Kazakh leader rejects term extension

Kazak leader Nursultan Nazarbayev has ruled Kazakhstan since 1989. AFP photo

Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev on Friday rejected the idea of extending his term until 2020 in a national referendum that was flatly denounced by the United States.
The country's first and only post-Soviet leader did not explain why he was overruling his entire political and business elite in a decision that received almost no attention from state media outlets.
The three-sentence presidential decree said only that Nazarbayev, who already holds the status of "leader of the nation" (Elbasy), had decided "to reject a motion by the parliament of Kazakhstan" to hold the vote.
The referendum idea emerged unexpectedly last month on the initiative of a little-known rector of a university in the city of Semipalatinsk and was then quickly backed by both branches of parliament.
But it was not clear what stood behind the motion as it gathered momentum and received increasing broad play on the news. The 70-year-old Nazarbayev has ruled the resource-rich former Soviet nation since 1989 and his supremacy has never been truly challenged.
The Kazakh parliament has already changed the constitution to allow Nazarbayev to run for re-election as many times as he chooses and he was expected to easily win votes scheduled for 2012 and 2017.
Some analysts suggested that the idea was made only so that Nazarbayev could reject it in a bid to improve his lagging democratic credentials in the West. His refusal to support the referendum came only three days after the U.S. embassy in Kazakhstan slammed the idea in an unusually strongly worded statement as a "setback for democracy."
"We believe a national referendum that would replace the presidential elections guaranteed by Kazakhstan's constitution would be a setback for democracy in Kazakhstan," the embassy said in a the statement.
"We think that it is important that Kazakhstan's government and citizens honor their international commitments and continue to strive for free and fair elections," the statement added.