‘[Nazarbayev has displayed] the toughness necessary to take the decisions to put the country on the right path.’

– TONY BLAIR IN A KAZAKH VIDEO PRAISING THE PRESIDENT OF THAT COUNTRY.

The former British Prime Minister makes a business out of providing consultancy to mostly unacceptable and disreputable clients. How else to explain the work he does for President el-Sisi in Egypt – who obtained his power by a military coup – or Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, not to mention the consultancy he provides, at great expense no doubt, to the unelected leaders of Gulf countries.

But perhaps the best-documented example of this touting of contacts built up over years of running a British government is seen in his consultancy to the Central Asian state of Kazakhstan. This last contract would lead many to ask if a former prime minister of a Western democracy should even be associating with someone with the record for human-rights abuse that Nursultan Nazarbayev has, let alone giving him public-relations advice.

Kazakhstan was gushing oil and gas in the late 2000s, when Tony Blair was building his consultancy. Sources of petrodollars had fallen into the hands of politicians who had varying degrees of illegitimacy to burnish their image. Blair made a beeline for Nursultan Nazarbayev – a politician whom he had cultivated over the previous decade when he was Prime Minister.

The darkness of the deal between Blair and Nazarbayev was set against a historic backcloth of pure innocence. How fitting that, in 2000, Blair entrusted into the arms of Nazarbayev his young son Leo, just six months old at the time, at Downing Street. The press cameras flashed as the thickset Kazakh bruiser, who was then sixty-two and had sired a number of children of his own, cradled the baby, Blair beaming as he looked on. The symbolism is said to have particular resonance for the highly family-conscious Central Asian public. Eleven years later, in 2011, when Blair had moved out of Downing Street, the man who held his child would be hiring him as image maker.

By this stage, Nazarbayev had removed ex-Soviet nuclear weapons from his soil. He may have looked to Blair to win him the Nobel Peace Prize. Moreover, Nazarbayev was showing his country round the world and wanted to be trumpeted as a moderniser. The rehabilitation of an old Soviet fixer as Third Way liberaliser (à la New Labour) was an elusive goal Blair could never deliver.

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 Kazhegeldin, 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.

So the payment was justified on the grounds that it was in the US government’s interest. Giffen pleaded guilty to one low-level offence and received a nominal penalty. A former minister in the Nazarbayev government, Zamanbek K. Nurkadilov, said that Nazarbayev should answer allegations that Kazakh officials had accepted millions of US dollars in bribes from an intermediary for US oil firms in the 1990s. This openness was a grave mistake, since, as we have seen, three weeks before the 2005 presidential election Nurkadilov was assassinated.

The regime makes no attempt to appear acceptable to its own people, let alone the outside world. An American diplomatic cable in 2010, released by WikiLeaks, reported that in 2007 ‘President Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, celebrated his 41st birthday in grand style. At a small venue in Almaty, he hosted a private concert with some of Russia’s biggest pop-stars. The headliner, however, was Elton John, to whom he reportedly paid one million pounds for this one-time appearance.’2

Kazakh state businesses are routinely run by favoured cronies of the President. Two of these businesses are in natural resources, a sector where the country is very rich, and include Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) and the Kazakh mining company Kazakhmys. The former is run by two Kyrgyz oligarchs and one Uzbek, the latter by a Kazakh. Both companies have been listed on the London Stock Exchange, bringing Kazakhstan to the attention of the international capital markets.

Their fates have been very different. ENRC became mired in corruption allegations over African deals, and is now the subject of a probe by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office. Its leaders have been forced to drop their listing and throw themselves at the mercy of Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan. The disastrous adventure has tarnished Nazarbayev’s dream of a modern Kazakh presence in international markets. Moreover, the President’s defensiveness in bringing the company back home to Kazakhstan and out of the public limelight testifies to a fear of scrutiny by democratic agencies. Kazakhmys has kept its nose clean and London continues to invest in this Kazakh poster child.

Nazarbayev meanwhile has been accused of transferring at least $1 billion worth of oil revenues to his private bank accounts in other countries and his family controls many other key enterprises in Kazakhstan. Those working in the country say that the Nazarbayev regime is in thrall to a coterie of wealthy entrepreneurs and friends of the President. One observer, a lawyer advising Kazakh companies, said that no one in the country obtains wealth except by paying him and his retinue a proportion. They must likewise serve his interests.

One Russian adviser to a former senior minister in a Nazarbayev government told us: ‘All of the big business people in Kazakhstan are close to the President. They can exist only if they are close to the President. Likewise Mukhtar Ablyazov [the allegedly corrupt former head of BTA Bank] became a billionaire in a few years because he stayed close to the President.’

Nazarbayev is not the only Kazakh leader to use Tony Blair for his political purposes. Blair is also used by Prime Minister Karim Massimov when he wants to sway the President in favour of one of his proposals; Nazarbayev holds Blair in such high esteem that Blair’s imprimatur boosts Massimov’s standing. Massimov reciprocates the favour, housing Blair’s five-strong local team in his offices. He uses them to scrutinise his proposals before forwarding them on to the President as recommended by Blair. Blair was particularly helpful to Massimov when he sought to raise the profile of Islamic banking in Kazakhstan, leading to a presidential visit to the Gulf and increasing amounts of Gulf money flowing to his country.

WHAT DOES BLAIR DO FOR HIS MONEY?

Blair evidently has his work cut out to make the unacceptable acceptable. Yet try it he does. We see Blair acting as an amanuensis for Nazarbayev, writing his speeches, being the door-opener to international leaders who otherwise would not pick up the phone. There are also the consultants with a team of administrators to staff the presidential office and other offices of state.

As Nazarbayev’s publicist, Blair appeared in a video, a panegyric of praise for the country’s economy and its leader that does not mention once any issues of human rights abuse. In this dreary neo-Stalinist propaganda video, he says that Nazarbayev had displayed ‘the toughness necessary to take the decisions to put the country on the right path, but also a certain degree of subtlety and ingenuity that allowed him to manoeuvre in a region that is fraught with difficulties, and frankly wedged between two great powers, China and Russia.’

Blair says, ‘It is a country almost unique I would say in its cultural diversity and the way it brings different faiths together, different cultures together.’ The film features extensive interviews with Nazarbayev and Western energy executives praising him, as well as fawning interventions from Blair. ‘In the work that I do there, I’ve found them really smart people, capable, very determined, and very proud of their country,’ he says.

The film is one hour and seven minutes long and it is hard to see who might have the endurance to view the whole thing. It is an endless parade of talking heads fawning over the great leader. Blair looks pinched and ill, and does not speak with his usual brio; he is looking down, speaking carefully in a hoarse, hushed voice. He looks rather as though he hopes no one he knows will ever see the thing. Several people have pointed out that he seems uneasy rather than displaying the confident and aggressive presence that Nazarbayev must have thought he was buying. He looks ashamed of it. As he should be.

The video, entitled In the Stirrups of Time and made by Kazakh satellite channel Caspionet, features photos and moving footage of the President and the country and clips of interviews with international business figures and Kazakh ministers.3 Blair is also filmed sitting at a long table at Nazarbayev’s right-hand side, a position normally reserved for subservient ministers. Blair performed the same publicist role in a speech in Astana in May 2012. This is reported on Blair’s website – which does not make clear to whom the speech was made. It puffs up the President again, though in slightly more measured tones:

The opportunity and the challenge for Kazakhstan in this changing global landscape is very clear. Over the past twenty years since emerging from the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan has grown its income per head of population more than tenfold, taking it from Third World to Second World status, a remarkable achievement. On that day of independence in 1991, it was the world’s fourth-largest nuclear-weapons power and it has since renounced and dismantled them, a great example to the world, as President Obama recently noted …

However, the challenge is also clear. As Kazakhstan moves to the next level of development – economic, social and political – it has to evolve and reform. This is the pattern the world over and also part of that changing geopolitical landscape …

The value to Nazarbayev is buying both Blair’s reputation as a moderniser and his connections, even if these are growing colder with each new assignment he acquires. But Blair appears to show the way forward, appears to be impatient with those who block change, appears to be able to sell and fix images.

In his role as a door opener, especially to the British political scene, Blair’s hand was seen in the visit made by David Cameron, the first by a sitting British head of government to Kazakhstan. In the course of the visit, which took place on 30 June 2013, Nazarbayev reputedly quipped, in answer to a question about human rights raised by Cameron, that he would have voted for him if he had a vote in Britain.

We see Blair’s role as reputation builder and fixer for the unacceptable face of Kazakhstan in glorious Technicolor following the previously discussed killing of at least fifteen striking workers on 16 December 2011. As described above, the massacre was perpetrated by Kazakh police on oil workers at the western town of Zhanaozen and was prompted by unpaid wages and poor working conditions.

The President was apparently beside himself about the damage that would be done to the country’s reputation. Nazarbayev was preparing to give a speech at the University of Cambridge that month and wanted a form of words to explain the blot on his record, so sought the advice of Blair. Blair wrote a letter to Nazarbayev in July 2012 on notepaper headed ‘Office of Tony Blair’ suggesting the President insert several key passages into the speech in order for it to be acceptable to the ‘Western media’.

The letter (reported in the Daily Telegraph) stated,

The Telegraph reported that Blair enclosed two paragraphs of about five hundred words for Nazarbayev to insert into his speech. The newspaper said, ‘The words written by Mr Blair but spoken by Mr Nazarbayev with some changes were widely picked up at the time. They were used to portray Mr Nazarbayev as a visionary leader who had improved living standards in his homeland.’

In his delivered speech Nazarbayev gave the Blair script, saying, ‘These are questions of democracy and human rights, which must be properly addressed and have energy devoted to them … I understand and hear what is being said of us by our critics. But we would like this to be done with a certain sense of balance and an objective valuation of the achievements of my country.’

Blair’s letter to Nazarbayev ended with his offering ‘very best wishes’, saying, ‘I look forward to seeing you in London! Yours ever, Tony Blair.’

Blair’s letter congratulating the regime on making ‘enormous progress’ was written just a few months after the show trial began of thirty-seven workers and political activists who were arrested following the massacre. They were accused of participating in mass unrest, the destruction and theft of private property and the use of force against government representatives. Thirteen defendants received multi-year prison terms, with one, Roza Tuletaeva, receiving a sentence of seven years in a prison colony from which she was eventually released in November 2014. Sixteen defendants were given suspended sentences, and five were convicted but pardoned. Just three of those on trial were acquitted.

What we do know is that Blair has many fine words of advice that the President is both happy to have spoken by his consultant and equally happy to ignore himself. In this vein, Blair told Astana university students in 2012,

The status quo is not an option. There has to be the development of proper systems of democratic participation, with competitive political parties; a responsible but free press; adherence to its hard-won reputation for religious tolerance; judicial and other reforms to enhance the rule of law; and an attack not just on corruption but on the systems in areas like public procurement that sustain it. The recent events at Zhanaozen, with the sharp focus on issues to do with human rights and single-industry towns, emphasise the need for systems that instil confidence. All of these issues have been widely canvassed in speeches and statements by President Nazarbayev and in the interaction with the EU, US and other countries who wish Kazakhstan well and want to see a process of steady political evolution put in place. The challenge is actually to do the reforms – to do them sensibly, preserving the core stability of the country; but do them also in such a way that the reform programme shows a decisive direction of travel.

Blair will frequently refer to the strength of the country’s economy, noting that in the twenty-five years since Kazakhstan set up a separate country, its commercial sector has grown dramatically. But Kazakhstan is rich in natural resources such as coal, gas and precious metals, so the collapse in the oil price and in precious metals and commodities will hit it badly. In 2013, Kazakhstan had a gross domestic product of $149 billion and a population of 16.3 million. This is minuscule for a country whose land area is greater than that of Western Europe. In the video mentioned above, In the Stirrups of Time, Blair talks about the country’s ‘extraordinary economic potential’.

Ken Olisa, the former nonexecutive director of ENRC, the Kazakh energy company that was shamed into leaving the London financial market after disclosures of alleged corruption, has noted that ‘every element in the periodic table lies under the Kazakh soil.’4 While prices lie low and the country’s economic system is dogged by corruption and bureaucracy, those metals will stay where they are, rather than benefiting the Kazakh people.

While part of Blair’s role in Kazakhstan is making the President look good, part is what may be called ‘networking’. That is finding and making friends and putting his friends together, on the basis that they will reward him as well as themselves. Hence, we see him putting the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi with Nazarbayev. It is rumoured that Nazarbayev has invested much of his personal wealth in the oil-rich state.

Sources in Astana have told the Daily Telegraph that Nazarbayev has given the Abu Dhabi royal family a ninety-nine-year lease on a huge hunting reserve in the south of Kazakhstan, and the Arab leader has reciprocated with a luxury home on an island off the Gulf coast. President Nazarbayev has been a guest of honour at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. As a result of the contact, a regular flight has been established between the two countries. Tony Blair the fixer will have been appreciated.

Blair’s contribution to the President is his capacity to buy influence, says Steve LeVine, author of The Oil and the Glory, a book about corruption in Kazakhstan. ‘Think about the contacts that you get with a former British prime minister. Why wouldn’t he want them if he can have them?’

Blair also has a role as matchmaker for friends and clients. This long preceded his consultancy, when he was still Prime Minister, but one might speculate that he had his eye on a future commercial relationship. How else to explain Blair’s facilitating the link-up between Sir Dick Evans, the former chairman of the UK defence firm BAE Systems – a company that had been investigated for bribery in Saudi Arabia – and Nazarbayev while the Kazakh was on a state visit to the UK? BAE systems was run by Evans. Two years after Evans ceased to be chairman, Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General during Blair’s administration between 2001 and 2007, pulled the investigation by the Serious Fraud Office into bribes involving the Al-Yamama contract, for $40 billion worth of military plane sales to Saudi Arabia. Blair cited the threat by Saudi Arabia to withhold intelligence about Middle Eastern terrorism from the UK as the reason for closing down the investigation.

Blair answered Nazarbayev’s need for an industrialist by putting him together with Evans and, in 2006, the bluff northerner became chairman of the Kazakh state holding company, Samruk, which owns most of the major companies in the country, including the national rail and postal service, the state oil and gas company, the state uranium company, the airline Air Astana and numerous financial groups. In 2008 Evans was replaced as chairman, while remaining the ‘independent’ director. Evans oversaw the restructuring of Air Astana for the Kazakh government in 2005 using the services of the consultancy McKinsey, with BAE having a significant minority shareholding in the company.

Evans told the Spectator magazine in February 2008, ‘I was introduced to Nazarbayev on one of his early trips to the UK by Tony Blair while I was still at BAE.’ That meeting led to BAE helping to restructure aviation in Kazakhstan and taking 50 per cent of Air Astana, which is a joint venture with Samruk-Kazyna, the country’s sovereign wealth fund and investment agency. ‘The President was pressing hard for me to come, and he wore me down. I was over here on a review of the airline, we had lunch at the palace and he said, “We want to talk to you again about Samruk,” and there and then at that lunch, after a previous nine months’ warm-up, I said, “Fine, OK, I’ll do it.” I don’t think I could’ve said yes had I not seen a lot of them and got to know them quite well.’

Evans is less than flattering about the country’s top officials. ‘It’s a lot easier for guys like myself to question the very senior people here about why they are doing something in a particular way. The whole culture here, for local people, is not to do that. When you go down underneath the top level of government, there’s what you might call a permafrost of the Soviet bureaucracy which is alive and very well.’ Evans was re-elected as an independent director on the Samruk board in January 2014.

It’s not clear what ‘reforms’ or ‘progress’ Blair constantly refers to. In 2011 Samruk-Kazyna hired Lord Mandelson, architect of Blair’s election victories, to give two speeches at its events. At one of the conferences in Astana, in October 2010, Mandelson reportedly lavished praise on Samruk-Kazyna, saying, ‘I want to stress a special role [it] played as a saviour of the world economy.’

Blair’s overall goal is to assist Kazakh President Nazarbayev in presenting his country as modern and dynamic. The moderniser who understands international markets and the challenges emerging countries face will lend allure to the little-known ‘-stan’, made famous by Borat, in the person of actor-comedian Sasha Baron Cohen, as lingering in the dark ages. In the public mind, Kazakhstan is easily confused with Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan. The common thread between all these ‘-stans’ is their addiction to despots. These leaders enabled them to surface as independent states from the Soviet Union, but they would be an obstacle to their becoming members of the wider global community. Jonathan Aitken, the writer of a fawning biography of Nazarbayev, Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan, recalls in his book a press conference in November 2006, when the British Prime Minister and the President stood side by side in Downing Street, and Nazarbayev was evidently discomfited by the Borat caricature. When asked to comment, he said, ‘The film was created by a comedian, so let’s laugh at it … any publicity is good publicity.’5

CLAIMS AND COUNTERCLAIMS

Messages claiming to evoke morality emanated from Kazakhstan long before Blair came to the aid of the party. The President, for example, has sought to trumpet his country’s religious freedom. He has also boasted about its modernity. One has only to make the journey to the extraordinary recently built political capital of Astana, with its raft of glass-and-concrete buildings. The British architect Norman Foster was part of a team that designed what became a new city. It includes the world’s largest tent, the 150-metre-high Khan Shatyr, trumpeted by a leading architectural paper as ‘a spectacular architectural and engineering achievement’. The building was designed by Foster + Partners, the well-known architectural practice of Lord Norman Foster. The message is one of hubristic pride at any price, paid for out of the country’s massive oil revenues.

Coupled with the modernity and excess is the claim to be tolerant of religious diversity. Nazarbayev even commissioned a £36 million Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, designed by Foster, where religious leaders from around the world could meet and find common ground. The rhetoric does not connect with the reality.

In October 2011, the Independent reported that human-rights activists in Kazakhstan were observing an increasingly hostile attitude towards religious groups, and raised serious questions about Nazarbayev’s recruitment of Tony Blair as an adviser.6 Nongovernmental organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, on the other hand, have called on Blair to use his role in Kazakhstan to put pressure on Nazarbayev to stop repression of religious communities and to implement democratic reforms rather than simply to polish the image of an increasingly autocratic state.

Blair’s office told journalist Ken Silverstein that he is ‘supporting the development of the reforms’ under way and that, while he was ‘well aware of the criticisms made of the Kazakhstan government … there are also visible signs of progress’. Local journalists seeing the reality of life in the country and who live under Nazarbayev’s yoke dispute this vehemently.

Strangely, perhaps, for a country that has the founder of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation as a consultant, Kazakhstan is less than friendly to its Christian minority, although most pressure is exerted on its Muslim minorities, some of whom are revealing alarming fundamentalist tendencies, not something favoured by its President. In a move marking a reversal from claimed religious toleration, in 2011 Nazarbayev proposed a law that was later adopted by the parliament imposing stringent restrictions on religious practices. Religious groups were required to reregister or face closure. The initiative was explained as an attempt to combat Islamic extremism. However, under the new law many minority religious groups, including many Christians, were deemed illegal. In order to exist on a local level, a group must have more than fifty members; on a regional level, more than five hundred; on the national level, more than five thousand. It is estimated that two-thirds of currently existing religious groups have been forced to close down. ‘Kazakhstan has repeatedly gone through the motions of introducing restrictions on religion during the two decades since it gained independence. Those efforts have been routinely quashed in the final stages amid vocal international criticism,’ wrote Peter Leonard, in the Huffington Post in September 2011.

Activists say that minority groups consistently face harassment. ‘This new law has simply legalised the current practice … of persecuting unregistered minority religious groups and limiting missionary activity,’ said rights activist Ninel Fokina, head of the Almaty Helsinki Committee as quoted in the World Post in September 2011. Fokina said authorities had been openly speaking about the need for a purge in the religious sphere. ‘I believe that out of the 4,500 religious groups currently in existence, barely 1,500 will remain,’ she said. Fokina said the new rules would also greatly complicate the life of even relatively large Christian Protestant communities, such as Lutherans, Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Nazarbayev’s repressive activity contradicts Blair’s claim in the video In the Stirrups of Time, where Blair is filmed saying, ‘It’s a country that is almost unique I would say in its cultural diversity and the way it brings different faiths together, and cultures together. In the work that I do there, I’ve found them really smart people, capable, very determined and very proud of their country.’

WHAT EXTERNAL AGENTS COMMENT ON BLAIR IN KAZAKHSTAN

Few people are fooled by Blair’s claims and Nazarbayev’s boasts. Criticism has followed Blair’s role in Kazakhstan. This has come not least from those inside the country.

In January 2012, fifty-two Kazakh youth activists urged Blair to back away from this deal in the opposition newspaper Respublika, after the massacre of at least fifteen oil workers referred to above. They told Blair that ‘the leadership of Kazakhstan in peacetime opened fire on unarmed citizens. Such methods have been the bloody practice in our country as soon as you became an adviser to President Nursultan Nazarbayev.’ Their letter was headed ‘Blood of the people on your hands, Blair.’

‘You are an adviser to the leadership of Kazakhstan on political issues. Why in the last seven months has power been deaf to the demands of oil workers?’ demanded the letter, published on 28 December. ‘And now it has opened fire on its citizens. Many were killed and many more are missing.’

None of the fifty-two people who signed the letter were well-known opposition leaders. The authorities responded by saying that police feared for their lives and even then they only fired into the air.

As the number of voices calling for Blair to intervene increases, one would expect that the pressure he feels to encourage Nazarbayev to make democratic reforms does too. Whether he ever attempts to guide the President away from repression, we cannot, of course, know. Bloomberg has called Mr Blair’s consultancy in Kazakhstan his ‘most controversial, and potentially most lucrative’.

DOES BLAIR GIVE VALUE FOR MONEY?

Blair may be a consummate moderniser and builder of images but are his efforts in Kazakhstan bearing fruit? Cynics, of which there is no shortage inside the country and outside, will say that, as long as Kazakh oil keeps flowing, enabling his bills to get paid, he will remain the salesman of the unacceptable.

Kairat Abusseitov, Kazakhstan’s ambassador to Britain, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 29 October 2011, has said,

This is quite odd. The ambassador seems to be saying that Blair is there to burnish the President’s image, to ‘help him show how he is reforming his country’, to ‘emphasise the key strategic and intelligence role his country played during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan’, to ‘help him highlight his role’ in peace and religious-tolerance initiatives. Blair himself, however, describing his role there in a 2012 speech, spoke in very different terms: ‘The work my team does within the Policy Advisory Group, and outside experts, focuses on areas such as decentralisation, public procurement, judicial and other reforms to do with the rule of law, precisely those types of things identified by the EU and others as necessary for Kazakhstan’s future development. It is important for Kazakhstan that the reform programme set out by President Nazarbayev succeeds. It is important for the world.’

So whose version do we believe? Blair, who says he is doing policy work, or the Ambassador, who says Blair is there to burnish the President’s image?

There will be those who point to the closeness between Kazakhstan’s wealthy and the British aristocracy and power elite as a sign of a triumph for Blair and his entourage. Rich Kazakhs are increasingly present in London, not least through Prince Andrew, who counts the glamorous energy tycoon Goga Ashkenazi – who lives in a £28 million house in Holland Park, west London – among his friends. She has a young son with Timur Kulibayev, the Kazakh tycoon who bought Prince Andrew’s former home Sunninghill Park for £15 million. It has been widely speculated that this was a very generous price for the property, a fact denied by the parties to the deal. Kulibayev also reportedly spent £44 million on a row of four houses in Belgravia, central London. Kulibayev is said to control 90 per cent of the Kazakh oilfields.7 He stands accused of money laundering, but cannot be prosecuted, having been given immunity in 2011.8

The modernisation of Kazakhstan has been a constant preoccupation of the President, and Blair has discussed with Nazarbayev at Davos how the country can meet its 2050 target of putting Kazakhstan into the group of the world’s top thirty developed economies. A local press report of the talks said that ‘consultation [presumably with Blair] would play an important role’ in achieving this target. London is expected to be the financial hub for future Kazakh companies seeking international capital. The country has the challenge of explaining the ignominy of the departure of Eurasian Natural Resources from London amid a corruption scandal. Perhaps Blair will be involved in showing how that happened and why the country’s companies have learned their lessons.

The severest criticism has come from Labour supporters who once believed in Blair. Mike Harris, for example, a former Labour political adviser and strong supporter of Tony Blair as PM, even during the Iraq War, feels a sharp sense of betrayal at Blair’s activities on behalf of dictators, and especially Nazarbayev. He told us, ‘The man who ushered in the post-Westphalian era, the anti-Kissinger who prevented the genocide of Kosovan Muslims and defended the rights of Sierra Leoneans, is now the counsel of oil-rich dictators.’ Harris widens his attack to any connections the former Prime Minister makes with other nondemocratic countries. ‘Any association, however tangential, with our politicians, is hugely symbolic for authoritarian regimes in helping them legitimise their rule within their countries. That Blair is involved is deeply depressing. The majority of despots are not household names – for a reason. Well-paid lobbyists tempt journalists over to write puff pieces on the burgeoning tourism trade. Or outfits like the European Azerbaijan Society use MPs like Mark Field or Mike Gapes to help promote the country’s interests with little reference to human rights violations.’

BLAIR IN AZERBAIJAN

The promise of a role in Azerbaijan’s energy boom may be what drew Tony Blair to a country whose President, Ilham Aliyev, locks up his critics and shuts down newspapers. We learn from a WikiLeaked cable in January 2010 that ‘observers in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, often note that today’s Azerbaijan is run in a manner similar to the feudalism found in Europe during the Middle Ages: a handful of well-connected families control certain geographic areas, as well as certain sectors of the economy.’

Blair’s interest appears to have been the Southern Gas corridor pipeline, which runs from Azerbaijan through Turkey and across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. This pipeline, which frees European countries from Russian control of gas distribution, involves Azerbaijan, Turkey, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Iraq, Egypt, Uzbekistan and Iran. The pipeline is expected to bring at least 60 billion cubic metres of gas to Europe and is now in the process of being built. One source described the pipeline as ‘one of the most complex gas value chains ever developed in the world. Stretching over 3,500 kilometres, crossing seven countries and involving more than a dozen major energy companies, it is comprised of several separate energy projects representing a total investment of approximately US$45 billion.’9

It is understood that Blair is involved with an organisation known as the Southern Corridor Advisory Council, whose key interest is protecting Western emerging and construction companies. The Southern Corridor Advisory Council has three directors, namely Blair, Peter Sutherland and Hans Genscher.

Blair appears here to be acting as a representative – whether formal or informal is not clear – of the British government, one of whose largest energy corporations, BP, is building the project in conjunction with a number of other European companies. Alan Riley, professor of law at London’s City University and an expert in international energy law, says that Blair is protecting ‘the strategic interest of the British state who regard the pipeline as a “key element in their energy security”.’ This coincides with the discreet involvement in the committee of Peter Sutherland, a former executive chairman of BP and former chairman of Goldman Sachs. Hans Dietrich Genscher, a former German foreign minister, is thought to be protecting the interests of the German companies participating in the construction of the pipeline.

Azerbaijan has had an allure for Blair since 2009, when he visited the country and met the President. He observed that Aliyev had a ‘very positive and exciting vision for the future of the country’. It was noted in the course of a diplomatic cable in 2009 that Azeri foreign policy had a ‘helpful bias toward integration with the West’. The same could not be said of the President’s internal practice.

Azerbaijan’s big presidential election in 2013, according to the Washington Post, was ‘anticipated to be neither free nor fair’. During the election campaign, President Aliyev, who took over from his father ten years previously, stepped up intimidation of activists and journalists, and they complained about free-speech restrictions and one-sided state media coverage. The BBC’s headline for its story on the election read ‘Azerbaijan election: the pre-determined president’.10

But, said the Washington Post on 9 October 2013,

This has not fazed Blair, who has visited the country to make well-remunerated speeches for politicians who are close to Aliyev. He was reported to receive £100,000 for one speech in the country. The country has also been a generous supporter of a Westminster-based pressure group called the European Azerbaijan Society.

The final piece of Blair’s Central Asian portfolio is Mongolia, where he is reported to have burgeoning business interests. Blair has indeed signed a contract to advise the country’s leaders on ‘good governance’. Mongolia is a landlocked country, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, east and west. Ulaanbaatar, the capital and also the largest city, is home to about 45 per cent of the population.

It was a dirt-poor nation, but it is about to become more like a conventional Blair client – very rich, thanks to vast copper and gold mines in the Gobi Desert.

 

Wherever one looks in Blair’s portfolio of business interests, one encounters the same problem: potential conflicts of interest. When Blair sits on the board of the Southern Corridor Advisory Council is he rooting for Britain – as you might expect a former prime minister to be – or is he rooting for Blair and hoping to receive a fee from a commercial interest such as an oil company? Conflicts in Kazakhstan are not dissimilar: when Blair uses contacts he has made as Prime Minister to promote the interests of a dictatorship – albeit not the world’s worst – should the remuneration be scrutinised by the British state that he served? Perhaps the cash-strapped state that Blair led to economic crisis deserves a portion of his earnings.

In any event, the shameless deference Blair shows to politicians who flout every democratic principle and lock up opponents and who are brazenly corrupt is sharply at odds with values he once espoused. Blair’s nonchalance about the claims of the striking miners mown down by Kazakh police sits uncomfortably with a man who once laid claim to principle. Autocrats claim the right to use their looted money to buy what advice they can. The seller of such advice must be regarded as a public-relations agent for a disreputable client.

Where Blair is conflicted out of the market is that he wants to be seen as principled to some audiences – namely the Middle Eastern parties – and a mere salesman of messages to another – namely a bunch of corrupt dictators. Cynicism of that kind infects each and every Blair enterprise. Not least his offer of help to Asia’s international pariah regime.