Nazarbayev, your friend the dictator
«The leader is always right and those who doubt it are called to order by the National Security Committee (NSC) and the law»
“As a lone fighter, I am standing up against a monolith that possesses huge means and benefits from widespread complicity. I do not hope to defeat it, I simply hope to be heard.”
This lone fighter is Viktor Khrapunov, former mayor of Almaty and former Minister for Energy of Kazakhstan, currently forced into exile. From Switzerland where he now lives, he sets out an unrelenting indictment of the twenty-year reign of Nursultan Nazarbayev, a once young and dynamic president who, over the years, transformed into a cunning and merciless old dictator. Khrapunov narrates Nazarbayev’s regime without taboo: abusive privatisation of the country’s sub-soil riches, large-scale corruption, strangling the population’s freedoms, elimination of political opponents, palace intrigues and personality cult. And if the Western public knows so little about it, this is because the Kazakh leadership can count on the duplicity of numerous governments and multinationals. Heads of State, including Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, rush to roll out the red carpet for this leader with a misleading jovial demeanour. Despite him being for years under the scrutiny of many international justice monitors for receiving tremendous bribes in exchange for lucrative contracts.
Through this breath-taking tale, Viktor Khrapunov plunges us in the reality of Kazakhstan, this far-off and mysterious country, and enables us to better understand what happened in the post-Soviet world since the break-up of the USSR in 1991.
Viktor Khrapunov, sixty five years old, was mayor of Almaty (former capital and the biggest city of Kazakhstan), minister for Energy, East Kazakhstan governor and minister of Emergency situations. Forced into exile for six years by Nazarbayev’s regime, he currently lives in Geneva, Switzerland.
