any honourable action. But now a historical moment has come when he can prove through his decisive actions that he is truly a virtuous and historic figure committed to helping his nation.
It is finally time to stop letting crooks tackle the tough tactics of policy-making, and to prevent them from conducting multi-level negotiations, effectively to escape from his own deep-seated fears and historic responsibility. Nursultan Nazarbayev has to overcome himself first of all. Then it will not be necessary to go to Mecca periodically and beg to the Kaaba for forgiveness for the lives of people who were killed in underground mines (privatized with his permission) by foreigners who do not care about European labour standards, or of journalists, politicians and respectable generals killed in the demolition of democratic institutions. Saddam Hussein also went to Mecca, and it turned out that Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic kept icons. People need to serve God, not Satan, and not resort to absolution only during their vacations. But first and foremost, they need to be God's permanent instrument. The Hadiths teach that above all else this applies to rulers. Therefore, we need a program of national reconciliation and revival with the help of our leaders, because the immorality of the power that is is the source of all misfortunes.
How do you see this program?
First, it is necessary to conduct a national referendum concerning the status of the first President of the country. Only the people themselves have the right to evaluate and acknowledge the services of the first head of the country. Taking into account the chaos connected with collapse of the U.S.S.R., and lack of experience in nation-building and ways to eliminate speculators, the first President was under great pressure and temptations, as any mortal person would be. There were mistakes and people who provoked them by exploiting institutional underdevelopment. There was natural fear and blackmail. This can be forgiven only through the wisdom and indulgence of the people. We should guarantee personal security to the first President.
Then the shame of the first Kazakhgate, and the second and inevitably the third one, which were and will be obstacles not only personally for Nursultan Nazarbayev as a President and a human being, but for our entire country, will be overcome. Kazakhgate is a reality. No negotiations with the participants in the process will make it disappear. Only the forgiveness of the people will cause it to cease.
Second, it is necessary to start a full-scale dismantling of the system of presidential government. establishing a monarchy is not a solution, but a catalyst for the break-up of the country into factional zhuzes. Under a monarchy, the behind-the-scenes war within the elite transforms into a civil war. We urgently need to restore a single-chamber parliamentary system. Then we will be able to transfer all the accumulated and uncontrollable tension within the elite into the civilized walls of Parliament and open it up to the general public. Then the post of President will cease to be the Holy Grail that Kazakh knights - with various-calibre intellects of all kinds - are currently striving in vain to reach, and the pursuit of the cursed diamond will no longer steal away their lives.
Third, it is necessary not to hold nation-wide elections during the period of national reconciliation. Under officialdom's standard drill of juggling and suppression, the Kazakh bureaucracy is not ready for fair and just elections. Like a ravenous shark driven by its genetic instinct, it will do everything it can to pervert the course of justice, causing a new round of tensions inside the elite and a social conflict. All unregistered parties must be acknowledged and admitted to parliamentary work, and with an independent mass media people will decide for themselves which party they need.
Fourth, the Nur Otan Party should be dissolved - like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - so that the President can demonstrate the political will to burn bridges with the past and start a qualitatively new stage in the government's dialogue with the public.
Fifth, development of a new constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan should begin with the participation of representatives from the [Council of Europe's] Venetian Commission under the chairmanship of an international constitutional lawyer not connected with Kazakhstan. The need for particular national characteristics that the presidential Administration will start screaming about tomorrow has absolutely nothing to do with it. The current antidemocratic constitution, having incorporated so-called "national specificity", is the main and sufficient argument in support of this approach.
Sixth, Kazakhstan should start taking genuine and tangible steps towards adopting the European Convention on Human Rights. This will provide international security for the irreversibility and democratic sincerity of the reform.
Seventh, the President - like the Spanish king after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco - should start a dialogue with constructive social forces. What prevents us from imagining that our dictator has died, Mr. Nazarbayev? Perhaps your stubbornness, fears, pride and distrust in 99 per cent of citizens and the international community? Let us, like America, open a new page in the history of Kazakhstan. Prove to everyone that you are not such a hopeless case.
Kazakhstan has to stop discrediting its national elite. The international authority of the country is being damaged heavily. Huge volumes of intellectual, organizational and financial means are spent by the government and all individual representatives of the elite on confrontations and mutual persecution. As a result, only ordinary people suffer.
What is the practical side of implementing such a proposal?
In informal negotiations, respectable Western politicians displayed a full understanding of our problems connected with establishing our statehood, and a sincere desire to favour a fullscale dialogue aimed at relieving economic and social tension and the formation of a more effective means of political organization.
Unlike other parties, the Atameken Party was not financed by the National Security Committee, the Administration of the President or Western secret services. The Atameken Party does not beg for meetings with the government. People of good sense both in the West and Kazakhstan believe in the Atameken Party. That is why the Atameken Party invites President Nazarbayev to come to the U.S.A. before January 20, 2009, and deliver a lecture and statement at Georgetown University in Washington. For some reason it seems to me that the newly-elected U.S. President and Vice-President will accept Atameken's invitation to attend the Kazakh President's lecture, if he is ready to accept the tangible program I just described. Why not? After all, the head of our country was ready to fly halfway across the globe to Washington for the presentation of his book organized by Ambassador [Erlan] Idrisov, well known in London as a lover of tourist trips to football matches at the expense of taxpayers. I ask President Nazarbayev to accept Atameken's invitation and put aside his apologies made by his advisers, who have been profiting from the rising tension over the last two years. National Security Committee analysts, who thoroughly monitor the speeches of all opposition politicians, can produce mounds of evidence confirming the veracity of my statements, and the accuracy of my forecasts and promises. Where will the presumptuous critics and mockers disappear to after that?
And will Rakhat Aliyev and Alnur Musayev be invited to the lecture?
As far as I know, American law-enforcement agencies have not prohibited their entry. Taking into account the fact that they have discredited the regime as much as possible and, as we all have seen, did not even sweat, may I take this opportunity to invite them as well. every new release of information about revels and drinking parties among Kazakhstan's high-ranking officials, and other bizarre ways of making state decisions, bolsters the opinion of leading countries in the international community that the ruling regime is frivolous.
The problem also lies in the fact that every new information release makes an ordinary person who has lost a father, mother or a child think that this regime does not care about its people with their problems because the government has ignored their sufferings for so long - for example, the lack of medicine or money to pay the corrupt public health system or the family members of dead miners.
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