Election takes place quietly in Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan has never held fair or just elections

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2005

ASTANA, Kazakhstan. The presidential election in Kazakhstan passed peacefully on Sunday, and early signs indicated that President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former Communist boss who has ruled this country since it declared independence from the Soviet Union, was heading to a landslide victory over his four opponents.

Opposition candidates complained of vote fraud but suggested that they would not hold public protests or stage mass actions in this large Central Asian state, underscoring the strength of the president, whom they have tried to portray as authoritarian and unfailingly corrupt. The opposition said it would prepare legal challenges instead.

Nazarbayev, 65, who has been described in federal court documents in New York as receiving millions of dollars in bribes from an intermediary representing American oil companies seeking rights to Kazakhstan's oil fields, has dominated Kazakh political life since the last years of the Soviet Union.

He has also kept popular support even as his critics have had to struggle to circulate word of the accusations because of restrictions on the independent press.

The president's supporters say he has tightly managed Kazakhstan's politics and oil-dominated economy from the dysfunction of the Soviet period to the relative prosperity of recent years, and without the war, ethnic strife, disorder and outright dictatorships that have marked Central Asia since the collapse of communism.

Preliminary elections results were expected to be released Monday; early exit poll data said Nazarbayev had received nearly 85 percent of the vote. Although the reliability of the poll could not be immediately determined, it seemed roughly consistent with the sentiment in the capital, where a preponderance of voters interviewed on Sunday expressed eagerness to keep him in office.

"I trust him, because I see the changes in our country, and they are positive," said Arai Ospanova, 19, a university student, after voting here in the capital on the Asian steppe.

Kazakhstan, however, has never held a free and fair vote, and there have been ample signs that the latest campaign was marred by abuses of state resources, restrictions on freedom of assembly and speech, and election-day fraud.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has provided the principal election observation mission, was scheduled to release its preliminary report on the election on Monday.

By C.J. Chivers
The New York Times