There is a small town in western Kazakhstan named Zhanaozen,
this happened in December of 2011.
It was a labor dispute, a normal labor dispute that lasted for a few months.
But suddenly, some unknown group of people came to the central square,
and started a riot. Then they suddenly disappeared.
And the military police came to the square, and started to shoot, shooting to kill.
And so the situation deteriorated and around 70 people were dead at the end.
So in January it was the end of the era of the silent, quiet Kazakhstan as the world knew it.
It’s been around 25 years as an independent country in which we never saw violence.
The last violence in Kazakhstan was in December 1986,
and it was the first time in the Soviet Union when one of the republics started to fight for its independence.
For most of this time, the chief of the country, from 1989 I would say,
was Mr. Nursultan Nazarbayev.
He was a Soviet apparatchik, who became by chance
the chairman and prime minister of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan.
He had wanted to become prime minister of the Soviet Union, or at least vice president of the Soviet Union.
You can see him here sitting by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Then there was a revolution, and he settled for being president
of the independent state of Kazakhstan. Well, first of course he was a chairman.
The chairman of the republic became president, and then he was president again, and again.
And then, a few years ago, he became the father of our nation.
It’s Elbasy in the Kazakh language. Or if you prefer, in German, you know, it’s Führer.
So from that moment you cannot actually write anything personal about him.
You can’t reveal any personal information, not only about him, but also about his relatives.
It’s prohibited by law.
Most of his friends who actually fought for the independent country from the beginning were ‘disappeared’ along the way.
Here are two of them. This one here on the right, Nurkadilov,
was found in his bed, shot twice in the chest,
once in the head, execution style, it was announced a suicide.
The other on the left, the minister of information, Sarsenbayev was found dead on the road.
His bodyguard and his driver were also found shot, execution style.
But most of the people just left the country.
And now, the most interesting case here is not the evolution of the tyrant in the country.
We know many examples like that.
Well, almost every former Soviet republic exhibited this type of tyranny.
What made Kazakhstan special was its oil.
And not just any oil, but Caspian Sea oil, which was the last frontier of “free oil”,
oil that was not part of OPEC.
It was so important for western companies to keep this oil that people made Nazarbayev very rich.
We know this not because we actually found some documents in Kazakhstan–
we know of course this is not possible.
But since 1999 I would say there was a huge worldwide investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,
and revealed that Mr. Nazarbayev got bribes from “Mr. Kazakhstan,”
as he was known in the United States, the shadow ambassador of Kazakhstan.
From those of you who saw Syriana the movie, this is a scene from the movie.
I shot Mr. James Giffen myself near this New York court.
He actually made an interesting defense, and he got away with it.
After 10 years of investigation, after all these documents were published,
after it was revealed that Nazarbayev got bribes.
In November 2010 the judge said that he was sorry actually
that he was prosecuting Mr. Giffen in the first place.
So he was found not guilty.
We were fighting for this case not because of Mr. Giffen, but because of Mr. Nazarbayev.
Suddenly we became laughing stocks as an independent press
because we had said that Mr. Nazarbayev had taken bribes,
but now there was no case and no bribes.
And we started to unravel the information, how was it possible to do this?
To get away from the prosecution?
We found this very interesting project,
an investigation made by a private intelligence company.
And it was running for almost all this time.
They were enormously interesting documents
which reveal that people from this company came to different offices
in different countries and found the information about how to confront this case.
So the company in question is Global Options Management Inc.
It’s a secret document, as you can see.
It’s a very different story, this company we found in these documents.
It took just 5 minutes for me to understand what this Global Options Management outfit was all about.
The main company does not exist anymore,
I found this website on an archive website.
It was a joint venture, between a huge Western corporation named Global Options,
and a small outfit named Kroll Investigations, which basically was run by Nazarbayev's friend and shadow advisor.
From now on it was clear, it was not by chance
that these two companies effectively stopped the biggest case in the history of the FCPA (Foreign Corruption Practice Act).
It’s interesting to read this document, to see how efficient this machine is.
I just don’t even know how much money was spent on this project.
We were interested in the history of these companies.
And we did some investigation and found a real hidden treasure.
It’s a project named Superkhan
Basically, its a roadmap, or a set of instructions,
for how to create and run an autocracy or autocratic system.
It’s actually interesting, to imagine when Mr. Nazarbayev and his friends from former Soviet republics talked about things like the Orange Revolution and dangers.
But they themselves follow the rules in this manual.
One of the ideas presented by Nazarbayev for the future, for 2035,
generally it says, that the ‘Western’ front of this company for Kazakhstan has to be supported by prominent figures from different countries.
So, we see actually this kind of support.
There is a book published by a famous former British politician, Jonathan Aitken
and he represented Mr. Nazarbayev as an “oak” and political opponents as political "pygmies."
That was the first line of the defense.
But this type of defense -- here’s Mr. Aitken -- for all who know British history,
you know he was a famous political figure in the 1970s and early 1980s.
This is a presentation of the book. But the real treasure, it’s when they arranged with Mr. Blair.
And now Tony Blair is an advisor to Mr. Nazarbayev, and his company supported him all the way,
it’s now part of a documentary of Kazakhstan, which was presented in western countries and in Kazakhstan itself.
And Mr. Blair supported Mr. Nazarbayev.
And Mr. Blair had many friends, you know some of them I can’t actually say.
I want to make a point, and then I'll finish the story.
This was not just a political memorandum or political ideas.
It’s a technological way. It is , how you say, intelligent design.
It’s basically like a packaged product, everyone could get this package,
for how to run an autocratic regime in one particular country.
It’s not like the communist instruction, on how to follow the communist revolution. No.
We are talking about know-how, just like a tax advisor.
That’s what the point of my presentation is. I hope that it is new knowledge for you, about how it works in Kazakhstan.
People like Mr. Blair must understand, all these technological things, it all comes to the this end.
This is absolutely clear, no technology.
In the end we will see what happened in Zhanaozen, what happened in the country.
And there is no way to prevent this, otherwise to create some sort of politically,
well of course it’s democracy, but a political concurrence between different political forces in the country.
That’s it. Thank you very much.