KZBlog

They’ve done it before and they’ll do it again.

President Nazarbayev and President Obama both attended a nuclear summit this weekend and Nazarbayev managed to get some private time with Obama. Obviously this is a big chance for Kazakhstan to promote its “brand image” in the world and for the President to gain more popularity domestically. Kazakhstan is also pushing to be the home of the World Nuclear Bank and certainly US support could do a lot for them, if the project ever gets off the ground.

Amusingly, as Joshua Kucera twitted earlier today, the press release of the Kazakhstan Embassy said that Obama called Nazarbayev, ““one of the model leaders in the world.” However the full sentence was a little more qualified: “On non-proliferation and nuclear safety issues, President Obama praised Nazarbayev as really one of the model leaders in the world.”

It does appear that Obama was favorably inclined to Nazarbayev. There was apparently some fear on the Kazakh side that human rights issues and particularly the case of Evgenii Zhovtis would come up. So far all that seems to have been said is that:

…the two leaders had a “lengthy” and “frank” discussion on issues of democracy and human rights, Michael McFaul, Obama’s adviser for Russian and Eurasian affairs, told reporters on a conference call.
“Both presidents agreed that you don’t ever reach democracy, you always have to work at it,” McFaul said. “In particular, President Obama reminded his Kazakh counterpart that we too are working to improve our democracy.”

, according to Businessweek.