Eurasia Foundation: Kazakhstan Democracy Activists

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Advocacy Campaign:

Building a Corps of Democracy Activists in Kazakhstan

Story by Jeff Erlich, Almaty Regional Office
Photos by Chris Runyan

The visit from the tax police was not unexpected, coming a week after a visit from a prosecutor. As Pavel Lobochov looked on, the police hauled away financial records and the computer hard drive from his organization, Echo—one of thirteen nongovernmental democracy organizations in Kazakhstan that recently worked together to stage an advocacy campaign supported by the Eurasia Foundation.

The groups each received separate grants, but worked in concert to promote legislation on local self-governance. Coordinated by the national Center for Support of Democracy, the campaign exemplified the type of partnership that the Eurasia Foundation seeks among local organizations.

Judging by the experience of Echo and the campaign’s five other organizations that also received visits from tax authorities, the groups are clearly catching people’s attention.

"They had one purpose: to scare us," Lobochov says of the tax inspectors. "But thanks to the Eurasia Foundation's strict accounting requirements, we had everything in order, and there was nothing they could do."

The organizations also caught the attention of Kazakhstani citizens as they made history with the first citizen-lobbying effort ever in Kazakhstan. They targeted a flawed bill that in name would decentralize the nation’s post-Soviet government, but in fact would set back the growing movement for local self-rule. The organizations in the advocacy campaign chose a petition drive as their means—collecting 90,000 signatures of people who want to guarantee the right to participate in their own governance.

In one sense, the organizations achieved only a partial victory: the bill stalled in the legislature and was quietly pulled by the executive branch. Unfortunately, a better bill has not replaced it.

In other ways, however, the campaign was successful. The thirteen groups proved that Kazakhstan's parliament, when faced with widespread public opposition, will hesitate to rubber-stamp legislation sent from the president’s administration. They have kept the issue of local self-governance at the forefront of public debate (the president recently promised trial elections for local political offices). They trained three thousand activists across Kazakhstan in petition drives and other civic campaign tactics. Finally, they awakened the interest of thousands of citizens in replacing centralized, autocratic rule with locally chosen leadership.

A Nationwide Campaign Focuses on Local Governance

"In America, people don’t vote because they basically have a normal life," says Natalia Chumakova, director of the Almaty-based Center for Support of Democracy. "The reason we don’t vote is fundamentally different. We don’t vote because we don’t think that our votes mean anything."

With a $35,000 grant from the Eurasia Foundation, the center trained regional activists throughout Kazakhstan and coordinated the nationwide campaign to increase public participation in government decision making. As Chumakova explains, "In order to turn the faces of people toward democracy, people need to feel that government affects their lives and represents their interests."

While it was a first of its kind, the campaign for local self-governance did not emerge overnight. Rather, it drew on a network of democracy supporters who monitored the most recent parliamentary elections, in October 1999. The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), which, like the Eurasia Foundation, is supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development, trained the monitors. Chumakova’s organization then coordinated local monitoring by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in each of Kazakhstan’s fourteen regions. Based on the observations of 2,500 volunteer monitors, the NGOs declared the elections "dishonest, unfair, and non-transparent."

In these election monitors Chumakova saw organized, enthusiastic activists, and she did not want them to sit idle until the next election. As it turned out, she did not have to wait long to put her volunteers to work again. With the introduction of the flawed bill in early 2000, she saw a mission for the monitors—one that fit well with her group’s focus on local self-governance and civic education.

Chumakova then called on NDI for advice and assistance in how to oppose the bill. Together, they decided to launch a nationwide advocacy campaign, using the same partner organizations that had monitored elections, to conduct petition drives and lobby their members of parliament.

The Eurasia Foundation saw in this idea an innovative way to increase citizen involvement in government, while at the same time promoting local leadership. In March, it awarded the regional NGOs grants between $3,000 and $3,500 each.

Training Volunteers, Educating the Public

The first step was to train the activists, drawn mainly from the ranks of the election monitors, in the merits of local self-governance and campaigning techniques. The activists would then stage regional civic education campaigns, collect signatures opposing the bill, and ultimately take their demands to parliament.

Sagat Zhusip, director of the Public Association for Democracy Assistance in the Kyzylorda region east of the Aral Sea, says it took some convincing to get people to sign his organization's petition. "People thought this would be a useless exercise. They don't think they can change anything," Zhusip says. "They didn’t want to give their addresses because they were afraid someone would come the next day to ask them why they signed this."

With fifteen trained activists giving curbside short courses in citizen participation, however, 8,500 people did indeed sign the petition in the Kyzylorda region.

In Aktau, on Kazakhstan’s Caspian coast, collecting signatures was somewhat easier, says Tlep Baimagambetov of Parasat, a regional democracy organization. Parasat’s one hundred activists and seven trainers working in Aktau and surrounding villages found that "the bulk of people believed this would be a good step forward."

Getting the Word out and Getting It to Parliament

The bill on local self-governance would have been a half-measure, at best. The American Bar Association/Central and East European Law Initiative (ABI-CEELI) wrote that the bill "does not vest significant powers in local self-government authorities," "reserves the right of the (national) government to regulate activities of local government entities," and does not give local governments the financial authority to function.

ABA-CEELI's analysis would not have been possible had the citizen lobbyists not found sympathetic members of parliament who agreed to publish the bill—an almost unheard-of practice in Kazakhstan.

Before the bill’s publication, "the population knew practically nothing" about it, says Zinaida Terekhina, of the Kompas Potrebitelya organization in Petropavlosk, in northern Kazakhstan. After the bill appeared in newspapers, however, the petition drive took off. The count topped more than 90,000 signatures on petitions from across the country. The regional activists then delivered them to the capital, Astana.

Before presenting the petitions to the members of parliament, the activists trained to deal with parliamentarians who were unaccustomed to constituent visits. By turns they played roles of rude, impatient, or simply uninterested legislators, and themselves, trying out their powers of persuasion.

Primed with this training, the activists held sixty-two meetings with legislators to present their case and solicit commitments of support. They then held a roundtable discussion with legislators to discuss their views and get the legislators’ positions, either for or against, on the record. The roundtable also led to the creation of a multi-party working group on the legislation.

The fruits of their labor appeared almost imperceptibly. At the end of the campaign in January 2001, a message came through a back channel that the executive branch had withdrawn the legislation for review. "I don’t think this bill will be the last," assures Chumakova. "Nevertheless, we have seen that there is a real desire to have locally elected governments."

The activists went on to spent the early months of 2001 in a new campaign, fighting legislation to limit the percentage of foreign programming on television. Independent television station owners saw in the legislation an attempt to drive them out of business, increasing the dominance of stations controlled by the government. This time, however, the activists' effort was not enough to stop legislation favored by the president.

According to Zhusip, the next campaign may have to focus on a topic less directly threatening to the central power structure—perhaps a push for free and fair elections, which the government claims to support. "Step by step," says Zhusip, "We’ll build a good base for democracy."

2001