Update 2: At The Registan, Joshua discusses the story as well and some readers reply.

Update: Check out the official development website, it has some flashy 3D-models and lists the exclusive pastimes that will be available in Astana from next year onwards.

neweurasia reported more than a year ago about Sir Norman Foster’s gig in Astana, where he designed the pyramid-shaped “Palace of Peace and Reconciliation”. Contrary to one of Foster’s other projects, the new Wembley Stadium in the UK, the palace has been finished in record time and already hosted the Second Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions.

Now, after so much religious solemnity, chief planner and architect of the new Kazakh capital, Nursultan Nazarbayev, thought that it’s time for some circus. The growing population locked in the middle of the inhospitable Steppe capital is plagued by low winter temperatures dipping below -20°C and generally nasty weather conditions. So, within the next twelve months, relief is being built in the form of a giant yurt.

The transparent tent will be 150 meters high, house an indoor city and will provide temperatures of +15°C even when it’s freezing outside. The BBC and The Times round up the yurt’s specifications:

• The tent is being made from special material that absorbs sunlight to create the effect of summer inside.
• Underneath, in an area larger than 10 football stadiums, will be a city with squares and cobbled streets, canals, shopping centres and golf courses.
• It will defy the bitter Kazakh winter with tropical gardens, beaches and a nine-hole golf course and, as the president declared last week, provide “everything that a man needs for his life”.
• It will also house 225 shops and a concert venue for 5,000.
• Terraced gardens will stretch the area of two football pitches, gondolas will ply an artificial river and artificial wave pools and beaches will replicate the nearest sea

Foster has said he enjoys aspects of working for an autocrat. In a recent essay he criticised British public inquiries as “bureaucratic charades”

On December 5, the Novy Sin Gallery in Prague hosted a concert by Ridina Ahmedova, a 32-year-old Prague-born singer whose roots lie in Kazakhstan, far away from the Prague City Lights. Her website features downloadable tracks of her music, which I very much recommend listening to.

The candle-lit performance, Ahmedova’s magical voice and an entranced audience all made for an amazing atmosphere. Ridina sings, tapes her voice, reproduces it and then performs over the recorded audio. She does not use any music instruments.

Born in the Czech Republic, Ridina later lived in Algeria with her Czech mother and Sudanese father, from whom she inherited her surname, which could strike many Europeans as highly exotic. Her grandfather was a Russian Jew who lived in Almaty most of his life. Ridina is interested in her roots, and even though she has never been to Kazakhstan, she is keen to learn more about the country, she said while sipping tea after the concert.

Ridina started singing when she was 16, went through different styles, including jazz and ambient, before finding her own music style, or “before the music found her”, as she puts it. Ridina compares creating music with knitting a fabric from threads — small pieces that come through inspiration. The rest is hard work.

Ridina is eight months pregnant, and yet remains amazingly active — she runs workshops for non-professional singers, helping them to explore their potential; gives charity concerts (like the one in support of Afghani women); and runs projects with the theatre. She has an inner strength — in spite of failing to be accepted to music school on the grounds of not having talent, Ridina proved just the opposite to her audience on Tuesday — me included.

Sir Richard (“Dick”) Evans is to become the chairman of Samruk, Kazakhstan’s state holding company, reports The Guardian. Dick Evans is of somewhat dubious fame in the UK. He is the former chairman of British defence giant BAE Systems and is frequently being brought into connection with a running scandal involving an alleged £60m fund to bribe Saudi officials into buying British defence equipment:

Shortly after he stepped aside as BAE chairman, Sir Richard was interviewed at length by the SFO at the end of 2005. Sir Richard and BAE deny any wrongdoing, and the current chairman, Mike Turner, made public threats last week that a £6bn Saudi contract to buy Typhoon aircraft could be derailed if SFO inquiries into Swiss bank accounts were not curtailed.

The word Samruk in Kazakh translates as “the bird of revival and happiness in ancient Kazakh mythology” – the holding company, however, has less mythological footing and is supposed to “to improve the efficiency of the Government’s asset management.” The general principle of Samruk is “to provide an active shareholdership that will not interfere into the activities of the national companies and that will carry out the state strategic policy in the areas of their activities.”

Among the list of companies are KazMunaiGas, Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (railways); Kazakhtelekom; KEGOC (Kazakhstan Electricity Grid Operating Company), and Kazpost (postal services). It is hoped that Sir Evans’ appointment will facilitate the companies’ flotation on the London Stock Exchange.

Rather than seeking to privatise the firms, the Kazakh government apparently likes the idea to cling to the companies it owns. The establishment of a state holding company seems to cement that attitude. In 1998, Kazmunaigas predecessor Kazakhoil was almost on the verge of being privatised, but that obviously never happened. The state-owned oil and gas conglomerate also proved to be the method of choice for the Kazakh government to soak up previously privatised assets and thus increase the state’s share in “strategic” industries such as the hydrocarbon sector.

Sir Richard Evans, who has good experience in the linkages between politics and big business, is probably the right man to chair Samruk. Taking into account his dubious track record, he seems an even better man to advise the Kazakh government.

Cross-posted on Global Voices

Kazakhstan Fashion Week at Registan.net


Police and protesters in Almaty, at svoboda.kz

“I phoned Sanzhar [Bokaev, a shortly detained leader of the movement against the ban of the right-hand-drive cars], he is in Almaty district police, which is next to Nikolski bazaar. Help him if you are a lawyer! He can answer the phone though, he can speak, he is safe, they are not beating him… And hello to a pretty BBC correspondent that I invited for a cup of tea…” – LJ user da_simon, coming home after the protests. Read the full story »

This is a translation of an interview with Merkhat Sharipzhan, Director of “Azattyq”, Kazakh service of RFE/RL (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty), made and posted by Adam Kesher on Russian-language neweurasia Kazakhstan.

- What is the target audience of “Azattyq” radio station?

It is a difficult question to address and it is a problem that we are trying to solve now. Only 3% of the population in Kazakhstan is our audience. Kazakhstan is not a country like Turkmenistan, and it is not the USSR – few people today would make efforts to get objective news on short wave and in Kazakh; besides, it is difficult to compete with entertainment radio stations.

It is not only a problem of the radio or people’s attitude to information. There is also a problem in how the language is used. Since Soviet times it is a common understanding that Kazakh should be used in talking about traditions, agriculture… I was unpleasantly surprised to see a “Who wants to be a Millionaire” show in Kazakh, where the majority of questions were about the nomadic way of life. Why not ask about James Bond in Kazakh? Read the full story »

I am looking into Kazakhstan’s centre-periphery relations for my Master’s thesis, and I am currently sighting the available literature. Essentially, the question is: How are centre-periphery relations shaping the implementation of development strategies taking into account both economic decentralisation and growing oil windfalls. A couple of interesting tidbits (comments on any of these aspects most welcome):

Over the last years, Kazakhstan has seen a gradual economic decentralisation coming from below. Although a de jure unitary state, the regions have been able to act more independently and the central state reacts by either ‘legitimising’ what is already occuring in practice or ignores what’s going on in order to avoid the appearance of ‘weakness’. Read the full story »

When my Korean economics lecturer told us that during the 25-odd years he was living in South Korea, he experienced a rise in living standards comparable to 100 years of economic development in Western Europe before the First World War. Which I found a great way of putting the East Asian Miracle into context.

Now, we know that the East Asian development model is revered in Kazakhstan, and President Nazarbayev wants his country to become the “Central Asian snow leopard”, akin to the East Asian Tigers South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. And Kazakhstan is actually outpacing their experience in only 15 years of independence:

These 15 years can be compared to 150 years of calm history of humankind, President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev said today at a special press conference following the results of a meeting of the Government members with city and oblast akims of Kazakhstan.

(…)

The world has not seen this kind of experience, and our country is the first to have such tremendous reforms. We have carried them out in our unique Kazakhstan way. It could be compared to great revolutions.

While one can only hope that this revolution is not over yet, it is probably fair to say that Kazakhstan has achieved a lot in its relatively short span of independence. Nevertheless, there are still major construction sites that could, conservatively speaking, take another 15-50 years to finish.

But let we just speak Nazarbayev’s beautiful words for themselves and not further speak ill of these tremendous reforms. In the extended entry, you can find some of his own words on the Snow Leopard Development Theorem, taken from his late-nineties “Kazakhstan 2030″ strategy. This man should become a poet once he retires in 2013. Read the full story »

Greetings from Kazakhstan. The weather has finally turned cold for good, and a white, snowy blanket stretches from the mountains of Almaty to the northern steppe. My name is Arthur Kennan, and this is the first of what I hope will be many posts on Neweurasia.

First a word of warning: I am not formally trained as a journalist, nor will I be able to reveal many sources, dates, or locations. My position here in Kazakhstan prevents a complete account of myself or my circumstances; though the government is certainly more tolerant here than elsewhere in Central Asia, they keep their eyes firmly on certain foreign nationals. I also live rather far from the two primary news-generating cities (Almaty and Astana), so timely on-the-scenes reporting on most major events is not possible.

My writing will be more experiential. I may also write more in-depth pieces on long-term trends. If either of these writing styles does not suit your tastes or your news-junky desires, I politely suggest you skip over my posts; there are plenty of other great sources of information on this website.

For my first story I feel compelled to relate an incident of about two months ago. For Kazakhstanis it is nothing, but for a foreigner like me it was nothing short of shocking- a police roadblock/shakedown. It was my first face-to-face encounter with corruption in this county, though I am sure it will not be my last. Read the full story »

A month after the Atyrau incident, it is still being debated in the Turkish-Kazakh communities and there have been many negative articles and opinions from the Turkish side, with a clear animosity towards the Kazakhs. It is debatable whether this is a productive process, since Turkey and Kazakhstan have been countries close to each other that shared numerous fields of cooperation. There have been criticisms from Kazakhs in Turkey towards the Kazakh-Turkish communities for not stopping the situation get that far out of hand. An article was written by Yalcin Bayer, responding to a letter by Rahmatullah Cetin, a Kazakh-Turk, whic was published in the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, making an assessment of the situation and the reasons for the incident. I have translated the most important parts of the article below.

The Inner Face of the Kazakhstan incidents

On the 20.10.2006, a fight has reached its peak. It included injuries on both sides, majority were Turkish citizens. A lot of negative and positive articles have been written on this subject. Both the Kazakhs and the Turks have been blamed for this incident. Even a Turkish-Kazakh hostility has been encouraged in some cases. Read the full story »

When does a flash mob become an organised demonstration? People gathered yesterday on the square in Almaty to protest the decision of the President to ban the cars with right-hand steering wheels in Kazakhstan. It is not about political or civic freedoms, neither does it concern the majority of people in the country. However, the event is meaningful: in an unathorized demonstration on Saturday, the drivers and their supporters in Almaty showed how social mobilisation can attract attention to disputed government decisions.

According to the President’s statement at the meeting of the Security Council, on 13 November, all right-hand drive cars will be banned from import and sale on the territory of Kazakhstan from January 1, 2007. Currently, there are 117,000 right-hand-drive cars in the country. The decision comes as an attempt to fight against the high number of accidents, and it is reported that cars with right-hand drive are more often the reason for accidents.

The demonstration was quickly organised on 18 November, just four days after the decision about the ban was made public, and it continues today. According to the 1995 law (RUS), the application on conducting the demonstration has to be submitted to the authorities 10 days before the planned demonstration. In the past, unauthorised demonstrations were prevented by a concert or celebrations, organised by the city authorities. The protests were usually followed by arrests, fines and imprisonment for up to 15 days. The owners of the right-hand drive cars did not have time to apply for a permission, and went without one. Read the full story »