Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had an extended consultancy contract during the 1990s with Nursultan Nazarbayev, the five-term President of Kazakhstan, according to numerous British media accounts. The effect over time of Blair’s advisory role, as well as that of his wife Cherie’s law firm, fits all the characteristics of what could be expected from an elaborate, multi-layered British intelligence operation to uncork chaos in Kazakhstan, at the moment needed, to attack the real target, which is Russia and its upcoming role in forcing dialogue with the U.S. and NATO on strategic stability.
The outbreak of violent protests in several cities of Kazakhstan occurred a few days after Queen Elizabeth, in the last week of 2021, awarded Blair the highest level of knighthood in the Empire. The reaction in the United Kingdom was what the intelligence services would have expected. Nearly a million people mobilized to demand that she retract the honor, on the grounds that Blair was prosecutable as a war criminal because of his role in starting the Iraq War. During Blair’s six years of advisory work with Nazarbayev, there would be similar protests erupting from UK branches of Human Rights Watch and other Non-Governmental Organizations, accusing Blair of “abetting” dictatorship in Kazakhstan. Whatever sincerity may have infused the hatred of Blair, these outbursts acted as a protective smokescreen for the real issue: that the NGOs also were being used by British intelligence to create the upheavals, and to sabotage serious approaches to economic development as the only possible root on which nurture political freedom.
Several accounts have been published periodically in left- and right-wing UK newspapers, of Blair’s relationship to Nazarbayev since 2013, when the relationship was shifted to his wife’s law firm. Here are some highlights of the clearest account, which appeared in the Daily Mail, April 22, 2016:
A leading aide to Blair offered “private strategic advice” to Nazarbayev a year after Blair ended his 10-year term in 2007. Blair and his aides kept pressing for a formal relationship to the President, who had visited London and met with the Queen. Blair’s aides kept contacting Nazarbayev, proposing that informal meetings be held every three to six months. Some media claim that Blair began “lucrative job opportunities” in Kazakhstan as early as 2008. The first publicly known meeting under the consultancy arrangement with the President occurred in 2011.
Soon thereafter, the Kazakh government came under international attack following an incident in the western oil town of Zhanaozen, where 15 union workers were killed and over 100 others injured by police in response to allegedly unarmed protests. Blair took Nazarbeyev under his wing, writing statements for him to “deal with” the western media onslaughts about the incident. Thus began an annual, 5-million-pound contract (which later increased), in which Blair trained him to use phrases which he told him would appease the western media. Blair was attacked by the Human Rights crowd in the UK for circulating the phrase “the enormous progress that Kazakhstan has made.” In 2012, Blair ran a public relations campaign for Nazarbayev, into the European Union bureaucracy and Parliaments, repeating such phrases to “massage” public perception of Kazakhstan, thus earning his annual fees.
In 2014, the Daily Telegraph broke the story that Cherie Blair—"known for her ‘ardent’ defense of civil liberties and human rights"—was brought into the picture, getting a contract for her firm to review the country’s “bilateral investment treaties.”
