KAZAKHSTAN'S EIGHTH EURASIAN MEDIA FORUM:

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 ASTANA 000715

SENSITIVE
SIPDIS

STATE FOR SCA/CEN, SCA/PPD, EUR/RUS

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: PREL PROP SOCI KPAO RS KZ
SUBJECT: KAZAKHSTAN'S EIGHTH EURASIAN MEDIA FORUM:
OUT-TAKES


1. (U) Sensitive but unclassified. Not for public Internet.


2. (SBU) Dr. (sic) Dariga Nazarbayeva organized (or at least
it was organized in her name),the Eighth Eurasian Media
Forum, April 23-24, in Almaty, co-sponsored by CNN and "The
International Herald Tribune," with support from EuroNews and
a large number of other international media, media-related,
and other businesses. U.S. participants included Republican
National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, former U.S.
Congressman and NBC news analyst Harold Ford, former USUN
Ambassador (and former Ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq)
Zalmay Khalilzad, and several other lesser but probably
worthy lights.


3. (SBU) Those who had attended previous years' events noted
this eighth iteration was significantly scaled back because
of the global financial crisis. Still, the usual MC presided
-- Riz Khan, former CNN correspondent currently with
Al-Jazeera (English). His opening monologue each day
employed many U.S.-specific political-commentary jokes, but
left most of the audience scratching their heads, especially
once his shtick went through translation into Russian,
because English-Russian word-play jokes notoriously fall flat
in translation.


4. (SBU) President Nazarbayev was originally scheduled to
give the welcome speech, but the final schedule distributed
at the last minute noted the welcome speech would be
delivered "on behalf of President Nazarbayev." The deliverer
was State Secretary Kanat Saudabayev, reputedly one of
Nazarbayev's closest confidants. Saudabayev's speech had
very little, if anything, to do with international media.
Instead, it was a well-reasoned message in support of
international non-proliferation, clearly a nod to the United
States and other Western partners, both to support the Obama
Administration's non-proliferation priorities and to burnish
President Nazarbayev's global non-proliferation credentials
in his alleged effort to be considered for the Nobel Peace
Prize. We talked to Saudabayev's speech writer later who,
somewhat sheepishly, confirmed both these goals.


5. (SBU) When Dariga Nazrabayeva subsequently took the stage
for her welcome comments, she grimly "thanked the President
of Kazakhstan for his words." The back-story here is that
Q, once the golden girl for the future leadership, has been
sidelined politically because of her (former) marriage to
Rakhat Aliyev, who is now Nazarbayev's mortal enemy-supremo.
(Besides that, she tumbled this year out of the Forbes' list
of international billionaires.) In the medieval-khan,
blood-feud-to-the-death battle between Nazarbayev and Aliyev,
Nazarbayev decreed that Dariga had to divorce Rakhat Aliyev,
even though she is said to have more than a soft spot for her
former husband, and, some say, might even bolt to the other
side -- except that Nazarbayev has taken up her first son,
his namesake, as a new favorite. Even more intriguing, word
on the street is that Nazarbayev is now not averse to letting
it be known that Dariga is "only" his step-daughter, being
the off-spring of his official wife from a previous liaison.
The real facts are hard to determine because both sides --
Nazarbayev and Aliyev, with Dariga caught in the middle --
have engaged international public relations firms to do
battle against each other. And yet Dariga is not without her
friends. At the Media Forum, two female members of
parliament hovered around her like mother hens, including
former Minister of Justice Baliyeva, who was recently demoted
to be a member of parliament.


6. (SBU) Back to the Media Forum. As usual at such events,
the initial presentations in each session were generally
reasonable and innocuous -- but not all. Both for the
record, and for a degree of amusement, certain statements

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follow. Without doubt, the most outrageous panel participant
was Igor Panarin, described as a "doctor of geopolitical
analysis and member of the faculty of the Diplomatic Academy
of the Russian Foreign Ministry." He alleged the following:

-- Since the U.S. Administration of President Bill Clinton,
there has been no difference between the U.S. political
parties. The secret plan is in place and is being
implemented by the permanent foreign policy cabal of
Washington to dominate the world.

-- The collapse of the "five totalitarian bankers of Wall
Street" (sic) marks the beginning of the destruction of
Imperial America and the equal destruction of global U.S.-led
capitalism.

-- September 8, 2008 (the Russian invasion of Georgia),was a
glorious date in world history, because it marked the
beginning of the spiritual reintegration of the former Soviet
peoples.

-- The U.S. dollar will collapse and disappear by August
2009, opening the way for a global currency the following
year that will be based on the currencies of Russia, China,
Japan, and maybe the European Union. Further, within a few
years the United States will likely disintegrate into a loose
commonwealth of mutually antagonistic regional powers.
Proof for this is the recent call by the Governor of Texas to
secede his state from the Union, as well as percentages in
Vermont and North Caroline who favor secession.

NOTE: Chairman of Kazakhstan's National Bank, Grigoriy
Marchenko, well known for not suffering fools gladly, raked
his fingers through his hair, ostentatiously rubbed his neck,
and stared at the ceiling during Ponarin's wild-eyed
presentation. END NOTE.


7. (SBU) Relatively less loony, and rational more often than
not, was Gaidar Djemal, Chairman of the Islamic Committee of
Russia. Still, he had his colorful moments:

-- The defeat of the Soviet Union didn't fully satisfy the
people of the world, including in Europe. They want the
"Final Solution" against the Homeland (rodina). There is now
a great vacuum because American Imperialism has failed.
Russia is re-emerging as the great world power that will
organize and lead "the lesser nations."

-- When we speak of the nuclear problem in Iran, we should
not forget the attitude of the United States. Obama, like
Bush, still supports regime change in Tehran. The U.S.
nuclear concern is nothing more than a pretense to
restructure Iranian politics against Russia's interests.
Obama is not concerned about nuclear weapons in Iran -- he
wants to achieve the final destruction of Russia.

-- Obama has turned the initial Russian liberal-democratic
joy about his election into bitter ashes in their mouths.
He's signaled they don't matter to him. They now understand
his cynical rejection of the forces of Russian democracy in
favor of the final humiliation -- the thorough disarmament of
Great Russia.


8. (SBU) Lest it appear we are dumping only on Russian
participants in the Eurasian Media Forum, Alexander Rahr,
Program Director for Russia/Eurasia of the German Council on
Foreign Relations, said, "I have no doubt that Obama has a
secret agreement with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO) for the SCO to step into Afghanistan as soon as NATO
fails. The goal will appear to be to empower Russia and
China to be the power arbiters of Eurasia, but the real goal

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will be to bog them down in the 'graveyard of empires.'"


9. (SBU) Finally, we want to take note of an older
Kazakhstani intellectual who rose to thunder an impassioned,
grandly self-important, extraordinarily repetitive
intervention (until he was cut off by the Chinese moderator),
demanding to know: "Why are we wasting time with all these
different points of view when we should be developing
instructions for the journalists here so that they know what
to publish tomorrow!"


10. (SBU) COMMENT: We want to acknowledge that the public
goals of the Eurasian Media Forum -- to bring together
leaders and thinkers to promote international understanding
-- are laudable. At the same time, we acknowledge that we,
like Grigoriy Marchenko, don't suffer fools gladly. Maybe
all international fora are subject to a degree of
public-intellectual ideological posturing. This one,
however, seems to have had more than its fair share of fools.
On the other hand, it was an interesting exposure to public
opinion. END COMMENT.
HOAGLAND