We all know that parrots and certain other birds can learn to talk. And most of us are aware that the Great Apes, i.e., chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, can be taught to communicate in American sign language. But have you ever heard of a talking elephant?
I recently discovered an extraordinary story of an Asian elephant called Batyr. Born in 1969, Batyr was a lifelong resident of the Karaganda Zoo in Kazakhstan. According to Wikipedia, Batyr was separated from his mother early on, and was the sole elephant in the Karaganda zoo. He never saw or interacted with other elephants. His only companions were his caretakers at the zoo. Elephants are very social animals, so it is only natural that Batyr identified with and imitated his human associates.
No one set about to teach Batyr to talk. By all acounts, he taught himself. In fact, his unique ability was first discovered by a night watchman at the zoo. The startled man reported he had heard the elephant talking to himself. (the Daily Telegraph Newspaper, April 9,1980) Batyr is said to have had a vocabulary of about 20 words and phrases in the Russian and Kazakh languages. He talked to his attendants or to himself, but his speech was frequently witnessed by amazed zoo visitors. Translated into English, his vocabulary included his name (Batyr), “water,” “good,” “bad,” “go,” “the fool,” “yes,” “give,” “grandma,” and “penis”. Phrases included, “I’m Batyr,” “Good Batyr,” “Bad Batyr,” “Batyr is hungry,” “One, two, three,” and “F*** you”.
Not surprisingly, Batyr’s astounding purported linguistic abilities caught the attention of the scientific community. The Soviet scientist A. N. Pogrebnoj-Aleksandroff studied Batyr and made audiovisual recordings of him speaking. Dr. Pogrebnoj-Aleksandroff described how Batyr produced human speech by pressing the tip of his trunk against the bottom of his jaw (simulating lips) and also using his tongue. Batyr was the subject of various scientific articles and zoological conferences in the 1980’s and ’90’s. These were primarily, if not exclusively, in Russia and former Soviet states.
Sadly, Batyr suffered an untimely death in 1993 when his caretakers gave him an accidental overdose of medication. It seems a shame that Batyr was and is so little known and little appreciated in the United States. I suppose it can be attributed to a combination of language, cultural, and political barriers. There is also much skepticism and ongoing controversy in the scientific community where issues of animal language and animal intelligence are concerned. It is hard to fathom why so many scientists, as well as nonscientists, are threatened by evidence of animal intelligence on a level comparable to a human pre-schooler. Is anyone afraid that pre-schoolers will take over the world?
Batyr was only about 24 years old when he died–a young adult who had so much promise. I can just imagine the delightful fellow frolicking happily in elephant heaven, blowing water out his trunk, and uttering the occasional gleeful “I’m Batyr, good Batyr, one, two, three, f*** you!”
Kosik is Alive and Talking!
Kosik is an Asian elephant at the Everland theme park and zoo in Seoul, South Korea. Like his predecessor, Batyr, he reportedly taught himelf to speak (Korean) by imitating his caretakers. He uses the same trunk-in-mouth method to produce human-like speech. And hIs ability to speak was discovered in the same way. Zoo workers outside his enclosure heard him talking to himself, initially thinking a person was in the enclosure. (See Science Magazine, 6 Oct. 2006 at sciencemag.org, and Wikipedia article, “Kosik”.)
Kosik’s vocabulary is said to include about eight words and phrases. Among these are “Yes,” “No,” “foot,” “good,” “Sit,”and “Lie down”. At the time of the videotaped newscast (Youtube video above) in 2006, a zoo spokesperson indicated plans were in the works for scientists to study Kosik’s vocalizations to determine if he understood the word meanings or was simply mimicking. Is this not a ridiculous issue? It is obvious he is repeating verbal commands used by his keepers. Dogs understand the same commands. They demonstrate their understanding by obeying the commands, as do elephants. It would be far more interesting and useful to have a speech and language therapist work with Kosik to see how much his vocabulary and expressive speech could be expanded through training. For that matter, why not experiment with training other elephants, both Asian and African, to speak?
I think most people these days have heard of elephants that paint. It is a wide-spread and well-known phenomenon. I suppose it is easier to teach an elephant to paint than to talk. But that does not explain the near-silence in the Western media on the subject of talking elephants. Where are the television documentaries and news segments? If the elephant does not speak our language, does it not count? Asian elephant gets art lesson
Many people think the names “Britain”, “England” and the “United Kingdom” are interchangeable– much to the irritation of millions of the UK’s inhabitants. Don’t call the Scots, the Welsh or the Irish “English”, if you know what’s good for you– and the English aren’t all that fond of being misidentified either. To be safe, just call them “Brits” and be done with it.
In a similar vein, what does it mean to be European? What, exactly does “Europe” mean? Well, it depends on which “Europe” you’re talking about. This article identifies four of them– but even these delineations are subject to debate. I can’t promise this is the final word or that you’ll be an expert on the subject, but at least you’ll know enough to question which “Europe” is being discussed.
Text Color Key: blue: states which straddle the border between Europe and Asia; green: states not geographically in Europe, but closely associated politically. Source: Map blank by Ssolbergj; derivative work by Dbachmann
The Continent of Europe (Largest Number of Countries)
The continent of Europe should be easy to identify. It is the geographical reference to the continental peninsula in the west of the Eurasian land mass, including related islands. Stretching roughly east to west from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural and Caucasus Mountains and north to south from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, it covers nearly 4 million square miles and contains 50 countries with a total population of about 730 million people. Among other countries, this version of Europe includes the island nations of Iceland and the United Kingdom and portions of Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan.
Although it should be easy to identify, beware when someone refers to “Continental Europe”, as this usually means the European mainland sans many of the islands. Therefore, the continent of Europe is different from “Continental Europe”. Also, the actual countries and boundaries of the continent are subject to debate. No one said this was going to be easy.
These are the 50 countries in the continent of Europe (note that this list does not include countries in dispute, such as Kosovo, Northern Cyprus, South Ossetia, etc):
Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Vatican City
Map of the Council of Europe members. Member states are green and dark green and include dependencies. Source: Public Domain
The Council of Europe (Large Number of Countries)
The Council of Europe , headquartered in Strasbourg, France, is an organization that promotes cooperation among nearly all of the countries in the continent of Europe (see above). Its emphasis is on standards, human rights, democracy and culture. It cannot make binding laws like the European Union (see below). Three countries from the continent of Europe are not members of the Council of Europe:Belarus, Kazakhstan and Vatican City. Its 47 member states have a population of about 800 million; this is higher than that stated for the continent of Europe because the entire population of member states is counted (e.g. Russia and Turkey) instead of just those living in the European continent. The member states are:
Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom
The European Union (EU) (Smaller Number of Countries)
Although there is no “country” of Europe, the European Union (EU), as a political and economic union, comes close to being the hypothetical “United States of Europe”, with its “capital” at Brussels, Belgium. The member states– or countries– that make up the EU, while part of this supranational union, struggle with developing a single market, common trade policies, free movement of subjects and trade across state borders, etc, while maintaining as much of their individual customs and laws as possible. The “economic” part of the European Union does not extend to a single currency– that is under the auspices of the Eurozone (see below). There are 28 European Union countries, with a population of around 500 million (Croatia was the latest to join on July 1, 2013):
Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom
Note that this is about half the countries that make up the continent of Europe (see above).
The 19 Eurozone countries (whose currency is the Euro) in dark blue and purple (Latvia and Lithuania joined in 2014 and 2015 respectively are purple). Source: Public Domain
The Eurozone (Smallest Number of Countries)
This is the “Europe” that has been in the news so much, dragging down the world’s economic recovery. Also called the “euro area”, it is Europe’s economic and monetary union. That is, its member states have adopted the “euro” as their common currency. There are currently only 19 member states in the Eurozone, since not all of the countries in the European Union (see above) have adopted the euro as their currency– most notably, the United Kingdom. As the Eurozone wrestles with the monetary crisis involving its member states Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, among others, the rest of the European Union as well as the world struggle to emerge from the global recession that started in 2008.
The 19 member states of the Eurozone, with a population of 335 million, are:
Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.
Finis
That concludes the whirlwind tour of four Europes. If you’re still confused, then you’re normal, but maybe now you understand why “Europe” never seems to stand still and why sometimes a country is European and sometimes it’s not. And fear not, the memberships of the various Europes will change over time.
Finally, on the off chance you may be able to handle the truth, the following image shows that there are actually more than four Europes.
Relationships between various multinational European organizations. Source: Public Domain
Kazakhstan’s recently re-elected president has made a vaguely worded pledge of political reform for his new term. Nursultan Nazarbayev suggested that Kazakhstan must transition from its super-presidential system to a more balanced one with greater checks and balances.
Yet while mulling reforms to pave the way for the eventual post-Nazarbayev era, the president made no specific pledges about what form they might take or when they might be enacted, leaving skeptics wondering if his intentions are serious.
Kazakhstan’s political system has hitherto been characterized by “strong presidential rule,” Nazarbayev said on May 29 in remarks quoted by the Kazakhstanskaya Pravda government-owned daily.
Yet as a middle class emerges “this should probably be weakened and the government should be given more opportunities to work independently and more powers should be handed over to parliament.”
There has long been talk in Kazakhstan about weakening the top-down system in which Nazarbayev wields all powers, the government carries out his orders, and parliament (which contains no genuine opposition parties) rubberstamps executive decisions.
Reforms, the thinking goes, would pave the way for a time when the aging president – who has ruled Kazakhstan for a quarter century and will be 80 when his term of office ends in 2020 – will no longer be in power, allowing him to bequeath his successor a system less dependent on one personality.
Talk of political reform has in the past failed to deliver anything beyond cosmetic changes. So many commentators reacted skeptically to the idea that Nazarbayev (who is officially known in Kazakhstan as “Leader of the Nation”) plans a radical overhaul of the system he created.
“Most such initiatives remain at the level of talk,” political analyst Rasul Zhumaly told the Kapital newspaper. Parliament is dominated by Nazarbayev’s ruling Nur Otan party, he pointed out, and “all decisions are made there with practically 100-percent unanimity.”
“Since there is no real debate in parliament, this sort of initiative with this sort of parliament will hardly change the quality of decision-making,” Zhumaly concluded.
Anticipating criticism, Nazarbayev said that everyone has “their own truth” when it comes to democracy. For Kazakhstan, he declared, “democracy lies in making the state more accountable to the people.”
His election manifesto promised greater public accountability and improved rule of law as well as economic growth. The 100 steps designed to deliver on his pledges, unveiled last month, contain plenty of detailed measures on improving transparency and public accountability, from overhauling the bloated and corrupt civil service, police and courts to publishing more financial data online.
However, the 100 steps contain not a word about the political reform to which Nazarbayev has once again professed his commitment.
With Kazakhstan set to re-elect its incumbent president relatively unopposed this weekend, here is a selection of other landslide polls around the world
Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev during an election campaign rally in Almaty. Photograph: Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters
For those who can’t take the suspense of the nail-biting British election, there’s another vote this weekend with more certainty about it.
In the blue corner is Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan for ever (literally: the country has never had another elected leader since it was formed after the collapse of the Soviet Union). And in the other corner, well, no one really. There are two unknowns but they have little chance given that Nazarbayev won 96% of the vote last time, in 2011.
It’s all shaping up to be one of the most one-sided elections since, well, since the last one-sided central Asian election. Which was less than a month ago.
And so, in no particular order, here are some of the most one-sided elections in history.
North Korea
Kim Jong-Un waves to cheering Korean People’s Army pilots on Mount Paektu. Photograph: KNS/AFP/Getty Images
In March 2014, North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, was elected to the Supreme People’s Assembly with a unanimous vote in his district on a 100% turnout. There was no other name on the ballot. Voters could vote for or against the candidate, but those who voted against had to do so in an open booth so everyone could see (and nobody did).
Voter turnout was actually 99.97%. A few voters were at sea.
North Korea elections: a sham worth studying, published by Time magazine, makes for an interesting read. It says the elections also have another purpose: “North Korean defectors report that voting acts as an informal census, with neighbourhood committees, called inminban, closely monitoring who shows up and who doesn’t.”
Uzbekistan
Last month it was announced that Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s authoritarian president since 1990, had been re-elected for another five years. As the Guardian correspondent Alec Luhn writes, it was a “predictable landslide victory”.
Uzbekistan’s president Islam Karimov at Navruz holiday festivities in Tashkent. Photograph: AP
This was a vote that took the idea of democratic competition to new levels of absurdity: Karimov’s opponents all praised the incumbent as the best candidate – a situation akin to Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage throwing their weight behind David Cameron.
Karimov duly won 90.4% of the vote, a nice return to form after only winning 88% in the last “election” eight years ago.
Cuba
For those fed up with UK-style campaigning, a short break in Cuba might be the order of the day. There, campaigning is not allowed. Voters can get a sense of competing candidates instead by viewing their biographies and photographs posted in public spaces.
Earlier this month, Reuters reported that two government opponents on the ballot for upcoming elections had complained that the biographies they’d each written had been altered by officials to “portray them as dangers to the revolution”.
As the Economist explains, while it was predictable that the government opponents didn’t win, the fact that they appeared on the ballot and had been chosen by citizens was worthy of note:
For the first time two openly declared dissidents made it on to the ballot among more than 27,000 candidates competing for 12,589 municipal posts around the country … their participation was an unusually open act of defiance, not just by the two men but also by ordinary citizens who proposed them in a show of hands before the elections.
Turkmenistan
Turkmenistan’s first president, Saparmurat Niyazov, was a tough act to follow, a man so revered in his country that he could rename January after his mother.
His successor, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, learned one or two things from the late “father of the nation”, not least how to stay in power. Niyazov didn’t bother with elections too much: he won a national referendum on extending his rule in 1994 with a razor-tight 99.9% of votes.
Berdymukhammedov duly followed suit in 2012 with an election win, deciding that 97% of the vote was the appropriate approval rating on this occasion.
Singapore
The ruling People’s Action party dominates the political landscape in Singapore and has done so since winning a landslide victory in 1959. The last election, in 2011, saw the party win 81 of 87 seats – a (very) slight bump down from winning 82 of 84 in 2006 and let’s not even mention the heady days of 1968, 1972, 1976 and 1980 when they won all the seats.
How long does it take to count 2.6m votes? Under two hours, according to the election commission of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. That’s some speedy counting.
The results of a referendum in May 2014 declared that 89.07% of people in the region voted in favour of independence, with a turnout of 74.87%.
However, protesters are unlikely to see any of their core demands met.
While Beijing has agreed to grant Hong Kong universal suffrage in the 2017 election, meaning that more than 5 million eligible voters will have their say on who is chosen as Hong Kong’s leader, all candidates will face screening by a majority pro-Beijing committee. Not such good news for protesters as, in effect, it threatens to bar any pro-democracy candidates from the ballot.
Under the proposed reforms the election process would look like this, says the BBC:
A primary vote will take place where the 1,200 members of the largely pro-Beijing nominating committee will get one vote each.
A candidate will have to win at least 120 votes which will result in a shortlist of between five and 10 candidates.
These candidates will then be put to a second round of voting by members of the nominating committee.
Each member will cast at least two approval votes.
The two or three candidates who win more than 600 votes each will then be eligible to run in the public election.
Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe. Photograph: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP
Mugabe, Africa’s oldest leader, won with 61% of the presidential vote, with the Zanu-PF party gaining more than a two-thirds majority in parliament, and hetrounced MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who gained 34% of votes.
The results garnered mixed reactions – while the African Union and most southern African nations were generally supportive, non-governmental groups and western governments were more critical and Botswana called for an audit.
But one-sided elections are, of course, not limited to repressive regimes. It is also possible to win by a landslide in open democracies.
Take for instance Ronald Reagan in 1984, when he won 49 of 50 states in America.
US presidential results 1984 map Photograph: Real Clear Politics
Tony Blair won a phenomenal 418 seats in the 1997 general election compared with John Major’s 165 and Paddy Ashdown’s 46. And all eyes are on next month’s election where, if projections bear out, the Scottish National party will win almost all of the country’s 59 seats.
Kazakhstan’s largest city began life as a Russian fortress. The government is doing all it can to stop it becoming one in future once President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s long rule ends.
Almaty, near the Chinese border, was the capital until 1997 when Nazarbayev moved it to Astana in the center of the country, and closer to the large Russian population in Kazakhstan’s north. The move was interpreted in part as an effort to bind the northern regions bordering Russia more tightly into the state as it consolidates its independence following the Soviet Union’s collapse.
The risk of domination from China or Russia is “like living in a cage with a dragon or a bear — it will bite you,” Dosym Satpayev, director of the Kazakhstan Risks Assessment Group said in an interview. “If Kazakhstan is seen as in only Russia’s sphere of influence, we’re lost.”
The conflict in Ukraine’s east between the new Europe-leaning government and pro-Russian separatists is sharpening the dilemma in Kazakhstan, the former Soviet Union’s second-largest energy exporter after Russia. Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in March and voiced “respect” for rebel demands for autonomy, even as its economy labored under U.S. and European Union sanctions.
Succession Question
With no anointed heir to 74-year-old Nazarbayev, who’s ruled since independence in 1991, uncertainty over the future was acknowledged in a sovereign bond prospectus in September. Should he leave office “without a smooth transfer to a successor,” the “political situation and economy could become unstable,” according to the document.
Russia may have spotted a potential opportunity to cement ties with Kazakhstan when Nazarbayev departs. A study for Russian government officials, conducted last year and obtained by Bloomberg, suggested his succession offers a “beneficial background to promote moderate values of Eurasian integration.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin jangled nerves when he told students at a pro-Kremlin youth camp on Aug. 29 that Nazarbayev had created a state “where there’s never been a state” and that the “vast majority of the citizens of Kazakhstan favor stronger ties with Russia.”
His remarks may be interpreted to mean a state “that’s appeared thanks to one person can disappear thanks to another,” Carnegie Moscow analyst Alexei Malashenko said in his blog.
Eurasian Warning
Two days before Putin spoke, Nazarbayev warned that Kazakhstan reserved the right to leave the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union if its independence is threatened by membership. The alliance includes Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia and takes effect Jan. 1.
Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s rejection of an EU integration pact, as Russia pushed it to join the Eurasian Union, triggered his nation’s current crisis.
“If you’re on good terms with Russia and participate in Russian projects then it’s OK,” said Nargis Kassenova, associate professor and director of Central Asian Studies Center at KIMEP University in Almaty. “If you decide to go elsewhere like Ukraine, you’ll be punished. That worries us a lot.”
Demographics fuel concern in this Central Asian republic, the world’s ninth-largest country, where Russians make up a quarter of the 17.4 million population. Russians outnumber Kazakhs in the Northern Kazakhstan and Kostanay regions next to Russia, according to the 2009 census.
Arriving, Leaving
Kazakhstan is seeking to revive an incentive program to lure back ethnic Kazakhs, known as “oralmans,” from abroad. More than 944,000 returned between 1991 and 2013, official data show, while there’s been a steady exodus of Russians, who made up 40 percent of the population before the Soviet collapse.
Military activity can also be a worry. More than 4,000 Russian troops held missile drills in the Altai region, close to the Kazakh border, RIA Novosti said Sept. 3. Kazakhstan tested the combat readiness of 3,000 troops in its south in unscheduled exercises Nov. 19-21, the Defense Ministry said.
Punishments for expressing separatism are being toughened and may include jail terms of as long as 10 years. The proposals were made a month after Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a deputy speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament, called for Kazakhstan to be merged into a new Russian region.
‘Dearest Treasure’
“Our independence is our dearest treasure,” Nazarbayev said in comments broadcast on Kazakhstan’s 24KZ TV. “We’ll never surrender it.”
Kazakhs are asserting a national identity that leaves some in the Russian minority wondering about their future.
“When Nazarbayev goes, it will be bad,” said Yuri Bunakov, 75, who heads the Russian Community office in Almaty’s state-run Ethnic Assembly of Kazakhstan. “There could be a scenario such as in the Baltic countries or Ukraine, where naked nationalism was adopted.”
The sign outside his office is written only in Kazakh, according to Bunakov, even though Russian enjoys official status under a law he says he helped persuade Nazarbayev to pass in the 1990s.
Nazarbayev is strengthening the dominance of Kazakh, ordering adoption of the Latin alphabet in place of Cyrillic by 2025. A 2007 Education Ministry report argued that the switch would move the nation from a colonial Soviet mentality “which still largely dominates the national consciousness” to a sovereign Kazakh one.
Use of Russian in official documents has fallen considerably, along with study of the language and Russian history in Kazakh schools, while Russians are “practically absent” from positions in state bodies, according to Bunakov.
Exxon, Eni
As well as firming up domestic unity, Kazakhstan has looked abroad to buttress its independence. The government has attracted $150 billion of foreign investments, according to the presidential website, including energy giants Exxon Mobil Corp, Royal Dutch Shell, Total SA and Eni SpA.
China, the region’s other dominant force, may also act as a counterweight to Russia, having overtaken it as Kazakhstan’s top trading partner in 2010. Kazakhstan signed cooperation contracts and agreements worth $30 billion last year and Nazarbayev has expressed enthusiasm for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s plan to revive the ancient Silk Road trading route from China to Europe through Central Asia.
“China looks good compared to Russia because of Ukraine,” Professor Kassenova said. “We’re vulnerable to Moscow; if Russia wants to undermine the legitimacy of our government, they can do.”
‘Unwavering Support’
The U.S. is also building ties through a “Strategic Partnership Dialogue” with Kazakhstan established in 2012. It expressed “unwavering support for Kazakhstan’s independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity” in a statement after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry held talks with Kazakhstan’s Foreign Minister Erlan Idrissov in Washington on Dec 10.
The U.S. “appreciates its open dialogue with Kazakhstan on the crisis in Ukraine,” according to the statement.
Nazarbayev has spearheaded the quest to cement independence, repeatedly demonstrating an ability to balance that goal with steps that avoid antagonizing Putin. He called the Russian leader “the most normal liberal today” on Dec. 5 and criticized sanctions against Russia over Ukraine as a “dead end,” according to Kazakhstanskaya Pravda.
The Kazakh leader’s exit would risk depriving the nation of the driving force behind its national identity, making it vulnerable to outside influence.
Nazarbayev and independence are “sacredly inseparable,” Gulshara Abdykalikova, state secretary of Kazakhstan, told a Nov. 28 meeting of the Ethnic Assembly in Astana, describing him as the “symbol and guarantor of the unity of the nation.”
Kazakhstan’s security forces arrested two Kazakh nationals on charges of participating in the Syrian crisis upon their return from Syria.
The arrested Kazakh nationals had illegally left Kazakhstan and visited Syria via Turkey.
Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee announced that it is interrogating the detainees and it will soon publish new information about them.
Earlier this week, Deputy Chairman of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee Nurgali Bilisbekov announced that a large number of Kazakh citizens are fighting in Syria and special investigations are underway to identify them.
In a related development, Kyrgyzstan’s intelligence agency announced last month that a number of Kyrgyz citizens are also taking part in the Syrian war against President Bashar Al-Assad’s government.
Analysts believe that what is presently going on in Syria is directly linked to the future stability and security of the former Soviet Union republics, including Central Asian countries.
The security sources, knowing the fact that hundreds of militants from the former Soviet Union are fighting in Syria, are worried that if the Syrian crisis is resolved most of the armed rebels will return to their countries and they will use their experiences under the management of intelligence agencies of the western and Arabic countries.
Last week, Syria’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun said more than 3,000 citizens from Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) are fighting along other foreign-backed militants in Syria.
“Around 2,000 Russian nationals most of them from the North Caucasus region and some 1,300 others from other former Soviet republics are fighting along armed opposition groups in this country,” the Syrian grand mufti said, addressing a ceremony at the Islamic University of Moscow said.
Sheikh Hassoun noted that the Russian militants poured into Syria after the outbreak of the unrest in 2011.
The Syrian government has long been charging that foreign fighters are joining the battle alongside the opposition rebels.
Many foreign nationals, including Russian and Chechen fighters, have been killed in the battle with the Syrian army.
In December 2012, a group of 39 Chechen terrorists left London’s Heathrow airport for Istanbul to sneak into Syria via the Turkish borders and join other terrorist and armed rebel groups in the war on Damascus.
The 39 terrorists were not the first group of Chechens sent to Syria. When armed rebellion against the Damascus government broke out, Chechen terrorists were among the first foreign troops sent to Syria through Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Britain.
All throughout the last century, Chechens who had always been treated like an enemy, or at least a second class citizen, both under Tsarist and Communist Russia mostly left their land for various world countries, specially in the Middle-East.
Chechnya which is a part of Russian territory has declared autonomy despite the opposition of the government in Moscow. The officials of the region who are aware of Moscow’s advocacy of the Damascus government now want to attract the attention and support of the western states which provide aid to the terrorists in Syria to topple President Bashar al-Assad’s government by sending terrorists to the Arab country.
Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011 with organized attacks by well-armed gangs against the Syrian police, border guards, statesmen, army and civilians being reported across the country.
Thousands of people have been killed since terrorist and armed groups turned protest rallies into armed clashes.
The government blames outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorist groups for the deaths, stressing that the unrest is being orchestrated from abroad. See more…
In December, 20-year-old Vladislav Chelakh was convicted of killing 15 men at a Kazakh border patrol post. But inconsistencies in his testimony and the behavior of prosecutors have led many to believe that Chelakh is innocent. He was given a life sentence in a labor camp.
The shocking murder of 15 soldiers in Kazakhstan led to a dubious trial and the sacking of the chief of the border guards. Now the suspicious airplane death of his reform-minded replacement has compounded widespread mistrust of the government.
The courtroom in Taldykorgan, a small city 120 kilometers (75 miles) west of the border with China, is small and stuffy, with less than 30 seats.
On this December day, 20-year-old soldier Vladislav Chelakh is standing in the glass cage used for defendants listening to a verdict being pronounced against him. Judge Erbol Akhmetzhanov speaks for only 10 minutes, but his words have an effect on the entire country.
Akhmetzhanov reads off the articles in the criminal code under which the slight young man in the black Armani shirt is being convicted: “murder, theft, betrayal of state secrets, misappropriation of weapons, malicious destruction of military property, desertion.” The sentence isn’t surprising: life imprisonment in a labor camp. “There are no mitigating circumstances,” Judge Akhmetzhanov says.
Chelakh was accused of killing 14 fellow border guards and a hunter at a remote post on the Kazakh-Chinese border. Four years ago, he would have been sentenced to death, but Kazakhstan essentially abolished the death penalty in 2009.
It’s a miracle that Chelakh is even alive to hear the verdict. In October, he tried to hang himself with a tracksuit bottom tied to his cell window. A month later, guards saved him after he sliced open an artery with a sharp piece of plastic.
“They did everything to get to me, but they didn’t search for the truth,” Chelakh said a few days before his sentencing. Since then, he has remained silent.
It’s a different story with his mother, Svetlana Vaschenko. “He is innocent,” she shouted as uniformed guards pulled her son out of the courtroom. “This trial proves that Kazakhstan is not a nation of law,” said Serik Sarsenov, his defense lawyer.
The Taldykorgan trial, the most spectacular to date in the history of the young nation of Kazakhstan, ended in tumult — and with the certainty that this isn’t a case that will simply be filed away and forgotten. The court had no evidence, no motive and no witnesses. The verdict will be appealed, although attorney Sarsenov sets little store in the appeals process in Kazakhstan and plans to take his case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
There is a different dynamic outside the courtroom, in Kazakh living rooms, on the street and on the Internet, where the Kazakh people clearly oppose their government — and don’t put anything past it, even if it entails covering up a mass murder. This widely held belief has led most Kazakhs to side with Chelakh. One blogger predicted that powerful men will eventually kill Chelakh “after an alleged escape attempt, so as to eliminate the last witness to this massacre.”
The case “is a reflection of our government system,” says Guljan Yergalieva, a prominent opposition journalist. “They provoke, they falsify and they lie. The people in power here have behaved suspiciously from the very start.”
Chelakh’s is the story of a country blessed with gold, oil, natural gas and uranium, almost eight times the size of Germany but with a population of only 17 million. Its autocratic ruler, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has established a bizarre personality cult around himself and promotes his country as a model nation in the heart of Asia, despite the deep mistrust between the government and the governed. But Kazakhstan’s story doesn’t bode well for the future in the fragile region north of Afghanistan.
A Grisly Massacre
It was a warm day on May 10, 2012, when 14 soldiers and a captain set off for Arkankergen, a post on the Chinese border that is high in the Alatau Mountains, at 3,000 meters (9,840 feet) above sea level, and only manned in the summer. The border service is an elite group, part of the country’s KNB national intelligence service.
Communication with the post was broken off on May 28, and a search team was dispatched two days later. When the men arrived, they encountered a horrific scene.
The Arkankergen post was no longer there. Almost everything had been burned down, including the wooden buildings housing the soldiers, the officers’ quarters and the other service structures. The team found the remains of 13 soldiers in the ashes and another body on the banks of a nearby stream. Some 150 meters from the site, the soldiers discovered the body of a hunter, a retired air force major who ran a forestry business nearby. The remains of the 15 men were unrecognizable at first, and only 13 were eventually identified. The task was even daunting for experts from Berlin’s Charité Hospital, who were brought in to assist the Kazakh authorities.
On June 4, another team found Chelakh, then 19, in a mountain hut. He was the only survivor from the Arkankergen border post. Chelakh was confused and, according to the public prosecutor’s office, he was dressed in civilian clothing and carrying a pistol, a notebook computer and mobile phones from the dead soldiers.
Chelakh reportedly said that unknown assailants had attacked the border post at 5 a.m. on May 28. He had been on guard duty that night and, after hearing gunshots, he fled into the mountains. When he later returned to the camp, he found the bodies.
But who committed the attack? People coming from the Chinese side of the border? The Kazakhs have a deep-seated fear of the Chinese, and Arkankergen is in an area in which the Soviet Union and China fought a border war in 1969.
Or did drug traffickers attack the post? A synthetic drug known askrokodil, or “crocodile,” 10 times stronger than morphine, is reportedly smuggled into the country via the nearby Tarlauly Pass.
Or was it Islamists using the Arkankergen murders to send a message? Radical imams control the mosques in many cities in the south, and last year supposedly quiet Kazakhstan saw attacks on a monthly basis. In July, an explosion killed eight people near Almaty, the nation’s largest city and former capital, and in August, authorities found the bodies of eight men and women who had been stabbed to death. Soon thereafter, security personnel killed nine “terrorists,” and another five people were killed in an “anti-terror campaign” in September.
And now there is Arkankergen, which President Nazarbayev initially described as an “act of terror.” First he announced a day of national mourning, and then he sacked and replaced the head of the country’s border guard.
It took only six days for the authorities to announce that the sole survivor, Chelakh, had confessed to the murders — all 15 of them.
Suspicious Explanations
A video of this confession was posted online even before the preliminary investigation had been completed. It couldn’t have come from anyone but the Kazakh intelligence service.
“I was humiliated and insulted throughout my entire term of service,” Chelakh says in the video. “The last straw came when Kambar Aganas, a soldier, tried to hit me just because I woke him up for guard duty.” He was beside himself, Chelakh says in the video. Then he says he went to the weapons storage room and grabbed two AK-47 assault rifles, 50 rounds and a Makarov pistol.
First, he says in the video, he killed Aganas with a shot to the back of the neck, and then he murdered the rest as they lay in their beds. The captain was hiding behind a door, so he shot him through the door. Finally, he says, he walked over to the forestry business, killed the hunter with a volley of shots and then set the barracks on fire. He claims that he committed the crimes in a “state of disorientation.”
The mass murder on the border soon became the most important topic of conversation in Kazakhstan, and the government was determined to provide a quick explanation for what lay behind the grisly crime. It made the video public and declared Chelakh guilty on 15 counts of murder before a court had even been allowed to hear the case.
Still, Kazakh experts found many inconsistencies in Chelakh’s account. It was written in words that a confused killer would hardly have used, and there were many conflicting details. The experts also concluded that it would be almost impossible to shoot and kill a dozen men without any of them trying to flee.
There were other contradictions relating to when things happened, the weapons used and the ammunition. Residents of a nearby village reported seeing strangers at the time of the killings. Why didn’t Chelakh flee across the Chinese border? And why did the president replace the head of the border guard after the massacre?
A newsreader at Channel 31, a private Kazakh television station, quit rather than having to report on Chelakh’s confession, saying he believed it was fabricated. On the Internet, opposition members started referring to the case as a “show.”
Chelakh himself soon recanted his confession, claiming that his interrogators had dictated it to him. He said that they had threatened him with rape and promised him a mild sentence if he pled guilty. He identified the interrogators in a police line-up.
Good Neighbors
Chelakh is from Karagandy, an unattractive city on the Kazakh steppes, where temperatures fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit) in the winter and climb to 40 degrees Celsius in the summer. There were once close to 100 coal mines in the region, as well as many steel mills where gulag inmates worked at the behest of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. In 1995, when Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal acquired the most important steel mill, he closed most of the coal mines.
Chelakh grew up in one of the drab developments on the city’s outskirts, where his mother Svetlana still lives today. She is a simple 39-year-old woman who worked as a sales clerk before becoming a taxi driver. Of course she doesn’t believe that her son is guilty. What mother would? His letters, which she fetches from a cabinet, speak for themselves. “I was lucky,” he wrote in the awkward handwriting of a 19-year-old, “because I get along well with everyone. The officers are okay.” There is no mention of the brutal army hazing ritual known as “dedovshchina,” in which older soldiers bully younger conscripts.
“He once wanted to become a locomotive engineer,” his mother says, “but after the conscription meeting with the military commission, he dreamed of a career with the KNB.” The boy thought it was a good sign that he had received a draft notice saying he would be assigned to the KNB’s border guard division.
“The whole thing is made up,” says Vladimir, Chelakh’s 69-year-old grandfather. “They’re protecting the higher-ups and destroying the evidence.” When asked if the neighbors have shunned the family since learning of Chelakh’s suspected involvement in the mass murder, Vladimir laughs and says: “People come to our door almost every day and bring us money, sometimes 2,000 tenge (€10 or $13) and sometimes 5,000. We quickly accumulated $2,000, so we were able to travel to the prison to see Vladislav and look for lawyers.”
When they were unable to secure train tickets to Almaty, he says, the station manager got them the tickets himself. “Synok, my boy,” the manager reportedly said, “everyone here knows that your grandson is innocent.”
The fact that the crime took place at the border with China has prompted much speculation about other possible culprits, including drug traffickers or Islamists.
Why would a large percentage of the population believe that Vladislav Chelakh is innocent without knowing the details of the massacre in the Alatau Mountains?
“People are willing to believe anything, just not the official viewpoint,” says Sergei Perchalsky, a local journalist in Karagandy who is familiar with both sides: the people and the regime. He suggests we meet at an inconspicuous café in the center of town.
“In his need for admiration, OSCE announces a new victory every day. He brought the OSCE summit and the Asian Winter Games to Kazakhstan, and now Expo 2017,” Perchalsky says. “But these aren’t the victories of ordinary people.” Those people, he explains, are constantly forced to deal with Nazarbayev’s bureaucrats, his mayors, police officers and judges — all of whom are corrupt.
“Some 10,000 people are waiting for apartments in Karagandy, while government officials are selling off housing,” Perchalsky says. “Construction contracts can only be secured with substantial bribes, and when the interior minister recently visited the city, every policeman had to spend $200 for a suitable gift for the visiting dignitary — unofficially, of course.”
Members of the political elite tend to use weapons to settle disputes and get rid of members of the opposition. Nazarbayev’s former son-in-law is suspected of involvement in several murders, and a former prime minister has fled the country.
“You can buy anything in Kazakhstan,” says Perchalsky, “a driver’s license, a school diploma, a ministerial post or a contract killer. The practical aspect of it all is that you can settle any infraction of the law with money — any. And people know it. The Chelakhs, however, are poor and can’t even use this method to free their boy.”
Alarming Incidents
Serik Sarsenov, Chelakh’s 60-year-old attorney, has been practicing for a long time. He has defended journalists and participated in political murder trials. He spent 20 years with the police’s criminal investigation division, and he is all too familiar with how the police and the courts operate. And now he is defending Chelakh.
Sarsenov was given 40 hours to read the 53 binders of documents. And then the court denied all of his motions. He summoned witnesses, called for expert witnesses and requested the release of classified files. But it was all in vain. “This system,” says Sarsenov, “is like a cancer that has formed metastases everywhere.”
But if Chelakh is innocent, what happened at the Chinese border?
Journalist Guljan Yergalieva knows what they’re saying in political discussion groups in Almaty. The government has banned her newspaper, Svoboda Slova (“Freedom of Speech”), her website guljan.org was shut down in December, and tax investigators have searched her house.
“The last few months have been the worst in Kazakhstan’s more recent history,” Yergalieva says. “It began with the shooting of the 17 striking oil workers, when the police fired on fellow Kazakhs for the first time. Then came the Chelakh case.” The army is also deeply corrupt, she says, and the wealthy clans are getting more and more ruthless in their struggle for the country’s oil billions.
“The people surrounding Nazarbayev are terrified that they could lose control of the country,” Yergalieva continues. They don’t understand why the 72-year-old president is playing his wealthy daughters, sons-in-law and government officials off each other rather than designating a successor. “They want to force him out of office, like (former Soviet leader Nikita) Khrushchev or (former Russian President Boris) Yeltsin, by proving that Nazarbayev can no longer guarantee the stability of Kazakhstan,” Yergalieva says. “They are provoking all kinds of incidents, possibly including what happened in the Alatau Mountains.”
Still, perhaps something much simpler was behind the murders. Could border officials have been trying to cover up some sort of illegal dealings in the mountains? Or was the massacre the work of the intelligence service?
Those who had previously dismissed such explanations as conspiracy theories may have changed their tune after Dec. 25, when a military aircraft crashed near Shymkent in southern Kazakhstan, killing all 27 people on board. The dead included the new head of the border guard, who had been appointed after the massacre in the Alatau Mountains, and his top staff officers.
The new director had been trying to reform the corrupt agency. The plane, an Antonov An-72, is considered a reliable aircraft and had just been serviced. It was already a ball of flames when it crashed, as if there had been an explosion on board.
Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s autocratic ruler, has established a bizarre personality cult around himself and fostered an oil-rich country drenched in corruption and intrigue. “People are willing to believe anything,” says one Kazakh journalist, “just not the official viewpoint.”
Isolated in the steppes of Kazakhstan, Baikonur is the world’s oldest and largest cosmodrome. Now, the former Soviet military facility is being transformed into a purely civilian satellite launch pad. The country hopes it will become a second Kennedy Space Center.
The Kazakh cosmodrome in Baikonur.
It is 3 a.m. Wisps of fog drift across the vast, empty steppes of Kazakhstan. All of a sudden, there is a loud roar, and a blindingly bright beam of light penetrates the hazy sky.
“Go, Proton, go!” shouts Frank McKenna, as he stands on the observation deck with a Western delegation. Proton is the name of the rocket that is sluggishly pushing its way into the night sky from Launch Pad 39 carrying a tank filled with 500 tons of highly explosive fuel.
The normally affable American seems tense. In a sense, he is the commander of this spaceship. McKenna is the president of International Launch Services (ILS), which sells mission and launch services from his office outside Washington. His customer base is made up of 35 satellite operators from 15 countries, which purchase one-way tickets into orbit.
Although this launch in Baikonur is nothing out of the ordinary, there’s a lot on the line for McKenna. A series of problems have damaged his company’s reputation. Since 2006, the company has lost one satellite a year during launches, and now the space center is having to fight to regain its customers’ confidence. To this end, McKenna has established a comprehensive quality assurance plan.
McKenna has been in the rocket business for a number of years. His company finds new customers, negotiates agreements, supervises the production of rockets in a factory near Moscow and monitors launches in Baikonur. McKenna spends most of his time, though, dealing with coveted US export licenses, which are one of the tools used to keep US satellite technology out of the hands of spies.
With McKenna’s help, Russia is currently attempting to expand Baikonur’s central role in the satellite business. The Russian military is scheduled to have completely withdrawn from the complex by 2010. After that, the spaceport will be put to exclusively civilian use, which will make it possible to launch even more commercial satellites into space from Baikonur.
Old Enemies, New Friends
Suddenly a whisper passes through the room. A tall, older man is standing in the doorway. “Today’s launch isn’t really all that special,” growls Leonid Gurushkin, the Proton program’s technical director. Gurushkin has worked in Baikonur for more than 40 years, and he has monitored 300 flights into space. “We are the only ones who can launch rockets on an industrial scale.”
The world’s oldest and largest spaceport is almost three times the size of Luxembourg. It stretches across a barren wasteland of sand and sparse vegetation, a place where the skies are clear 300 days a year. The summers are brutally hot, and the winters bitterly cold. Crumbling barracks are interspersed among the 50 launch pads, and the endless network of streets within the compound is randomly peppered with roadblocks.
“In the past, collaborating with Americans would have been my worst nightmare,” says Gurushkin. Baikonur was once Russia’s most important base for launching intercontinental ballistic missiles. To keep the site as secret as possible, it was deliberately named after the small city of Baikonur more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) away. To this day, visitors are not permitted to bring GPS navigation devices onto the grounds.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the cosmodrome was suddenly located in a different country. Since then, Russia has been using the site as a tenant of Kazakhstan. Moscow is reportedly paying about $100 million (€80 million) a year in rent — or roughly what it costs to launch a single rocket.
A Kazakh man drinks water near a rocket part that fell onto the steppe after a space launch from the Baikonur cosmodrome.
In 1995, the Russians teamed up with the Lockheed Martin, the American aerospace and rocket-making company, to establish ILS. Both sides have benefited from the arrangement. “The joint venture was the best thing that could have happened to us,” says Gurushkin.
Business is expected to get even better once the military completes its withdrawal. In fact, after downing a few drinks, Gurushkin positively raves about what he calls a new golden age. He fantasizes about souvenir shops, tour buses and visitors from around the world — not unlike what you would find at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.
But until then, only paying customers and their guests are allowed to watch their satellites being launched at Baikonur. The Astra 1M, which is roaring into space on the Proton rocket today, weighs more than five tons. The satellite is like a transmission tower in space capable of broadcasting more than 70 television programs at the same time.
Once it reaches its geostationary orbit about 36,000 kilometers (22,360 miles) above Earth, the primary function of the Astra 1M will be to expand high-definition TV (HDTV) programming. Television viewers with a satellite dish will now be able to receive things like MTV video clips and other programming via the new satellite.
What Goes Up…
Back on Earth, the thinly populated Kazakh steppes are littered with spent rocket stages that lie about like discarded packaging. Even before the night ends, scrap metal dealers in all-terrain vehicles will be rushing about to the impact craters and recovering the scrap metal, which they will either sell or pound into cooking pots.
The spent rocket stages are not the only thing to rain back down on the Kazakh steppes. There is also the highly toxic rocket fuel, which might pose a health risk to children, according to the scientific journal Nature. Nonsense, says a Russian engineer in Baikonur. Rocket fuel, he claims, works like fertilizer. As he sees it, the rocket stage crash sites are so fertile that they practically turn into jungles.
…There are important questions must be asked: How did they come to Syria? What are those organizations that helped them to come Syria? How did they leave their homeland and enter Syria? What entrance gates they used in order to enter Syria?…
Batyr the Talking Elephant
Asian elephant gets art lesson
Text Color Key: blue: states which straddle the border between Europe and Asia; green: states not geographically in Europe, but closely associated politically. Source: Map blank by Ssolbergj; derivative work by Dbachmann
Map of the Council of Europe members. Member states are green and dark green and include dependencies. Source: Public Domain
European Union member states in blue. Source: 
The 19 Eurozone countries (whose currency is the Euro) in dark blue and purple (Latvia and Lithuania joined in 2014 and 2015 respectively are purple). Source: Public Domain
Relationships between various multinational European organizations. Source: Public Domain
to Kazakhstan 