Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Yuriy Yekhanurov, Prime Minister of Ukraine, discussed his government's economic plans and Ukraine's integration into the EU, NATO, and the WTO.
Dr. Karim Massimov, Advisor to President Nursultan Nazarbayev, addressed the upcoming presidential election and the future of Kazakhstan's political system.
As voters in Azerbaijan go to the polls, they will participate in an election whose conduct will serve as a referendum on U.S. efforts to spread democracy. A free and fair election will signal that Islam, oil and democracy can coexist. A tainted vote will affirm that those elements don't mix well, and show that the West is indifferent to democracy when oil and military bases are at stake.
In Egypt’s first-ever multicandidate presidential election on September 7, opponents to President Mubarak’s regime performed poorly, and Mubarak swept the election with 88.6 percent of the vote to secure his fifth presidential term. But is this landslide victory a mandate for the ruling party’s power and policies?
Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski took his scalpel to the administration’s national security strategy in an opinion piece Oct. 13. Former State Department chief of staff Larry Wilkerson assisted in the surgery with an October 19 speech. The war in Iraq has hurt “America's ability to cope with nuclear nonproliferation,” Brzezinski says.
A discussion with Robert Amsterdam, lawyer for Mikhail Khodorkovsky of YUKOS.
Mubarak's victory represented a step toward opening up a persistently autocratic regime. It revitalized the political scene and partially minimized citizens' apathy toward politics. However, to describe the election as a historic breakthrough or as a shift toward a new pattern of state-society relationship is misleading. The election was not competitive and its conduct clearly undemocratic.