Another look at Nurusultan Nazarbayev

So, I did a bit more reading into Kazakhstan President Nazarbayev, the man pushing for his country to become a global uranium fuel bank for Iran, among other countries.

Paraphrasing from a 2007 BBC profile on the man.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4489174.stm

• He is perceived to have concentrated power in his hands and those of his family, to have suppressed the opposition, and to have failed to deliver democratic and fair elections.
• He pushed through reforms that granted him unlimited Presidential terms.
• In 2006, he announced his belief that Kazakhstan will become one of the world's 50 most developed countries and one of the world's top 10 oil exporters in the next seven years.

Paraphrasing from his Wikipedia profile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nursultan_Nazarbayev

• Transparency International ranked Kazakhstan 124th in its list of countries by corruption in 2004 with a score of 2.2 (on a scale of 0-10 with 0 indicating a "highly corrupt" state).
• He is believed to have transferred at least $1 billion worth of oil revenues to his private bank accounts in other countries and his family controls many other key enterprises in Kazakhstan.
• Nazarbayev has exerted effort to highlight his Muslim heritage and apparently shares a strong "religious and cultural" bond with Ahmadinejad. In a recent announcement of a railway link, Nazarbayev expressed religious solidarity with Iran, as he was quoted as saying, "Today I will pay a visit to Turkmenistan where we will agree on the construction of a railway through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to Iran with access to the Persian Gulf. This will bring us closer to our Muslim brothers."

Obama May Cede Iran's Nuclear Rights

From the April 10, 2009 Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KD10Ak03.html

So, apparently the Obama Administration's way to confront Iran's nuclear ambitions and promote nuclear non-proliferation is to...encourage Kazakhstan, the world's #2 holder of uranium reserves after Australia, to create an international uranium fuel bank. The theory, as I read it, is that Iran would stop sensitive internal uranium enrichment if it could obtain the uranium globally and peacefully for use in nuclear power plants. I need to do some more research on whether this uranium from a fuel bank can't be used for weaponization.

The article's author, a former Indian diplomat, editorializes (there's a lot of this with The Asia Times) that Kazakhstan President Nurusultan Nazarbayev (who according to the author, supposedly could've been the Soviet Union's PM if not for its collapse) is a shrewd veteran politician who's been trying to build support for this global uranium bank for a while. Apparently, the Japanese are big supporters of this idea as it is the world's 3rd largest importer of uranium, after the US and France, and it gives them a stable source. China and Russian are understandably not pleased with improved US-Japanese-Central Asian relations. Companies from both nations had been trying to persuade Kazakhstan to grant exclusive contracts, thereby increasing their influence on yet another Central Asian energy-rich nation.