Kazakh opposition snubs president's son-in-law

ASTANA, May 29 (Reuters) Kazakhstan's opposition rebuffed the son-in-law of President Nursultan Nazarbayev today after he called for more political freedom in his home country.

Kazakh police issued an international arrest warrant for Rakhat Aliyev, a powerful businessman, yesterday and accused him of running a mafia network in the oil-rich state.

Aliyev, sacked as ambassador to Vienna on Saturday, says the case is a politically motivated attempt to silence him.

The Real Ak Zhol opposition party said the authorities' actions against Aliyev were ''a belated but inevitable reaction to endless complaints by his victims, the opposition's statements and publications in the independent media''.

''We must not forget that this is not all about the personality of this concrete citizen, Rakhat Aliyev, but the broader defects of the Kazakh political system,'' it said in a statement.

Kazakhstan's opposition is weak and fragmented and has little support in the Central Asian country, a key energy producer in the region. Aliyev, who has no platform as an opposition leader at home, acknowledges this.

''Our president has been persistently building a political system that brooks no dissent, no pluralism,'' he said in a statement from Vienna on Monday. ''One cannot be a leader of something (the opposition) that does not exist.'' Last week Nazarbayev, in power since 1989, signed constitutional amendments allowing him to stay in office for life, a move the opposition condemned as undemocratic.

Aliyev, who has accumulated wealth and power since mid-1990s, has said his problems started after he shared with Nazarbayev his intention to run for the presidency in 2012.

''For President Nazarbayev it may be major news that the wish to participate in presidential elections is not a crime but the constitutional right of any citizen, and I am no exception,'' Aliyev said in a statement on Monday.

Nazarbayev has ordered the police to investigate Aliyev, married to his eldest daughter Dariga, on suspicion of kidnapping two senior bankers.

The opposition said it was not taken in by Aliyev's democratic rhetoric.

''Supporting Aliyev just because he is against Nazarbayev at the moment is not the kind of thing I would do. Not the kind of thing any serious politician would do,'' Oraz Zhandosov, co-head of Real Ak Zhol, told the liberal zonakz.net Web site.

REUTERS NY ND1642