Francis Pike

Is Kazakhstan capable of transitioning to democracy?

First family: Dariga and Nursultan meet a respectable couple, and also Prince Andrew (Getty)

In the dramatic ‘reveal’ of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, the lead character, private dick Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) violently extracts the identity of the young girl hidden in the house of Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). Evelyn, after being beaten and thrown across the room by Gittes, explains, ‘She’s my sister and my daughter’. The penny drops and Gittes realises that Evelyn has had a daughter by her father.

Incest is shocking enough in a film. When incest allegedly involves Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former president of Kazakhstan, and his daughter Dariga, the speaker of Kazakhstan’s Senate, the revelation is jaw-dropping.

The reveal of this hard-to-believe accusation was even more extraordinary. It was posted on Facebook by Aisultan Nazarbayev, the president’s grandson, who in February 2020 sought political asylum in Britain: ‘My mother [Dariga] kept my grandfather on the hook because I am his son.’ Other Facebook posts by Aisultan include rather less surprising charges of high-level corruption. Aisultan is a former Chelsea FC prospect and a graduate of Sandhurst, Britain’s officer school. He was supposedly being trained for power until he lapsed into the life of a dissolute, arguably unhinged, playboy.

The Kazakhstan government countered that Aisultan’s posts were the rantings of a known drug addict. He certainly was one: not long after seeking asylum in London, he was convicted for a drug-fuelled assault on a policeman. From Kazakhstan’s point of view then, it was perhaps fortunate that in August that year the 29-year-old Aisultan was found dead, supposedly of heart failure.

Since his death, attempts to discredit Aisultan have been muddied by claims from Alnur Musayev, the exiled former chairman of the National Security Council (NSC), Kazakhstan’s intelligence service. According to Musayev, DNA tests show that Aisultan was not the son of Dariga Nazarbayeva’s ex-husband, Rakhat Aliyiev. Tantalisingly, Musayev has not revealed the name of the real father.

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