I have been following with interest — not to say glee — the spat between the government of Kazakhstan and ‘Borat Sagdiyev’, the latest alter ego of the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. Kazakhstan’s autocratic President Nursultan Nazarbayev has evidently failed to see the funny side of Borat’s characterisation of Kazakh men as brutal racists and Kazakh women as mulish peasants who are treated as chattels by their menfolk. London ambassador Erlan Idrissov and other spokesmen have suggested that Baron Cohen is cowardly and politically motivated as well as plain wrong. What particularly got up Idrissov’s nose was Borat’s claim that a Kazakh wife can be bought from her father for ‘15 gallons of insecticide’.
Happily I can adjudicate in this dispute, having once spent a week in the old Cossack stronghold of Uralsk in north-west Kazakhstan. Indeed, I count as an acquaintance — I hesitate to say friend — one of Nazarbayev’s most trusted henchmen, Krymbek Kusherbayev, who was until recently ambassador to Moscow but at the time of my visit was Akim, or governor, of the oil-rich West Kazakhstan oblast of which Uralsk is the capital.
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