US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Kazakhstan yesterday on a visit designed to cement energy ties with a strategic country courted by both Russia and the West.
Moscow is sensitive to visits by top US officials to its former Soviet backyard and has in the past accused Western countries of trying to poach its traditional allies.
Rice will meet Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and other officials during her five-hour stopover in the Caspian country with strategic proximity to Iran and Afghanistan and bordering Russia and China.
Speaking to reporters en route to Kazakhstan, Rice said she was not trying to take allies away from Russia — nor did he recognize Russia’s special sphere of influence in the region.
“We don’t see any of this as a zero sum game,” she said. “Kazakhstan is an independent country, it can have friendships with whomever it wishes … So we don’t see and don’t accept any notion of a special sphere of influence.”
Lying on some of the world’s biggest oil reserves, Kazakhstan has played a careful balancing act by keeping smooth ties with Russia while looking to the West to diversify oil exports.
Russia’s war with Georgia highlighted Kazakhstan’s importance further in the energy-rich region prone to instability and ethnic tension.
To highlight his neutrality, Nazarbayev held large-scale military exercises with both NATO and Russia in the two weeks preceding Rice’s visit.
During her talks, Rice will seek to forge closer energy ties with Kazakhstan where US companies have invested billions of dollars in oil money. But no concrete deals are expected to be signed.
Another issue is human rights. Kazakhstan’s democracy credentials are being closely watched in the West ahead of the country’s chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 2010.
“They are set commitments and I expect Kazakhstan to live up to them and they are commitments that they’ve taken and they say they want to live up to,” Rice said.
She said the US had raised individual cases of human rights with the Kazakhs, but gave no details.
Nazarbayev, in power since Soviet times, is accused by some rights organizations of tolerating no dissent at home and allowing no press freedom.
Freedom House said ahead of Rice’s visit that Kazakhstan’s failure to make sufficient progress towards democracy risked undermining the OSCE’s reputation.
Rice was in Kazakhstan for a few hours en route from a visit to India.
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