Former Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler (D., Fla.) has been accused of "dictator schilling" following a recent stay in Kazakhstan where he served as an election observer and attracted criticism for declaring the dictatorship’s vote "impressive."
Wexler came under fire in a recently Daily Beast article for traveling to Kazakhstan in a trip that was partly paid for by the country’s hardline government.
"Wexler recently returned from Kazakhstan, where he served as a self-described ‘independent’ monitor observing the country’s presidential election last month," the Daily Beast reported. "Wexler told me that the costs of his trip were split between the think tank he runs—the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Peace—and the Kazakh government (a morsel that might complicate his ‘independence’)."
Kazakhstan’s long reigning dictator, President Nursultan Nazarbayev, won the election with nearly 98 percent of the vote. Despite this outcome, Wexler praised the elections.
"Clearly, an incumbent president that gets 97.5 percent of the vote, most Americans—myself included—would shrug and say that’s not a contest," Wexler told the Daily Beast. "And that’s kind of the way I went into it. But what’s clear is that Kazakhstan is in a special place in terms of its development as a country."
The Daily Beast reports:
At one point in my interview, I gave Wexler an opportunity to criticize the Kazakh government, to prove that he wasn’t a complete shill for a Central Asian kleptocracy. Did he talk to any independent journalists? It’s not an easy thing to do in a closed society like Kazakhstan’s, but surely a former Congressman, visiting at the invitation of the foreign ministry, would have been able to arrange such a meeting if he insisted. Wexler told me that he "had heard a number of stories and controversies about lack of freedom of the press," and did speak to many journalists (whether any of them weren’t employees of the state, he wouldn’t say).
Rather than explore the issue of press freedom, however, Wexler used the opportunity to laud the regime’s openness.