Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1998, Pages 45, 114-117

Central Asia

Between Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan: The Politics of Water

By Gordon Feller

In Soviet times, it was easy. Kyrgyzstan's mountains held the water and Uzbekistan's fields the cotton.

So, year after year, the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) in Moscow ordered Kyrgyzstan to empty most of its reservoirs to water Uzbekistan's plantations of "white gold." The Uzbek harvest filled the Kremlin's coffers and Moscow made sure that Kyrgyzstan received just enough in compensation subsidies to keep the operation going.

After the Soviet Union fell apart at the end of 1991, and both states gained their independence, the deal lost much of its appeal to the Kyrgyz. They continued to provide their water, free of charge, to Uzbekistan, but now received no subsidies from Moscow. By contrast, Uzbekistan began to grow richer, since it no longer had to deliver any of its cotton profits to the Kremlin.

Relations between the two neighbors grew strained as Kyrgyzstan began to demand payment for its water. Uzbekistan balked and threatened to cut off gas and coal deliveries. After some acrimony, the two countries reached an informal barter agreement three years ago, under which Uzbekistan agreed to provide Kyrgyzstan with winter heat and electricity in exchange for water during the summer growing season.

But Duishen Mamatkhanov, director of Kyrgyzstan's Institute of Hydroenergy, says the arrangement must be revised. Speaking to RFE/RL in Bishkek, Mamatkhanov said the time has come to treat water as "any other valuable commodity—something that can be bought and sold, for a real market price." According to Mamatkhanov, it is absurd that Kyrgyzstan is currently unable to freely dispose of its most abundant and valuable resource.

Of the 50,000 million cubic meters of water that Kyrgyzstan's lakes and reservoirs collect each year, only 12,000 million cubic meters remain in the country, he noted. While Uzbekistan uses Kyrgyzstan's water to irrigate 1,600,000 hectares of fields each summer, Kyrgyzstan itself can irrigate less than half a million hectares for its own agricultural needs, Mamatkhanov said. And because most of the water is delivered to Uzbekistan in the summer, Kyrgyzstan must wait until autumn and winter to produce its own hydroelectric energy.

This is both costly and inefficient, forcing Kyrgyzstan to rely on imported electricity from Uzbekistan to make up the shortfall. Mamatkhanov also said that Uzbekistan makes no contribution to his country's upkeep of dams and mountain weather stations which monitor water levels.

For all of these reasons, Kyrgyzstan wants to rework the arrangement, to allow it to keep more of its water and sell the rest for hard cash. It wants the same principle to be established with its other neighbor, Kazakhstan, which also siphons off Kyrgyzstan's water, albeit in lesser quantities.

Mamatkhanov and his colleagues have already put a price on each cubic meter of their precious water and drawn up a sealed plan which has been put before President Askar Akayev.

So far, Akayev has taken no action. The matter is delicate, and the president and the government are loath to comment. Deputy Prime Minister Karimsher Abdimunov told the press in Bishkek that "the matter will be resolved in a civilized way."

Opposition legislator Dooronbek Sadyrbayev warns that unless it wants to freeze this winter, Kyrgyzstan will have to come to a friendly agreement with its neighbors, especially Uzbekistan.

"If the Uzbeks want to play rough," he told the press, "there are a hundred ways they can make our life difficult, starting with new customs duties, as a small example."

But with water as its main exportable resource, Kyrgyzstan has little choice but to push for a new arrangement, observers say, though all acknowledge that this Soviet tangle won't be easy to undo.

"How Things Change—Or Don't—in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan"

There used to be a popular saying in Communist times. It wasn't painted on any walls, but everyone knew it and many people lived by it. The saying was, "If you don't steal from the State, then you're stealing from your own family."

The higher up you were, the more you could, and usually did, steal. In this respect, little has changed in today's Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. At the lower levels, petty corruption is a way of life, and the higher up you go, the bigger the thefts get.

As in Soviet times, citizens do not feel they have a stake in the State. The State is not something to build up, something to feel proud of, or something that will protect you. There is no use contributing to the state, because the state is "them."

And "they" are officials who owe their positions of power to their superiors, in a vertical line stretching right up to the president. They do not care about what is below them, and they do not care that much about the country. They care primarily about lining their own pockets and about pleasing their superiors.

Sadly, it appears that the presidents of both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan feel threatened by a civil society. Instead of supporting independent institutions and separation of powers, instead of building a state of laws that everyone could have a stake in, they have consolidated their personal power to the maximum degree and attempted to organize society in a pyramid below them.

Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Kyrgyzstan's President Askar Akayev portray themselves as the fathers of post-Soviet independence in their respective countries. And both say they must remain in power in order to safeguard that independence. Little mention is made of the fact that both men were leading Communist officials in Soviet times, men who shaped and benefited from the former regime, rather than lifelong independence fighters.

National histories have been rewritten into hagiographies of the president and his illustrious ancestors. Ten years ago, as Communists, Akayev and Nazarbayev were the sons of workers and shepherds, but now both trace their lineage to the great Chinghiz (Genghis) Khan. They have started to behave like great patriarchs and their acolytes play along.

The head of the National Statistical Office in Bishkek boasts that he is no longer overseen by parliament. Rather, he answers only to the president. This, he says, "guarantees freedom, because the president only wants objective statistics." In the same vein, a vice president and former economics minister responsible for introducing the national currency says he is not the father of any reforms. 'No, President Akayev is our father," he says, and points to a large presidential portrait on the wall.

One of Kazakhstan's most valuable archeological treasures is an ancient warrior's costume made of 4,000 separate gold pieces. It is called the Golden Man and is the pride of the nation. Under the Communists, the Golden Man was considered too fragile to be displayed, so a copy was put on view in the Central State Museum. The original Golden Man still cannot be seen by the general public, for he has been transferred to the president's palace, into the president's own personal treasury.

The line between the president's real family and the nation has become blurred. Two of the most glaring, but by no means unique, examples are the fact that President Nazarbayev's daughter runs a major television network, while her husband runs the Almaty tax police.

The opposition figures who have not been silenced say that countries like the United States, by far the largest foreign investor in Kazakhstan, used to care about democracy in Central Asia. Washington's first ambassadors after independence held weekly meetings with the opposition, made note of their ideas, held educational seminars and kept the embassy doors open to them. But now Washington's emissaries, it is said, are more interested in facilitating business deals than dealing with the democrats. Other Western powers are said to behave in the same way.

Khasen Kozha-Akhmet, who founded Kazakhstan's Azat citizens' movement in 1990 and himself spent time in jail under the Communists, puts it more colorfully.

"While the Americans were teaching us how to use the knife and fork," he says, "President Nazarbayev came up and took our steak away. And now he's eating it all by himself."

Kozha-Akhmet warns that betting on an all-powerful individual instead of a stable democratic system could have major pitfalls for the West—as he astutely noted just before the resignation of Prime Minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin, who was widely seen as the patron of Western investment in Kazakhstan.

"Self-anointed leaders have a tendency to disappear from the scene with the state treasury, or else they end up hanging from a lamppost eventually," he said.

Kazhegeldin is gone, but the president remains. And he, to paraphrase the saying, is having his steak and eating it too. Nazarbayev disposes of his country's vast natural resources as he sees fit and no one questions his judgment. He lavishes hundreds of millions of dollars on a new capital while millions of his people struggle to feed their families.

Laws mean little and neither does the constitution, but those who complain are hounded into silence. The official media, meanwhile, sing paeans to the president.

Natalia Ablova, director of the Kyrgyz-American Human Rights Bureau in Bishkek, says there is some hope. She notes that despite all the government pressure, a civil society is forming in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. She says many young people, even schoolchildren, see the connection between human rights and a prospering economy. Ablova believes that members of the younger generation understand that they must not depend on the government for handouts, but earn their own living. And to do so, they need rights—rights as employees, rights as entrepreneurs, and the right to live as citizens of a law-based state. The rights, she says, must come before prosperity.

Those who defend presidential rule say Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan need a period of stability before they can graduate to democracy. They point to what they say is the success of the Chile model under General Pinochet.

But others, especially in the case of Kazakhstan, look at the country's vast oil and mineral wealth and ask where the profits are going. They look at the bribe-hungry traffic police armed with Kalashnikovs who stop cars every few meters, and ask: whatever happened to law enforcement? In some ways, it looks more like Marshal Mobutu and Zaire than General Pinochet and Chile. And it brings to mind a biting post-Soviet anecdote:

A minister from one of the former Soviet republics goes on an official visit to France. After a day of negotiations, the French minister invites his post-Soviet counterpart to his home for dinner. The house is located in an attractive neighborhood of large and pleasant houses. So the post-Soviet minister politely asks his host, "Tell me, how did you manage to build all this?"

The French minister thinks for a bit then proudly answers. "You see that highway over there? It's a toll road and every time a motorist goes past, we collect a small fee. In this way we can afford to build new neighborhoods and houses such as the one I live in. And that is how our society functions." The post-Soviet minister nods.

A few months later he invites his French colleague to his own country. He picks him up at the airport in a helicopter and whisks him off into the countryside. There are no roads and the landscape is poor and desolate. But soon they land in front of a gigantic palace, the likes of which the French minister has never seen. He is baffled and asks his post-Soviet colleague: "And how, in your poor country, do you manage to build such palaces?" And the post-Soviet minister laughs, "Simple, " he says, "in my country, we just don't build roads."

No Room for a Free Press in Kyrgyzstan's Democracy

The weekend before he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison, Kyrgyz journalist Yrysbek Omurzakov was resigned to his fate.

"The facts have nothing to do with it," he said quietly. "The authorities want to teach independent journalists a lesson in this country, and I'm going to be their latest whipping boy."

Omurzakov works for the independent Res Publica newspaper, based in Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek. His crime was to write an article condemning living conditions in a local factory dormitory. The article was based on first-hand reporting and supported by quotes from residents. But the factory director sued Omurzakov for libel. At the initial trial last Spring, factory workers lined up to testify in Omurzakov's favor. Conditions in the dormitory were indeed miserable, they said. The trial was adjourned.

When the proceedings reopened, the workers' testimony had vanished from the record. No new workers came to testify. Omurzakov says they were threatened with losing their jobs if they showed up in court. By contrast, a whole collection of positive character witnesses arrived to testify in the factory manager's favor. Omurzakov was soon found guilty.

He is not the first, and, say journalists and human rights activists in Kyrgyzstan, not likely to be the last.

Omurzakov's boss, editor-in-chief Zamira Sysykova of the Res Publica newspaper, was sentenced to two years in jail in 1996 for writing about government corruption. The official charge: "insulting the president." Sydykova appealed her conviction. She was freed after a month in a penal colony, but has not been exhonorated of the charge.

Res Publica is the only major opposition newspaper in Kyrgyzstan that has not been closed by the authorities, but Sydykova now fears it may come to that.

For a brief period after independence in 1991, Kyrgyzstan was known as Central Asia's "little island of democracy." The name stuck, but the reality has long since ceased to exist, say local and international human rights organizations, especially since President Askar Akayev introduced presidential rule at the start of last year. Amnesty International currently tracks at least five prisoners of conscience in the country.

Many even dispute the original designation. "Kyrgyzstan never was an island of democracy," says Kyrgyz-American Office of Human Rights director Natalia Ablova. "It just got called that because the countries around us were worse."

Tursunbek Akunov, another well-known local human rights activist, agrees. "We still have some opposition figures," he says. "They haven't been forced to flee abroad, unlike those in many of the neighboring countries. But they are being made into dissidents and are continually harassed."

And the mood against journalists is turning equally sour. Kyrgyzstan's new criminal code retains an article protecting the "honor and dignity of The President" and it is increasingly being used to prosecute offending journalists when no other specific charge can be brought against them. Violators of the president's honor are liable to spend three years in prison or pay up to 100 times the monthly minimum wage. Since judges are personally confirmed by the president, as is the prosecutor-general, the outcome of these trials is never a surprise.

Deputy Prime Minister Kemelbek Nanayev says the trials against journalists are proof of the democratic process at work in Kyrgyzstan.

"Journalists have to learn to be responsible," he says. "They have to stop thinking they are experts at everything and should stick to writing about their individual areas of specialty."

Asked why journalists must be held criminally accountable for alleged libel offences, when libel suits in most countries usually go through the civil courts, Nanayev says he is not qualified to answer.

"I, unlike you journalists," he smiles, "am not an expert in every matter, so let's leave that to the lawyers."

Elfrida Yausheva, deputy head of the Kyrgyz Committee for Human Rights, says that, unfortunately, "President Akayev is very sensitive, and lately, he has been getting offended quite a lot."

She points out that Kyrgyzstan's new constitution devotes half-a-dozen pages to the rights and powers of the president, but makes scant mention of his obligations and responsibilities.

"Ordinary citizens and journalists have most of those," she notes.

Legislator Omurbek Tekebayev describes a draft bill currently before parliament which he says will guarantee true democracy in the Kyrgyz press. According to the bill, government officials will have the right to demand that any newspaper or magazine retract articles they find objectionable and give them unlimited space to write their own rebuttal. This will affect editorials as well.

Tekebayev says that in any case, "journalists are never objective since they represent the will of the newspaper owners." According to him, this bill will guarantee a plurality of opinion in every publication and prevent individual newspapers from adopting a particular editorial line.

Opposition deputy and leading Kyrgyz filmmaker Dooronbek Sadyrbayev says that, at present, the government hardly lacks the means to communicate its point of view.

"Just look at our television," he says. "On Monday, it's President Akayev. On Tuesday, Mrs. Akayev. On Wednesday, President Akayev. On Thursday, Mrs. Akayev. On Friday, President Akayev. On Saturday, Mrs. Akayev. And on Sunday, it's both of them together."

Sadyrbayev says with a heavy tinge of irony that he is even willing to accept this since, officially, President Akayev was recently re-elected with 70 percent of the popular vote.

"But," he says, "what about the other 30 percent? Shouldn't their voice be heard at all?"

As in Soviet times, it seems Kyrgyzstan's citizens remain safe if they stick to complaining to their friends around the kitchen table.

"But those who tell the truth as it is, those who try to go against the wind," Sadyrbayev says, alluding to Omurzakov and other journalists like him, "such people can expect a lot of unpleasantness."

In Kyrgyzstan, Today's "Democrats" Are Yesterday's Communists

It isn't hard to recognize the people who call themselves democrats in Kyrgyzstan.

They work in the ministries or are involved in business. They travel abroad, sport well-tailored suits and have impeccable manners. Indeed, many of the very top democrats are former physicists, graduates of the same institute as President Askar Akayev. They drive, or are driven, in government Volgas or BMWs, while their offspring favor off-road Jeeps and Range Rovers. In the evenings, they sip imported beer in the outdoor restaurants that have sprouted around Kyrgyzstan's tree-filled capital, Bishkek. When the music starts up, they cluster around the karaoke sets and sing and dance the night away.

Such is the life of the democrats in Kyrgyzstan, six years after this mountainous republic on the eastern edge of Central Asia gained its independence. But sadly, the club of democrats in Kyrgyzstan is very small.

The rest of the country's 4.5 million inhabitants, more than 80 percent of them in fact, make an average wage of $25 a month. Indeed, according to a recent World Bank study, 49 percent of Kyrgyz families lived below the poverty level in 1996. You won't find these Kyrgyz whiling away the evening hours in Bishkek's new crop of cafes. Feeding the family at home is enough of a problem, and as for savings, well, there usually aren't any.

Who, then, are these Kyrgyz democrats, who think little of handing over an average month's wage for an evening night out? And where do they get the means to do so?

Kyrgyz filmmaker Dooronbek Sadyrbayev is one of the few outspoken parliament deputies.

"Today's democrats are yesterday's Communists, who have cleverly exploited the change in government to cloak themselves in the mantle of democracy and enrich themselves in the process," he says.

It is hardly a unique phenomenon. In Russia, they are called the new Russians. Across these newly independent states, as everywhere in the former Soviet Union, the wealthy and powerful are envied, but they aren't held in high esteem. Few people think there are legitimate ways of gaining riches or influence.

Today in Kyrgyzstan, all leading government posts are occupied by former Communist officials. In the absence of conflict- of-interest laws, many have direct ties to the business world through personal investments or extended family ties.

In the years 1992 to 1994, immediately after independence, many leading former Communists became overnight millionaires. It didn't take much work. Economist Sapar Orosbakov explains the process.

"These Communists-turned-businessmen used their government ties to obtain generous loans to purchase new businesses and refurbish existing enterprises," he says.

"At the time," Orosbakov notes, "inflation was running at an annual rate of 1,300 percent, but the loans were offered with interest rates as low as 50 percent."

It doesn't take much arithmetic to see how these well-connected businessmen soon became rich, he adds. But even under such generous terms, few bothered to repay the loans at all, opting instead to gut the purchased enterprises and line their pockets with the extra proceeds.

As a result, the country's four leading banks quickly went under. In 1994, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stepped in and forced the government to introduce a tight fiscal policy, which gradually brought down inflation and restored some stability to the economy. But the damage had been done.

After the credit binge of the early 1990s, Kyrgyzstan's remaining banks are wary of extending credits. Now that inflation is running at 20 percent a year, they offer loans at minimum annual rates of 60 to 70 percent, making it next to impossible for legitimate businesses to borrow to purchase new equipment or modernize their assembly lines. The Communists-turned-democrats, meanwhile, have established themselves as the new captains of industry.

Kyrgyzstan's National Statistics Office says the country's gross domestic product (GDP) is on the upswing, citing growth figures of up to 18 percent so far this year. Observers say that given how far GDP dropped in the years following the breakup of the Soviet Union, this may even be true. But they say it masks the fact that many private companies and even government businesses still barter their goods and services.

Opposition newspaper editor Zamira Sydykova challenges economic statistics in Kyrgyzstan.

"Statisticians count money that doesn't exist," she says. "Instead of paying its workers in cash, the Finance Ministry will pay them in kind, say with crates of beer which it in turn received from an indebted brewery that couldn't afford to pay its taxes."

"The whole transaction," she notes, "is marked down as a money transfer, and on top of it all, the value of the bartered goods, in this case the beer, is artificially inflated to make the whole deal look better on paper."

Sydykova says ruefully that "if anything works in the Kyrgyz economy, it is despite the government's policies."

Independent analysts do point to some promising developments, among them the Kumtor gold mine, a $300 million Kyrgyz-Canadian joint venture, which has begun to turn a profit. But most of the country's enterprises remain barely functional, while their workers try to earn a living by street trading.

The dominant agricultural sector is also in crisis, struggling to overcome the breakup of the country's collective farms. Individual farmers have little money to buy new equipment and cannot afford to get any loans. Most of the old equipment disappeared into the hands of the former Communist farm bosses, who appropriated it or purchased it with cheap credits during "privatization."

Dooronbek Sadyrbayev says that corruption under the new system is far worse than it was in Soviet times. For the well-connected, he notes, the opportunities to get rich are far greater.

"In the old days," he says, "officials used to steal enough for their present needs. Now they're attempting to steal enough for the next two generations."

It's little wonder that the word democracy has a bitter after-taste for the majority of people in Kyrgyzstan. Lenin, whose towering statue still dominates one of Bishkek's main squares, would surely have appreciated the irony.

In Kazakstan, Exiled Uighurs Step Up Fight Against Beijing

The Chinese government calls him a terrorist. He says he is a freedom fighter. But when 77-year-old Yusupbek Mukhlisi walks into a room, smooths his rumpled gray suit, and extends his hands in a gesture of greeting, the initial impression is more that of a benevolent grandfather.

"Salam Aleykum," he says, "Peace be with you, visitor. You do me a great honor with your visit." And Mukhlisi sits down, adjusting the embroidered skullcap that identifies him as a Uighur, the Turkic-Muslim people who inhabit China's westernmost Xinjiang Autonomous Region.

But ask Mukhlisi about his homeland, and the kind eyes quickly harden and the rhetoric soon turns fiery.

Mukhlisi is a Uighur by birth, but also by vocation. Having fled China for the Soviet Union back in 1960, he now heads the United National Revolutionary Front of East Turkestan. East Turkestan is how the Uighurs refer to their homeland, rather than Xinjiang, which means "New Dominion" in Chinese.

Mukhlisi's organization, which operates in exile from its headquarters in neighboring Kazakhstan, has until this year advocated peaceful resistance to what it calls China's colonial rule. But no longer.

This March, Mukhlisi and two other Kazakhstan-based Uighur groups issued a common declaration, saying they were taking up arms to fight against Chinese oppression. The declaration followed the execution by Chinese authorities of three alleged Uighur separatists in the city of Urumqi. The executions provoked an anti-Chinese riot in the western city of Kuldja that was brutally put down by Chinese troops. Reports say at least 10 people were killed in the incident, and up to 190 people injured. Three more Uighurs were subsequently executed by the Chinese authorities and 27 others given long prison sentences for allegedly organizing the riot.

The three Uighur groups claim that, since then, over 60,000 alleged Uighur separatists have been arrested by the Chinese and sent to labor camps. They say over 500 of them have died during internment or under interrogation.

Mukhlisi says the Uighurs must now fight for survival, or face eventual extermination by the Chinese government. All means are legitimate, he says, against policies aimed at making the Uighurs a minority in their own territory and quashing all resistance to Beijing's rule.

Given Beijing's clampdown on the region, it is impossible to confirm all of Mukhlisi's figures. But several trends are clear: over the past several years, China's central government has encouraged the mass migration of ethnic Chinese to Xinjiang, with the result that Han Chinese now roughly equal Uighurs in the region.

When Beijing imposed direct rule in 1949, the ratio was 96 percent ethnic Uighurs to 4 percent Han Chinese. When it is completed in two years, a new railway line spanning the length of Xinjiang is expected to further encourage Chinese migration.

This is coupled with strict enforcement of a two-child per family policy for "ethnic minorities." Sean Roberts, an American anthropologist who is a specialist on Xinjiang, says that to the agriculturalist Uighurs, who see large families as both a source of pride and economic necessity, this is tantamount to cultural genocide.

The new Chinese immigrants are put to work in Xinjiang's rapidly expanding industrial sector, helping to mine coal, uranium and precious minerals, which are then sent on to other parts of China or sold to fill Beijing's treasury.

On the cultural front, in 1997 the government unveiled a new campaign it labeled "strike hard," aimed at dislodging separatism and what it termed religious extremism. Travelers to the region, including Roberts, confirm an increasing Chinese military presence in the region and the closing of hundreds of mosques and cultural centers in recent months.

Mukhlisi says each new Chinese repression wins new converts to his underground army, which he claims now numbers 30,000 young radicals. Mukhlisi's group claims responsibility for a series of bombs which exploded this spring in Xinjiang's largest city, Urumqi, as well as in Beijing itself.

"Our targets are not civilian," he says, but he gleefully details how his men have already succeeded in raiding six major Chinese arms depots in the region. To supplement the raids, Mukhlisi says Chinese soldiers on patrol are often kidnapped and robbed or else paid to surrender their weapons.

All this puts Kazakhstan's government in a bind. Almaty wants to develop its economic relations with China, and feels awkward about hosting the leaders of an increasingly radical Uighur diaspora. But at the same time, it doesn't want to be seen repressing the Kazakh's ethnic cousins.

Yusupbek Mukhlisi remembers the short-lived, independent republic of Turkestan in the 1940s. He remembers an independent Tibet and he intends to keep fighting against Beijing.

"It's simple," he says, "Either we fight, or we will disappear off the face of the Earth."

Akmola, the Former "Virgin Lands City," Replaces Almaty as Kazakhstan's Capital

The world may not yet believe it, but with the arrival of Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev at the end of October, Akmola, a city of wind-blown, dirt-strewn streets, became the national capital of Kazakhstan.

It isn't the first time Akmola, a bleak outpost in the middle of the great Eurasian steppe, has had a brush with greatness. In the 1950s, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev renamed the city Tselinograd, or Virgin Lands City, and made it the center of his campaign to turn Kazakhstan's steppes into oceans of wheat fields. However, the thin topsoil was blown away by erosion and the effort soon failed. Then Khrushchev was deposed and the city's people were forgotten. The Soviet Union moved onto other grand projects.

Now, Tselinograd, known once again as Akmola, has been rescued from obscurity by Kazakhstan's leader.

Up to now, Akmola's name was commonly translated as "White Grave." Now, a new official interpretation has been found. Government historians say Akmola actually means "Abundance of White," which is to say dairy products. Akmola, President Nazarbayev has decreed, was and will once again be a "land of plenty."

Among the official reasons cited for abandoning cosmopolitan Almaty, in Kazakhstan's southeast corner, are the city's susceptibility to earthquakes and its proximity to the Chinese border. President Nazarbayev also says that relocating government institutions to Akmola will give an economic boost to northern regions and help spread wealth more evenly around the country.

But the primary reason, officials acknowledge privately, is both political and simple. Having presided over Kazakhstan's drive to independence, Nazarbayev now wants to resettle the northern regions of his country with ethnic Kazakhs, reversing a more than century-long campaign of Russian colonization. At last count, ethnic Kazakhs made up barely more than 30 percent of Akmola's population, but since the start of the year, their numbers have once again begun to grow.

A slightly more than two-hour flight or 20-hour train ride across a sun-baked, Martian landscape separates Akmola from verdant Almaty. Although at present there may be no hot water and, occasionally, no electricity in Akmola, in the best Soviet tradition legions of foreign engineers and local workers have been summoned to the city with orders to transform it into a worthy seat of government within a matter of months.

Blow-torches sparkle through the night on the main square, as crews toil around-the-clock to finish the 20-story glass and steel skyscraper that is to be Kazakhstan's new parliament. It and the equally futuristic presidential palace being completed a few meters away have been contracted out to the Swiss firm Mobetex.

The price tag is a closely guarded secret. Kazakh Oil's Turkish-built headquarters rise on the other side of the square while, a couple of hundred meters away, Akmola's main theater and concert hall is being completely gutted and renovated by a consortium of Czech contractors. Word on the site is that Nazarbayev's presidential loge is to be transported up from Almaty and re-installed, piece-by-piece, in the completed theater.

Along Akmola's main street, formerly known as Virgin Workers' Prospekt, and now renamed Republic Prospekt, workers are covering the pock-marked concrete apartment blocks with new plastic siding. Rutted sidewalks along a two-kilometer stretch have been torn up and replaced by cobblestones.

All this, say local officials, is just the first phase of an architectural master plan that will transform Akmola into a city of the future, with superhighways, industrial parks, vast housing complexes and even an artificial island in the swampy Ishim River for the new presidential residence.

Where will the money come from and how much has it all cost so far? Presidential architect Serik Rustambekov estimates 1997 spending at $300 million. He conducts interviews inside a minivan. Rustambekov's own offices, like most official buildings in the city, are in the process of being built. But, he says, all money is coming from "non-budgetary sources."

The governor of Akmola region, Zhanybek Karibzhanov, concurs. Sitting in one of the few completed offices in town, he emphasizes that "not one penny of the state budget is being spent on Akmola's reconstruction." He points to Akmola's new special economic status, which provides incentives for investors, especially construction firms.

But Karibzhanov, who himself arrived in July as a Nazarbayev's appointee, refuses to provide any more concrete details. Asked whether any foreign investors have established themselves in the city for good, he asserts that they will.

City Mayor Amanzhol Bolekbayev is equally cagey. He spends most of his time shuttling between construction sites, making sure visible progress is being attained. Bolekbayev says there are no conflicts with the central administration over where Akmola's funds should be allocated.

Off-the-record, residents tell of sudden evictions, coerced labor, and a rapid jump in prices. They mention the lack of any environmental impact studies and talk of the country's oil profits being siphoned off to realize Nazarbayev's costly new vision. But all that is unimportant. They weren't asked their opinion.

"What the government thinks is what we think," one woman walking by the new parliament told RFE/RL. "All there is left for us to do is to obey. Our wishes and voices don't reach them."

Never mind that only the main streets are being resurfaced and, in the outlying districts where most people live, there are unpaved roads with potholes big enough to swallow cars, no streetlights and even no gas for cooking.

The president won't go there. And he wouldn't be advised to wander into the side streets just two blocks away from his palace, where wooden houses and shabby apartment buildings sink crookedly into the swampy ground, like the huge heating pipes that snake around them.

Six ministries have already been moved to the steppes and a steady trickle of ambitious young people has started to beat a path to Akmola. But convincing foreign companies and embassies to relocate from Almaty will be harder to do. There, doubts remain strong and some dub Akmola "the new Brasilia," drawing comparisons to Brazil's artificially created capital, which has become synonymous with central planning gone wrong. Everyone is waiting to see if Nazarbayev will stay through the merciless northern winter, or abandon his pet project, much as Khrushchev was forced to do.

If he stays, then this is a country where everyone else will soon have to follow.