KAZAKHSTAN….

In response to a Kazakh warrant, Russian authorities in Moscow arrested former Prime Minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin on September 10 as he stepped off a London flight. Kazhegeldin spent several days in bizarrely comfortable detention at the Barvikha sanatorium, where Boris Yeltsin takes his rest cures, before Kazakhstan withdrew the warrant and left him a free man. Kazhegeldin, prime minister from 1994 to 1997, had the temerity to challenge Nursultan Nazarbaev, the country’s only post-Soviet ruler, for the presidency in 1998. Although the electoral commission quickly voided his candidacy-leaving Nazarbaev effectively unopposed-the act of lèse majesté did not go unnoticed. The chief of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee in a statement to parliament denounced Kazhegeldin for having hidden his assets, including Western bank accounts and property valued in the millions of dollars, in the names of his wife and his relatives. The warrant for his arrest sought him for questioning on those matters. Kazhegeldin, whose political support comes almost entirely from Kazakhstan’s large ethnic-Russian minority and from the Kazakh Communist Party, has spent the past year outside Kazakhstan, where he has been actively lobbying to portray himself as the democratic opposition. Reportedly Kazakhstan withdrew the warrant for his arrest under pressure from the United States Department of State and a number of U.S. congressmen.