[DVNT]

Some countries just can't take a joke can they?

The fact that Kazahks are even bothered to refute it makes it even more ridiculous especially after placing full tabloid spreads in the London / NY times and at one point threat of a law suit. But to hint at political motives is borderline paranoia.

I know it's nothing new but still kinda funny reading the responses.

British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has made Kazakhstan famous with his satirical character Borat the Kazakh TV journalist, reports Michael Andersen. Wild talk of supposed Kazakh hobbies as drinking horse urine, or raping and caging women gets a laugh on MTV. But the Kazakh government is not amused.

Borat Sagdiyev calls himself “the number two” television reporter in Kazakhstan, where, he says, the nation’s favourite hobbies are “disco dancing, archery, rape and table tennis”.

Via his Da Ali G Show on HBO and dozens of other channels, the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has brought the character of Borat to millions of people all over the world.

Borat always sports a combination of extremely poorly-fitting glitzy-cheap suits, a ’70s moustache and a series of wild outbursts about his ’homeland’ Kazakhstan.

....................................

The Kazakh government had had enough when Borat hosted MTV’s Europe Music awards in Lisbon at the beginning of November. In front of dozens of millions of viewers the ’Kazakh’ journlist arrived in a rickety old Air Kazakh plane with a one-eyed pilot who had a vodka bottle in hand.

As press attache at the Kazakh embassy in Washington, it is Roman Vassilenko’s job to refute Borat’s utterings on Kazakhstan.

For example regarding the life of women there. As Borat says, “In Kazakhstan, we say God, man, horse, dog, then woman, then rat” or how about “in Kazakhstan we say, letting a woman in politics is like letting a monkey drive a plane”.

“What Borat says is ridiculous,” Roman Vassilenko tells me on the phone from Washington, “in fact, five out of fifteen minsters in the government are women”.

Domestic violence

He also refutes Borat’s claim that Kazakh women are kept in cages and beaten up for fun by their husbands. And I have to say that in many visits to the country, I have indeed never seen caged women.

What I have seen is the extreme and very widespread domestic violence, which – according to international experts - 52 percent of Kazakh women have been the victim of.

Rape

– which Borat calls a favourite Kazakh hobby – is according to the same research a problem of horrendous dimensions, but often goes unreported and thus unpunished.

According to Borat anti-semitism is another typical Kazakh hobby. In one of his HBO shows, he got patrons at an Arizona bar to sing along to ’a popular Kazakh folk song’ called ’Throw the Jew down the well’. The Kazakh spokesman angrily refutes this image. And it has to be said that when the Kazakh government prides itself on having established good inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations in the country, this is basically true. Not least if one compares the situation to other former Soviet republics.

After his performance on MTV, the Kazakh government speculated publicly that Borat – i.e. the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen – had ulterior motives. “We do not rule out that Mr Cohen is serving someone’s political order designed to pressent Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way”, a statement read. But Roman Vassilenko couldn’t tell me who that ’someone’ might be. At some point, the Kazakh government even threatened to sue Cohen but this threat has apparently now evaporated.
Despite much talk about establishing a democracy, freedom of speech is in very bad health in Kazakhstan: practically all media are either owned or controlled by the president and his family. His own daughter is Kazakhstan’s leading media magnate. And is also being groomed as its next leader when (if) her dad’s time in office comes to a close. Critical journalists are often beaten up or sent death threats in the form of severed heads of dogs, as happened to one Kazakh colleague after she wrote about how oil millions had landed in the president’s personal accounts in Switzerland.

According to the Kazakh constitution, criticism of the office of the president is forbidden which precludes scrutiny of Nazarbeyev’s rule.

Against this background, I suggested to spokesman Vassilenko that maybe the Kazakh regime did not ‘get’ freedom of speech. And also that maybe they had misunderstood that Cohen is using Borat to poke fun – not so much at Kazakhstan – but at the westerners and our stereotypes.

“Unfortunately people in the West, especially in the United States, just refer to the countries in Central Asia collectively as the ‘Stans’,” says Roman Vassilenko at the Kazakh embassy in Washington. “We are concerned that (Cohen’s) irony might be lost on some people when Borat uses Kazakhstan”. (“Stan - who?” President George Bush was supposed to have asked when Condoleeza Rice first briefed him about Uzbekistan.)

Recently, I discussed Borat with the small group of Kazakh students at Oxford – the future elite of their country. Several of them were openly irritated that their British classmates now know Kazakhstan – but only Borat’s version.

One of them had clearly studied his president’s methods. “Instead of suing him, there are other ways of influencing TV stations, so they simply won’t put him on air”, he said somewhat ominously.

Another argued that threats of legal action and diplomatic protests only made Kazakhstan look silly and ‘Soviet’. Calling himself a Kazakh patriot, a third student appealed to westeners not to watch Borat’s programmes.

Maybe the Kazakh sense of humour is just different. Sunday sees presidential elections in Kazakhstan. A couple of weeks ago, a prominent member of the opposition and former close ally of Nazarbeyev, Zamanbek Nurkadilov, was found dead after having been shot twice in the chest and once in the head.

Wednesday this week, the Kazakh police published its conclusions: Nurkadilov had committed suicide. According to the police, he had shot himself. First in the chest. Then in the heart. And then in the head.
• Michael Andersen is a journalist and broadcaster who has covered Central Asia and the Caucasus for many years. He can be reached at michaelandersencentralasia@yah oo.com
source:http://www.indexonline.org/en/ news/articles/2005/4/kazakhsta n-tv-comedian-s-satire-falls-f lat-i.shtml