Legacies, bribes or culture? Prosecuting large-scale drug-trafficking in Kazakhstan

Abstract

Several recent criminal cases against high-ranking Kazakhstani Ministry of Internal Affairs officials who had been charged with organizing drug dealing groups of 30 to 50 members within their departments have exposed sophisticated criminal operations involving significant flows of cash, narcotics, and corrupt influence. Some of these officers have been convicted and sent to prison right away, others have been initially released only to find themselves convicted and sentenced to imprisonment a few years later, yet others escaped the punishment. How can we explain this mixed, successful yet protracted criminal prosecution of corrupt police officers who have been protecting drug dealing groups in what many view as corrupt political system? Drawing on the evidence gained from the analysis of mass media reports on drugrelated topics, Kazakhstani criminal legislation and court records, from interviews with the law-enforcement officials dealing with drug-trafficking (detectives, investigators, judges, lawyers, criminals, etc.), and from participant observation of criminal trials of police officers in Kostanay, I argue that the structure of internal and external incentives accounts for both police involvement in organized crime and the mixed success in combatting it. Strong internal incentives arise from Soviet legacies such as formal statistical evaluation of police officers’ performance and from informal subculture within these law-enforcement agencies. Meanwhile, weaker external incentives arise from imperfect legislation, pressure from politicians, an inter-agency competition and highly developed practices of corruption, all of which weakens law enforcement’s the ability to prosecute both organized crime and corrupt officials. I conclude that modern Central Asian states are too weak to prosecute a relatively new type of transnational crime such a drug trafficking. More broadly, this helps advance our theoretical understanding of how formal and informal political institutions interact in different political orders.