Larry Busacca/Getty Images For MTV Kanye WestMOSCOW - Kanye West serenaded the grandson of Kazakhstan's longtime president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, at a wedding reception in Almaty on Saturday, seeming to put aside concerns about human rights abuses during the leader's 23-year autocratic rule. Photographs and video of Mr. West at the Royal Tulip hotel in Almaty began appearing Saturday evening, when he stepped out of a black Mercedes onto a red carpet. Video on Instagram showed a gaggle of young wedding guests, their backs to the stage, posing for pictures with Mr. West as he performed “Can't Tell Me Nothing.†Alyona Gadjilova, the photographer who uploaded the video to Instagram, refused to comment on the wedding when reached by phone on Monday evening.
According to the Kazakh news agency Tengrinews, Mr. West was a personal guest of Mr. Nazarbayev's. The leader's grandson, Aisultan Nazarbayev, 23, married Alima Boranbayeva, the daughter of a top executive at a Kazakh state energy firm. Phone calls to the Kazakh presidential administration and to Mr. West's publicist in New York were not returned on Monday.
Mr. Nazarbayev has ruled Kazakhstan in an autocratic fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union, and was criticized for a brutal police crackdown against striking oil workers in the city of Zhanaozen in 2011 that left more than a dozen killed.
