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Feud splits Kazakh ruling family Feud splits Kazakh ruling family
(about 5 hours later)
By Ian MacWilliam BBC regional analyst Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev has fired his son-in-law Rakhat Aliyev from the Foreign Service in what appears to be a growing power struggle.
Kazakhstan's energy resources are attracting keen interest Earlier, Mr Aliyev accused the leader of trying to silence him after he said he planned to run for the presidency.
The son-in-law of Kazakhstan's long-serving president has accused him of usurping the presidential post and rigging elections. What started as a family disagreement is now a major political scandal.
In a statement published on a media website, Rakhat Aliyev also said President Nursultan Nazarbayev had opened a criminal case against him to keep him out of politics after Mr Aliyev said he planned to run for president himself. Earlier this week, President Nazarbayev ordered a criminal investigation into allegations his son-in-law was behind the kidnapping of two senior bankers.
It is unprecedented in Kazakhstan for such a public figure to accuse the president directly. Then, on Friday, the government shut down a television station and a newspaper belonging to Mr Aliyev and his wife, the president's daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva.
It brings into the open a long-running power struggle within the ruling family of Central Asia's richest country, where the Western powers, Russia and China are all seeking new energy sources. And on Saturday, Mr Aliyev lost his job as an ambassador of Kazakhstan to Austria.
This family feud is a complicated tale of power and money in the top circles of Kazakhstan's ruling elite. In a statement from Vienna, Mr Aliyev accused his father-in-law of trying to silence him because of his ambition to run for the presidency.
Rakhat Aliyev is a controversial businessman married to the president's eldest daughter. The country, he said, was slipping back into its totalitarian, Soviet past.
As Kazakhstan has prospered from its oil and other resources, this power couple have come to control numerous media, banking and other enterprises. Weak opposition
New generation But few in Kazakhstan think that this power struggle has anything to do with democratic values - rather its money and power.
Mr Aliyev has occupied a number of senior government positions and is currently Kazakhstan's ambassador in Vienna. Mr Aliyev is an extremely controversial figure: together with his wife, he has wide-ranging business and political interests and a strong following among some of the country's wealthy elite.
But he has now admitted to greater ambitions - he said he told President Nazarbayev that he intended to run for president himself when his father-in-law's term ends in five years. But President Nazarbayev, who has been in office for 17 years, is not about to give up power, even to his family members.
Mr Nazarbayev has just headed off that possibility by changing the law to allow himself to run again. In fact, only last week, Mr Nazarbayev strengthened his rule by changing the law to allow him to run for the presidency as many times as he likes.
Then a newspaper and a television station controlled by Mr Aliyev were closed down. In Kazakhstan, where the media is tightly controlled by the state, and where the opposition is weak, the political process has always been a family affair.
And now he has also been accused of involvement in an alleged kidnapping in a confusing fraud scandal at a top bank which he also controls. But this could split the family in two, which may be just enough to destroy the fragile political structure of a country that is an increasingly important oil producer.
Mr Aliyev says the criminal charges were arranged to keep him out of politics - a common technique in most ex-Soviet countries.
President Nazarbayev has been in power for nearly two decades, but this family feud suggests his grip will increasingly be questioned by the rising political generation, particularly in an age when information and the media are harder to control.