to the press) to Israel for an operation – has raised the stakes in the selection of a successor to Nazarbayev. The President is not thought to have any intention of naming a successor, let alone handing over power in his lifetime. Individuals who have staked any claim to replace him have suffered severe fates. This ensures a constant guessing game: first, about the President’s longevity, and, second, about who is most likely to be sitting when the music stops. The President makes all key political decisions, and Blair’s generous contract is undoubtedly one of those. It does not seem likely that Blair will be able to hang on to his contract in the turmoil that seems certain to follow the moment when the President at last steps down.

  CAN BLAIR BURNISH SUCH AN IMAGE?

  If much of his role is to make the unacceptable acceptable to the sceptical, and in some cases downright hostile, Western world media, what is he having to contend with? The answer is that Nursultan Nazarbayev’s tenure on power is held by his complete domination of a system. He doesn’t have democratic legitimacy. He has led the country since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991; in 2011 he was re-elected with 95 per cent of the vote, a percentage that is seldom achieved by strictly democratic means. In accomplishing this he has outmanoeuvred opponents and put many in prison.

  His reign of fear is brutal and comprehensive. It is illegal to criticise the President. The police routinely torture opponents, and the use of child labour is widespread. A newspaper that attacked the President has been the target of threats, web-blocking by Kazakhtelecom (the country’s largest Internet service provider), libel actions and even arson attacks. In 2002, its offices were burned down and a dead dog left hanging from a ground-floor window in full view of the street. Attached to the carcass was a note stating simply, ‘You won’t get a second warning.’

  The full horror of the authoritarian state was laid open to full view just two months after Blair’s appointment, in December 2011, when at least fifteen oil workers were mown down by police. The number is approximate as no official death toll was provided. The massacre occurred in the oil town of Zhanaozen, and it followed a protracted strike for unpaid wages and better working conditions. Local courts outlawed the strike and the state oil company sacked nearly 1,000 employees.

  Some eight months after the strike began, police and protesters clashed over attempts to evict them from the square in preparation for an Independence Day celebration. Activists claimed security officers opened fire on unarmed demonstrators in the course of the celebrations. Authorities claimed that ‘bandits’ infiltrated the protesters and began the riots first, producing video to support their version of events. In the disturbances which followed, local government offices, a hotel and an office of the state oil company were set on fire. Eighty-six people were injured in the clashes, according to officials. Unrest spread throughout Kazakhstan’s oil fields as a result of the killings.

  OPPONENTS OF THE PRESIDENT

  The massacre was widely criticised by civil rights groups across the country as well as by mining unions abroad. In late June 2012, Human Rights Watch issued a report attacking the lamentable state of human rights in Kazakhstan. It also detailed ‘significant setbacks’ in the country, including the use of criminal charges for ‘inciting social discord’ (which carries a maximum sentence of twelve years in prison).

  In late 2012 Kazakhstan closed an opposition newspaper, Respublika. This had been used as the political mouthpiece of Mukhtar Ablyazov, the former head of BTA Bank, who allegedly stole some $11 billion from the bank before going on the run, first to London, then Italy then France. The public-relations company Portland Communications, run by Blair’s former press officer Tim Allan with Alastair Campbell on the board, is representing BTA Bank in its multibillion-pound case against Ablyazov. BTA Bank is one the country’s largest banks.

  In late June 2012, Human Rights Watch issued a report that detailed ‘significant setbacks’ in Kazakhstan. Former Kazakh Prime Minister Akezhan Kazhe
geldin, who was forced into exile in 1997, is dismissive of Blair’s alleged efforts. ‘He can offer all the advice he wants but you can’t have better governance in Kazakhstan without changing the government.’

  Corruption is the bane of Nazarbayev’s one-party state. In 2004 Transparency International ranked Kazakhstan 122 in its ‘corruption perception’ listing of 146 countries. This is an annual index of corruption covering most countries, carried out by an authoritative non-governmental organisation. Nazarbayev has paradoxically declared a holy war against corruption and ordered the adoption of ‘ten steps against corruption’ to fight it at all levels of state and society. Despite his becoming chairman of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2010, little has been done to address human-rights abuses and widespread corruption in the country. Allegations of corruption have been used to keep some leading (and almost certainly blameless) Kazakh officials behind bars, most notably Moukhtar Dzhakishev, the former head of the atomic-energy company Kazatomprom. From all of this, one must wonder how comfortable someone professing transparency in the manner of the former British Prime Minister feels about this assignment.

  The Nazarbayev family itself was embroiled in a series of investigations by Western governments into money laundering, bribery, and assassinations, in so-called ‘Kazakhgate’. This concerned an oil executive called James Giffen, who worked closely with Nazarbayev in the years prior to Kazakh independence and afterwards. Allegations of impropriety surfaced in 2003 and were resolved only at the conclusion of a trial in 2010. It was disclosed at Giffen’s trial that he funnelled some $80 million to Nazarbayev through a complex series of bank accounts. Giffen was brought to trial in the United States for breaches of the Foreign and Corrupt Practices Act. He did not deny the fact that he had paid the money to Nazarbayev as a bribe, but rather that he had paid it in his role as an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency, to which he was providing information about Nazarbayev.