A day after the demonstration on Respublika Square, the Kazakh authorities explained everything to the confused observer. “Personal enmity” between Utembaev and Sarsenbaev led the former to call a hit on the latter:

After Sarsenbaev published an article giving a negative characterization of [Utembaev] in one of the national newspapers, their relations deteriorated rapidly. After the publication of that article, Erzhan Utembaev’s career, in his own words, went downhill. Blaming that on Sarsenbaev, he nurtured the idea of taking revenge on him for a long time.”

Any questions?

Well, a couple of them, really. First off, the timing of the press release is rather odd. Just one day after more than 1,000 demonstrators chanted for an independent inquiry into the murder, the version put forward by the authorities seems a little hasty. Also, the RFE/RL article linked above extensively quotes the Almaty-based Political Risks Assessment Group, an independent Kazakh think-tank. While we know some other “independent” think-tanks already, this one is particularly interesting as it has previously made very insightful comments on the political landscape in Kazakhstan:

Dosym Satpayev, director of the Risk Assessment Group, a corporate consulting firm in downtown Almaty, writes occasional political columns for several newspapers around this country. Over coffee one afternoon, he described Kazakhstan as a “rich country with a soft authoritarian regime.”

(…)

Mr. Satpayev added that it is difficult for any opposition party to gain traction because virtually anyone who has achieved business or political success is indebted to the current regime.

“They all owe the president,” he said. “There is nobody successful in Kazakhstan politics or business who has done it by himself. This is why Kazakhstan’s opposition parties cannot find support among the people.”

So, in these heated times, Mr Satpayev poses the right kind of questions that will lead to the core of the problem in Kazakhstan. The internal power struggles become ever more obscure and difficult to entangle. Whereas the real threat to Nazarbayev does not come in the form of clearly-segregated opposition groups (as their political influence is, and will probably remain marginal), the real battlefronts over who is going to have an influence in appointing a successor to the incumbent when his (likely last) term will end in about 6 1/2 years (as partly discussed here) seem to be within the existing coalition of Otan (Nazarbayev’s party), Asar (his daughter’s party) and AIST and in the oligarchic business community .

As Nathan rightly points out, it is rather unlikely that either President Nazarbayev or his daughter were directly involved in the w murder:

It certainly seems that President Nazarbaev has extremely strong disincentives for allowing the murder of opposition politicians even with plausible deniability, let alone plotting them himself.

But who was it then? I guess for the time being, it is probably not entirely justified to outrightly dismiss the government’s version of events. Nevertheless, the killing might be motivated by something else than personal enmity, and it should be absolutely imperative for the Kazakh authorities to coherently proove that Dariga Nazarbayeva is not involved in any shady affair here.

Last year, Sarsenbaev went to court blaming her for being still in control of running the Khabar broadcast company, a job she had officially quit when taking over as the head of the Asar-party. Sarsenbaev seemed convinced that he had enough evidence to proove Dariga’s continuous involvement in running the broadcaster via a holding group:

Representatives of the Khabar group have said they would be prepared to drop the case if Sarsenbaev agreed to withdraw his allegations. But Sarsenbaev has refused, insisting that the documents he has amassed and dozens of witness testimonies will vindicate him in court.

It becomes obvious that only digging below the surface presents the outsider with a colourful array of potential theories to explain the murder.

So, even the respected Mr Satpaev from the Almaty-based think-tank might be drawing too easy and general assumptions, not paying enough attention to the internal fractions within the established power structures:

Satpaev says recent events are aimed at killing two birds with one stone: on the one hand, the authorities eliminated Sarsenbaev, who was a major strategist of the opposition. On the other, Satpaev says, the Nazarbaev family gets rid of rivals within the government itself — Utembaev and others.

The authorities - who, then, are we talking about here?