Update below

President Nazarbayev rejected the nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Peoples Assembly, reports Gazeta.kz. In the good-old fashion of the benevolent statesman, Nazarbayev expressed his gratitude, but also said that…

“…we are working not for awards, but for our country’s prestige.”

Unfortunately, the short article does not give any details about the reasons for the nomination, but Nazarbayev’s role in nuclear disarmament seems the most ‘award-worthy’ in this respect.

Sitting on about 1,400 nuclear warheads by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the young nation was faced with the choice whether to gain nuclear-weapon status among the world community or to dismantle its nuclear arms stock.

The reasons for Kazakhstan to give up its arsenal of nuclear weapons are multi-layered. While Nazarbayev is widely held to be the architect of this political move, some analysts also point out that he held out on disarmament until he could gain more attention from the West (and better technical assistance deals).

In the end, the decision to let Russia deal with the nuclear weapons was nothing more than pragmatic:

The drivers are foreign technical assistance and, for NTI and Embassy of Kazakhstan, the individuals who allowed this technical assistance to proceed. The Kazakhs did not have the resources to maintain their nuclear weapons or to dismantle them safely, so technical assistance was needed when the policy of disarmament was decided upon.

But will Central Asia continue to be a nuclear-free zone?

Russia’s objection to the Almaty declaration from 1997 (signed by all five Central Asian governments) stems from another CIS treaty, the 1992 Tashkent Treaty:

Russia is the only signatory that believes that this treaty would allow it to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons to Central Asia in order to deal with threats emanating from the region.

If Nazarbayev is to convince Russia that nuclear weapons should stay out of Central Asia as a whole, he might not reject the Peoples Assembly’s proposal next time around. Fair enough.

Update:

The idea that Nursultan Nazarbayev deserves a Nobel Price is not new, apparently. Via “Bartholomew’s notes on religion” I see that during the “Second Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions” (held in the spanking new Pyramid of Peace in Astana), a Muslim leader from Pakistan outdid representatives from other faiths in his praise for the Kazakh president:

Dr. Mahmood Ahmad Ghazi, former President of the International Islamic University of Pakistan, suggested nominating Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev for the Nobel Prize in Peace.“I am going to put up Nursultan Nazarbayev for the Nobel Prize”, he stressed.