Tag Archives: Vladimir Kozlov

When Nureke meets Donny

16 Jan

16 January 2018

Later today Qazaqstan’s Leader of the Nation, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is due to meet America’s novice president Donald Drumpf in Washington.

In this opinionated piece, kazaxia speculates on what may pass in this meeting between one of the world’s longest serving non-royal heads of state and the orange haired golfer who has enjoyed a gaffe-strewn first year in the White House.

Nazarbayev Trump

(image borrowed from https://www.kazakhembus.com/content/president-nazarbayev-meets-president-trump)

What advice can the world’s fourth longest-serving leader give to the newbie, whose forebears left Germany when it was quite a shithole?

kazaxia has identified three areas for advice:

Media

President Drumpf’s first year has been marred by a stormy relationship with the media, with many a foul-mouthed outburst on Twitter coming out of Donny’s Mar a Lago golf resort in the middle of the night.

Qazaqstan has reined in its pesky media by forcing outlets, such as Respublika, to close or encouraging owners to sell their outlets, such as Svoboda Slova, to more compliant, pro-goverment owners.

Opponents

Donny’s campaign to become president saw calls of ‘Lock her up’ directed at his main rival Hillary Clinton. This method has proved a most effective one in Qazaqstan with the authorities throwing many opponents, such as Vladimir Kozlov, behind bars.

Hagiography

2018 got off to a bad start for the White House with Micheal Wolff’s ‘explosive’ exposé of the Drumpf presidency – ‘Fire and Fury’. To counteract this ‘fake news’ account of the day-to-day workings of the regime, Don should consider using Elbasi’s personal hagiographer, ex-jailbird Jonathan Aitken, who can be guaranteed to give a glowing account of life in the White House.

It looks like these guys’ll get on like a house on fire!

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Farewell Zhanaozen?

1 Nov

At the height of Stalin’s purges figures that had fallen foul of the authorities were routinely airbrushed from photos in the archives. Now it looks like Kazakhstan is preparing to take its own airbrush and erase the troubled oil-city of Zhanaozen from the map.

RFE/RL reports proposals to rename the city after Beket-Ata, a famed, locally-born sufi mystic from the eighteenth century. The proposals were said to have been made at a meeting of Mangystau Region’s Council of Elders on 27 October.

The move comes hot on the heels of the show trials that saw Kazakh opposition leader Vladimir Kozlov get sent down for seven years for fomenting the violence that erupted last December in Zhanaozen that, according to official statistics, left 15 dead.

The Kazakh authorities must be hoping with the removal of the pesky name  from the archives it can finally move on from this black mark on its post-independence story and the ghosts of Zhanaozen can be consigned to the dustbin of history.

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Kazakhstan: Dangerous Bohemian Sentenced to 7.5 Years

8 Oct

The people of Kazakhstan can rest easy tonight as the leader of the gang thought to be behind the Zhanaozen violence last December, Vladimir Kozlov, was sentenced to seven and a half years for provoking the unrest and planning to overthrow the state.

During the trial in Aktau, Western Kazakhstan,  Kozlov, the leader of the unregistered Alga! party, was tagged by an ‘expert’ analyst as having a ‘Bohemian personality’.  This was most likely why he decided to form a gang with himself and tried to overthrow the state.

Astana will surely be in a ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as its court found Kozlov guilty of the charges laid against him in Kazakhstan’s first show trial of the post-Soviet era.

The whereabouts of Kozlov’s supposed ‘puppet master’ – Mukhtar Ablyazov, remain unknown since he fled Britain in March 2012 after being sent down himself.

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