The politics of not knowing: Rumour and power in Central Asia
When presidents vanish and constitutions shift with suspicious haste, hearsay ceases to be idle chatter and starts shaping elite calculations and testing loyalties.
In a politically free society, rumour is dessert, a guilty pleasure to be taken following a meal of verified news.
In Central Asia, hearsay is often the main course. The intrigue can be diverting, but it comes at the cost of impoverishing the public conversation, paralysing decision-making and turning uncertainty itself into a tool of governance.
Take a story that has for months been circulating quietly but insistently around Astana and Almaty.
The whisper goes that Kazakhstan’s president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev is plotting to get himself appointed Secretary-General of the United Nations. The notion has been given a fresh fillip by the recent announcement of a constitutional reform referendum to be held, in an unseemly rush, on March 15.
The proposed overhaul of the constitution would help clear up some domestic complications. The reform envisions the creation of a vice president post, which would enable Tokayev to identify a candidate to succeed him. Meanwhile nominations for the UN Secretary-General job close in April.
As this now quite well-developed theory has it, Tokayev’s chances might be quite favourable. He is copacetic with Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. And he has put in the hours pretending to look seriously upon President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace bauble. In the arithmetic of multilateral politics, three such nods would not hurt.
The deeper appeal of the scenario, however, lies at home. A glide path to Turtle Bay would be tantamount to a gilded exit. Installed atop the UN system, Tokayev would be physically distant and diplomatically shielded from domestic score-settling. For a leader contemplating succession in a region where former presidents have not always enjoyed tranquil retirements, that is no small consideration.
While this may very well all be nonsense, the scuttlebutt is real.
