Kazakhstan's Aliyev declares rivalry to president

ALMATY, May 26 (Reuters) The son-in-law of President Nursultan Nazarbayev accused the Kazakh leader today of trying to silence him after he declared his intention to run for the presidency.

Rakhat Aliyev, husband of Nazarbayev's daughter Dariga, has fallen out with the veteran leader and was sent to Vienna as ambassador this year, in what analysts called ''luxury exile''.

Nazarbayev this week ordered the police to investigate Aliyev on suspicion of kidnapping two executives of Nurbank, a Kazakh bank controlled by Aliyev.

''This hastily organised case is truly 'important'. Its 'importance' lies in the attempt to remove me from the political process in the country,'' Aliyev said in a statement on the Web site of the Kazakhstan Today news agency, which he controls.

''A few months ago I told Nursultan Abishevich (Nazarbayev) that I had decided to run for the presidency in the next elections in 2012. Shortly after that conversation the Nurbank case happened.'' Nazarbayev, in power in the oil-rich Central Asian state since 1989, this week signed constitutional amendments allowing him theoretically to stay in office for life. His current presidential term expires in 2012.

The authorities also took Aliyev's KTK television channel off the air and closed his Karavan newspaper for three months for violations of Kazakh law -- a move criticised by the US embassy in Kazakhstan.

Analysts believe the amendments and the Aliyev case are part of a broader process to consolidate power in Nazarbayev's hands in a country aspiring to join the world's top 10 oil-producing nations in a decade.

Aliyev, who is still in Vienna, has accumulated vast political and business weight in the ex-Soviet state where clan divisions and family connections play a key role in politics.

But Aliyev, who once proposed setting up a monarchy in Kazakhstan, has no profile as an opposition politician at home where the opposition, led by the Real Ak Zhol party, accuses both him and Nazarbayev of corruption and nepotism.

The 44-year-old said the case was an attempt to silence him and called the Nurbank case and the seizure of his media assets ''absurd'' and ''illegal''.

''I think the effective usurpation of the (presidential) post by one person, turning elections into a farce for foreign monitors, a gradual rollback of democratic achievements, are not helping our country, to say the least,'' he said.

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