ALMATY, Kazakhstan — The message could not have been clearer even without the note. In the courtyard of Irina Petrushova's opposition newspaper office, a decapitated dog was strung up by its paws, a screwdriver plunged into its torso with a computer-printed warning attached to it:
"There won't be a next time."
The dog's missing head was left along with a similar note at Petrushova's house. Three nights later, someone threw three Molotov cocktails into her office, burning it to the ground.
The political climate in this oil-rich former Soviet republic has taken an ominous turn in recent weeks, ever since the revelation that the country's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, secretly stashed $1 billion of state money in a Swiss bank account six years ago. As the scandal blossomed, opposition leaders suddenly were arrested, newspapers and television stations were shut down, and critical journalists were beaten in what foes of the government consider a new wave of repression.
What inspectors and regulators have not accomplished, mysterious vandals have. One of the country's leading television stations was knocked off the air when its cable was sliced in the middle of the night. Shortly after it was repaired, the cable was rendered useless again when someone shot through it.
Achievements `wiped out'
"Everything that's been achieved over the last 10 years, it has been wiped out," Petrushova lamented.
"This political system we have is still Soviet," said Yevgeny Zhovits, director of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and the Rule of Law. "By its spirit, by its nature, by its attitude toward personal freedom, it's still Soviet."
The tale of intrigue emerging in Kazakhstan, while familiar across the former Soviet Union, takes on special significance in Central Asia, a region that has become far more important to the United States as it fights a war in nearby Afghanistan. The case also sheds some light on the tangled world of oil, money and politics in a country with massive energy reserves.
The U.S. Embassy and the State Department have issued statements condemning the pattern of events and fretting about the state of democracy in a country still run by its last Communist boss. But many reformers in Kazakhstan worry that the West has turned its eyes away from human-rights abuses to maintain the international coalition against terrorism.
"All this is happening with the silent consent of the West," said Assylbeck Kozhakhmetov, a leading figure in Democratic Choice for Kazakhstan, an opposition party founded last year. Until Sept. 11, Nazarbayev's government worried about offending the West, he noted, but not anymore. "The ostrich party of Western democracies actually unties the hands of dictators."
Nazarbayev has run this giant country of 17 million people with an authoritarian style. Nazarbayev is a former member of the Soviet Politburo who took over as head of the republic in 1990, became president after independence in 1991 and continued to dominate Kazakhstan through uncompetitive elections and a referendum extending his term.
Under investigation
His relationship with oil corporations has prompted investigations in Switzerland and the United States as prosecutors in both countries probe whether an American lobbyist helped steer millions of dollars in oil commissions to him and other Kazakh leaders.
The long-brewing questions about such transfers and rumors of foreign bank accounts erupted into a scandal in April when Nazarbayev's prime minister admitted to parliament that the president diverted $1 billion to a secret Swiss bank account in 1996. The money came from the sale that year of a 20 percent stake in the Tengiz offshore oil fields to Chevron.
The prime minister, Imangali Tasmagambetov, said that Nazarbayev had sent the money abroad because he worried that such a large infusion of cash into Kazakhstan would throw the currency into a tailspin. Although he never disclosed the secret fund to parliament, Nazarbayev used it twice to help stabilize the country during subsequent financial crises, Tasmagambetov said.
But opposition leaders and journalists said Nazarbayev finally revealed the account this spring only after they pushed Swiss prosecutors for information. The opposition and journalists said they believe the president announced the $1 billion fund only as a smoke screen to obscure other matters still under investigation by the Swiss and U.S. prosecutors.
"All around there is bribe-taking and stealing and Mafia," said Serikbolsyn Abdildin, head of the Communist Party and one of two parliament deputies whose request to prosecutors preceded the announcement. "There's corruption in the top echelon of power."
Tamara Kaleyeva, president of the Almaty-based International Foundation for Protection of Speech, said about 20 newspapers have been forced to stop publishing and about 20 television stations have been shut down or face closure.
Petrushova suspects state security agencies were behind the dog incident May 10 as well as a fire at the newspaper office on May 22, but cannot prove it.
"The throne started to waver, and in order to hold it in place, all sorts of measures are being used," she said.
Now she works out of borrowed offices. "It's just like it was in the time of the Soviet Union."
