My two months in Central Asia ended, as all good things should, with a four day trip to Kazakhstan. I don't know if I have as much to say here as I did about the trip to Uzbekistan. Part of this is due to the fact that, given the size of the country and the way SRAS structured the visit, I saw a much less of Kazakhstan than I did of Uzbekistan. When I went to Uzbekistan, I almost circled the entire country. In Kazakhstan, we never left Almaty. Furthermore, since we spent the whole time in one city, we stayed with one host family the whole trip and didn’t have nearly as much of a chance to go out and meet people. All of that said, let’s start with the first full day in Almaty.
That morning, after a bus ride that must have taken at least two hours, we arrived at the Asian Winter Games sports complex:
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a wider angle. You can’t see the main walking trail in this photo. The place slopes up between two very large mountains with a staircase that takes the average person about an hour to climb up. I’d go on for a while about the complex, but I’m really only mentioning it because of the conversation we had at the top of the staircase with our host-sister. She was a student at the University of International Business, and, given that I had just written a paper discussing the telecom market in Uzbekistan (see “Odds and Ends from CA-202”), we got to talking about smart phones in Kazakhstan. The average Kazakh makes about 60,000 or more tenge per year, and an iPhone 3GS with a plan costs about 80,000 tenge. I think I saw two people with a tablet or smartphone in Kazakhstan, and they were both at the airport. Just as in Uzbekistan (where I saw just as few people with a smartphone), most people use cheap Nokia phones.
After a visit to the Central State Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan (which was right across the street from one of Nazarbayev’s palaces) and a stop at a nearby shopping mall (where I had my first glass of delicious ayran in a year), we got to talking with a Kyrgyz woman as we waited for a bus/taxi back to our host family’s house about, of all things, bride-kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan. The story she told us was a much more mixed bag than what you usually hear. A friend of her’s and this friend’s boyfriend were talking about getting married anyway, and they had talked about bride-kidnapping and the obvious psychological damage it causes. However, the boyfriend’s family pressured him into it, and she was kidnapped a few weeks before we had this conversation. The woman who told us this (let’s call her Jodie Foster from now on) said she thinks they’ll be ok, “because they love each other”. From her perspective, they had a good relationship before the kidnapping. This helps illustrate two things I’ve learned about Kyrgyz society. First, family ties (both in what we would call “the nuclear family” and in the extended family) are a kind of social black hole. In business, courtship, and politics, they exert a force so strong that even ideas like individuality and self-determination as we understand them in the West can’t escape. Second, there is a spectrum of cases, ranging from consensual eloping to abduction by force that leads to rape, that are all labeled “bride-kidnapping” by the Western press. While Azamat’s post in Cyber Chaikhana is absolutely right, there do exist mixed cases like the one I just described, where a healthy relationship was forcefully turned into a marriage by the timeandapacewarpingpowers of Central Asian family pressure. The conversation in Kyrgyzstan (where they have a saying, “Love comes after the wedding”) seems to be taking these cases into account, but I don’t see similar nuance in the Western media.
We also ate dinner that night with Jodie Foster and our host-sister. We got to the topic of Kazakh politics, and I asked our host-sister what she thought of Nazarbayev. She likes him, and she thinks people are better off in the cities. There is a problem in the villages, however, where people can’t find work. Drawing on my own observations of Almaty, the place generally looks nicer than Bishkek (yes, there are some bad parts of the city). I’ve had this idea going all the way back to a research paper I wrote for Politics of Eurasia in the spring of 2008, but a neo-Communist, authoritarian, jabroni beatin’, pie eatin’ SOB like Nazarbayev could win a fair election in this country if one were held.
I then asked Jodie Foster about Kyrgyz politics. I was curious to know what she thought of the politicians that I understood to be the frontrunners in the upcoming presidential election: Almazbek “Let’s Stage a gas crisis to show people I can work with Russia” Atambayev, First Deputy Prime Minister Omurbek Babanov, and Kamchybek Tashiev, the head of the nationalist Ata-Jurt party. “I like Babanov, and I like his plans, “ she said. “But he is involved with crime. My father had a business, and he ran into trouble with Babanov’s men. I like Atambayev but he is linked to crime too.” I then asked about Tashiev, and she nearly, for lack of a better term, ROFLMAO’ed. “He definitely has links to crime. You know, I like Putin. I think he is the greatest president in the world. Presidents like Putin and Nazarbayev, they take and they have corruption, but they give back to their country. In our country, all of our politicians just take. I think we need a strong ruler like Putin.” I think most Americans can’t really imagine what a strong argument for a strongman looks like, but in the current state of Kyrgyz politics, Jodie’s statement makes a lot of sense. To make a comparison with American politics, I think that, if Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry or Mitt Romney gets elected president, it would be a disaster for this country. However, I have no reason to believe that any serious candidate for president has ties to the drug mafia. When you consider that Bakiyev eliminated the Kyrgyz version of the DEA, Kyrgyz voters do not have this luxury. Hunter S. Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 that all of the presidential candidates in America looked the same. “There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn’t pass for the executive vice-president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego”. For an increasing number of Kyrgyz, there isn’t a potentially serious candidate this year who couldn’t pass for an underboss in the Bishkek branch of a Russian mafia family. If all of the candidates look like the same corrupt oligarchs that were ousted in 2005 and 2010, how can you not at least consider someone who will crack down on the drug trade, make the proverbial trains arrive on time, and unite the forty tribes under a single ruler (hmm, where have I heard that before?)
Oh yeah, this post was about Kazakhstan. The next day, we took a cab into the city and toured Kazakh State University, or KazГУ. Now that was a nice campus. Most of the buildings looked as nice (if not better) than the ones at UMass. We stopped by a small museum on campus devoted to the history of the university, and I’m sure it looked exactly the way it was supposed to: clean, modern, and with a giant mural / exhibit on Nazarbayev across from a giant mural/exhibit on Al-Farabi. The message is clear: the exhibition on Al-Farabi is a celebration of Kazakhstan’s past, and if you turn around, you see Nazarbayev leading Kazakhstan into the great shining future. Kazakhstan greatest country in the world / All other countries are run by little girls…
As the tour progressed, we stopped by the philology department and, instead of a meeting with a political scientist like the schedule said, we met with the Dean of the department. I tuned out about five minutes after she started talking, because it quickly became clear that she only intended to give us the official government song and dance routine. Everything has been great since independence under the wise leadership of Nazarbayev. Enrollment has risen to X students at our universities, Y thousand students have studied abroad, we collaborate with Z universities around the world and have students from N countries. Kazakhstan #1 exporter of potassium / All other countries have inferior potassium.
That night, I was invited over to our host-sister’s aunt’s house for tea. She turned out to be fluent in German, and given that I still had a good amount of German in my head from Middlebury Deutsche Schule , I had a chance to practice it…in Kazakhstan. While I sometimes lapsed in and out of Russian, she told me (in a language, I forget which) that she lived in Frankfurt and one or two other cities in Germany and used to teach Неме́цкий язык here in Kazakhstan. We also learned that her grandson’s first birthday (which in Kazakh culture is almost as big an event as a bar mitzvah) was tomorrow, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The next day, our first stop was a trip to the Association of Kazakhs, an NGO that does a lot of outreach work with the Kazakh diaspora. The president of the organization, of course, is Nazarbayev. In addition to a whole bunch of magazines that I wasn’t able to fit into my luggage once I flew back to America, we were given several CDs and DVDs of Kazakh music, and a documentary on Nowruz celebrations from two years ago. Thus we spent most of the day lugging around a big fat bag of Kazakh cultural swag, never mind the brochures we were given at a visit to another university. We toured the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics, and Strategic Research (KIMEP), a university focused on the social sciences that, like KazГУ, looked just as nice as UMass (if not better) with one serious exception that I’ll describe later.
That night, we were invited to the birthday party I mentioned earlier. The family had rented a floor in a nearby dance hall a few minutes walk from our host family’s house. This was as extravagant as a Sweet Sixteen party in the U.S. There were fancy tables and chairs, catering, a DJ, a birthday cake with fireworks, an obnoxiously loud sound system, the works. There were at least 35 guests at this party. Not as much as a Tajik wedding, but still a lot of guests by American standards. Around the time I was watching some teenage kid dancing the robot to Pitbull and T-Pain’s “Hey Baby”, it dawned on me that the little toddler at this party is going to look through the family album years from now, see two exhausted-looking Americans, and have little idea what they’re doing there. It was one of the most surreal moments in my two months in Central Asia.
While we were there, I excused myself to use the bathroom, and by this point in the story I had experienced three things I would wish on my worst enemy, Mohammed Esteban Al-Sexfaci. First, that he have a 40 minute commute to work in a marshrutka.. Second, that the only toilets near the place he works be “squatties”, as I discovered at the dance hall. There’s something about trying to take a piss while standing in a puddle of someone else’s urine as the noise from a nearby loudspeaker drills through your ears that extinguishes all hope for the existence of a loving and benevolent creator. Third, that if he ever does find a Western-style toilet, all the toilet paper dispensers turn out to be empty, and he would have to leave the bathroom to find the materials necessary to finish the paperwork. That was the one exception I found at KIMEP.
Later that night, I submitted all the Kazakh reports on Herdict dated July 27th. Coming to that with experience from the trip to Uzbekistan, I decided to be a little more comprehensive this time. I didn’t test any websites for circumvention tools last time, but I discovered that torproject.org wasn’t blocked. At least the domain names for several news sites are unblocked, and the only sites that appear to be blocked are Livejournal (which perhaps has to do with Rakhat Aliyev's blog, note that, while his livejournal appears to be accessible from the U.S., I'm not seeing the kind of things that a Kazakh dissident would write) and possibly the Blogspot platform this blog is hosted on. I say possibly for the same reason that I don’t think specific URLs on news sites are blocked, because I think I didn’t need to be in Kazakhstan to test its internet filtering system. As Christoper Schwartz points out on neweurasia, Kyrgyzstan fell prey to what Computer Science types call “upstream filtering” after the Kazakh government blocked Wordpress. However, while in Kyrgyzstan I never encountered a block while looking for articles on eurasianet, RFE/RL, registan.net, etc. that were often critical of the Nazarbayev government. I would have conducted some more tests that night in Almaty, but I didn’t largely because they all happened at about 10pm, and I was more exhausted than on most of the nights I spent in Uzbekistan.
On the last day of the trip, the other student I went with was sick, and I went alone with the in-country coordinator for the trip to a memorial to the Вели́кая Оте́чественная война́ (which people in the Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan increasingly refer to as WWII), a Russian Orthodox church, and a Kazakh music museum in quick succession, but I don't have much to say about any of that. Afterwards we tried to take a tour of Kazakh-British Technical University (which advertised itself as a big Petroleum Engineering school), but since our coordinator didn't call ahead and everyone was busy dealing with prospective students fresh out of their entrance exams, we just walked around the campus.
After that came the weirdest moment of the entire trip, beyond standing on Arthur Conolly's unmarked grave, beyond not knowing if I was hearing small talk or a veiled political statement about the Arab Spring, and certainly beyond going to the birthday party of a 1 year old kid I had met the day before. Our coordinator, at least twice during the trip, interrupted it with a short visit to some of the clothing stores in the city...and I'm using the term “clothes” in a very general sense. Not long after we left Kazakh-British Tech, she didn't pay close enough attention to the sign outside (which clearly said “Lingerie”), and there I was, walking into the equivalent of a Victoria's Secret with a woman I barely knew in Almaty, Kazakhstan...bras and panties as far as the eye could see...and the walls were painted red...
After the longest minute ever, she realized that the store was just lingerie, and we alked over to another store from there. We later visited an NGO called The Global Monitor Group. They mostly do studies of Kazakh society and the economy, and they could use a better translator. I still have the business card of the person we had a short Q&A session with, and the tagline on it reads “Researches | Interrogations | Examinations”. During the session, I naturally began to ask about the state of the Kazakh IT sector. Back when I had my midterm in Central Asian studies, I had a question that went something like “Define 'Dutch Disease'. Does the Kazakh economy suffer from it? Why or why not?” I bs'ed the following:
“Kazakhstan may suffer from 'Dutch disease' to a certain extent , but that is at least slightly offset by the fact that the country has some industry and manufacturing. Dutch disease is an economic pattern whereby exploitation of mineral or energy wealth leads to an increase in the value of a country's currency. Then exports become difficult due to high prices, which leads to more of a focus on energy. Kazakhstan has made a progress in combating Dutch disease through the creation of free trade zones (ex. the zone on the Chinese border), and it may be able to develop a significant (if tightly controlled IT sector. I don't believe that Kazakhstan will be able to diversify its economy due to the fact that there can only be more interest in its energy resources, although there may be some promise in the IT sector due to the 'reverse brain drain'.”
This was before I came to Kazakhstan. The person we spoke with agreed that there has been an effort to build the IT sector, and she pointed to the creation of the Alatau IT Park there in Almaty as an example (which, unfortunately, I didn't get to see). A look at the park's website indicates that it has certainly gotten off the ground, and there are numerous projects in development at the park. Only 5 out of 36 projects seem to be related to the energy sector. Now seems like a good time to introduce the last stop on the tour: the trip to the University-IT. It was mostly a tall, 10 or 12-story building that had a fairly nice view of the city. Sadly, we ran into the same problem there that we had at Kazakh-British Tech (minus the Kazakh Victoria's Secret), but I did notice that most of the signs advertised English language coursework and online journalism. There was little to no talk of system administration or any of the other things we geeks think of when we think IT. Their website doesn't have as much information as what you could get from a CS department at an American university, but it was only built in 2009. As the person we spoke with at The Global Monitor Group said, like so many things in Kazakhstan, the IT sector and the educational system that trains it is just getting started.
Just across from the front doorstep of our host family's place, there was a shed that had some of the windows covered over with newspaper. On one of the windows, there was a Hallmark card-sized picture of Nazarbayev staring back at us every time we walked out the front door during the trip. When I was in Uzbekistan, I was constantly looking over my shoulder looking for Islam Karimov. But for all the propaganda billboards I saw (the fact that they were in Uzbek probably helped), I didn't see him until I walked into a cybercafe, got right in his face, and asked him questions about what sites I could and couldn't visit on his Internet in his capital. By contrast, I think I spent the entire trip in Nazarbayev's shadow. His picture wasn't everywhere, but it was everywhere it needed to be. It's morning in Kazakhstan! Things are so much better than they were 20 years ago, come grasp the mighty...yeah, I'm not quoting the end of the Borat theme. There was enough of…that during the trip.
