Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev has called on world leaders and the United Nations to take concrete measures to put an end to the brutal and violent rampage of the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists who senselessly massacred 129 innocent people in Paris and many others in Mali and other areas recently.
Addressing the UN General Assembly lately, the Kazakh President said the world must “radically change the rules of the global behavior and unite against a common threat—terrorism,” which has now taken a global scale.
Nazarbayev said “no matter how impossible it may seem at first glance,” world leaders must take action, “unite and create a unified global network to counter and put an end to extremism and rampant terrorism in the world.”
Under Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan, a part of the now defunct Soviet Union and which shares common borders with volatile Afghanistan, prides itself in having effectively united its more that 40 ethnic groups, most of which are Islams, and gained significant strides towards modernization and prosperity under a regime of sustained peace and stability. The Kazakh President believes economic problems provoke “negative phenomena in the world, including terrorism.”
The Kazakh leader stressed that the crises of the past years demonstrate the futility of the policy of isolationism, “new rules of life, new and more effective treatment for existing crisis to prevent future ones.” He suggested also that the world “needs a common currency and a valid supranational global financial regulator, and wider representation in the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.” This measure, he added, will help address the main danger of “endless wars that generate uncontrolled migration, terrorism and chaos.”
Observers said Kazakhstan itself could serve as a model of these suggested reforms having demonstrated its stability despite its circumstances, including its geographical proximity to Afghanistan, one of the key sources of instability in Central Asia, the destructive impact of which is not always easy to curb.
The same observers said Kazakhstan is a miniature world, which has done away with nuclear weapons, pointing that “it is the first country in history that decided to close its nuclear test sites and voluntarily renounced the fourth largest nuclear arsenal.”
Kazakhstan today is now a showcase of economic development. Its “100 concrete steps” revolutionary approach, formulated under Nazarbayev’s guidance, now propels the country on an unprecedented economic surge.
Former Russian Minister of Economic Development, German Gref, a world renowned economist who now heads one of the world’s largest banks, has called the plan as “one of the best documents” he had ever seen, noting that “after the implementation of even just 50 of the steps Kazakhstan has become fundamentally a different state.”
Indeed. Kazakhstan is now a very different state from what it was two decades ago. It is now the lead state among the CIS countries in terms of prosperity and competitiveness as may be judged by how its capital, Astana, has risen to higher world ranking. Kazakh leaders have vowed not to rest on their laurels and have expressed determination to strive further to scale new heights and enter the circle if the world’s top 30 most developed countries by 2050.
• Luis T. Arriola is the publisher of Asean Times and has followed Kazakhstan’s progress in the last eight years.