Kazakh officials don't see spoof's humor
By Doreen Carvajal International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2005
PARIS The official Web site of Borat Sagdiyev - the fictitious, self-styled second-string Kazakh journalist and sixth-most-famous man in Kazakhstan - was hardly a postcard extolling this vast, oil-rich nation sandwiched between Russia and China.
"Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world!" Borat, as he is known, boasted in a Web site posting that is actually the work of the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, star of "Da Ali G Show," a television comedy in Britain and the United States.
"Women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hat and age of consent has been raised to 8 years old."
But now, the grainy image of Borat - posed in his trademark dark curls, below a Kazakh flag and dueling pistols - has vanished along with the Web site, shut down this week by the Kazakh authorities, who were not joking.
For almost a year, government officials have been grumbling about Borat, the loutish anti-ambassador of Kazakhstan who is a master of fractured English and likes to expose prejudice by showing how easy it is to encourage a crowd in a bar to sing a chorus of "Throw the Jew down the well so my country can be free!"
In the latest skirmish, Borat's official home page,
www.borat.kz, was closed by the Association of IT Companies of Kazakhstan. It issued orders to KazNIC, which presides over registration of the country's domain name.
"This is a political matter," said KazNIC's managing director, Alexander Bolshakov, who insisted that he did not know who made the decision.
However, a document obtained by the International Herald Tribune indicated that the association received two complaints in December from the government and the security service for Kazakhstan's president, which accused the borat.kz Web site of besmirching the "international image of Kazakhstan." They also asserted that the Web page had been registered by a nonresident of the country with the aims of "unconscientious usage."
The clash between Cohen and the Kazakh authorities began when Cohen decided to spoof a real country with a coarse character whose passions run from table tennis to shooting dogs and chasing gypsies.
Cohen riled Kazakh government officials last month when he was host of the MTV Europe awards in Lisbon. He was accompanied by a rumpled group of low-kicking performers, who milled below a giant sign: "Official Kazakhstan Government Dancers." By the time the show ended, he had introduced a one-eyed, drunken Kazakh pilot, insulted Uzbekistan and showered Madonna with effusive praise: "That singer before me. Who was it? It was very courageous of MTV to start the show with a genuine transvestite. He was very convincing."
But they were not laughing in Kazakhstan; and in the weeks after the show, the government appeared to be considering legal options. Later, though, a Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman, Yerzhan Ashikbayev, said his country was not planning any lawsuits. Perhaps, he suggested, other people might lodge complaints with the European broadcasting authorities.
And so they have. Three complaints were filed about the MTV show with Ofcom, an independent broadcasting regulator in Britain. "We are now looking into those," said an Ofcom spokeswoman, Kate Lee, who added that the names of complainants were confidential.
Last year, Ofcom reviewed six complaints about the Borat TV episode that featured the "Throw the Jew down the well" song. Ultimately, Ofcom decided that the show did not violate television standards in a ruling that said, "When such hard-edged comedy is concerned, it is very difficult to censure a characterization if its purpose is to use the very attitudes which it intends to mock."
Cohen has also aroused the ire of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization in the United States. It acknowledged that Cohen, who is Jewish, intended to be ironic to demonstrate how easy it is to encourage people to join in racist or anti-Semitic behavior. But they feared that this intent was probably lost on many home viewers.
Ashikbayev, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, has the same doubts.
"What we are concerned about," he said, "is that the public that is interested in Mr. Cohen's jokes are youngsters, people from 12 to 30 years old. Cohen comes up with these ridiculous jokes that some people may take for truth."
Cohen declined to comment through his agent, Matthew Labov. But before his Web site was shut down this week, Borat surfaced online in a video clip to confront the Kazakh government's complaints: "In response to Mr. Ashikbayev's comments, I like to state I have no connection with Mr. Cohen. I support my government's decision to sue this Jew."
Borat's old site,
www.borat.kz, has reappeared with a new domain name,
www.borat.tv. Labov said he suspected that the old site had apparently been "shut down by the Ministry of Justice in Kazakhstan."
Ashikbayev denied that the government had blocked the site.
"So many jokes," he said. "I can't even comment on that. Where did you get that from?"
Kazakhstan, Ashikbayev insisted, has more important issues to deal with. But the government may yet face more irritation with "Borat: The Movie." The film, which was shot in the United States, is still in postproduction and a release date has not been scheduled, said an agent for Dan Mazur, the film's executive producer.
In the meantime, Kazakh officials have invited Borat to visit to his would-be home. Mazur, who could not be reached for comment, has told others that the production group did consider going to Kazakhstan. But technical problems prevented such a visit, Mazur said in an interview with the unofficial fan Web site, Borat Online. Instead, the group went to Romania to create Borat's mythical home village.
"We were all set to go to Kazakhstan," Mazur said, "but we found that the people from Kazakhstan looked nothing like Borat."
Meg Bortin contributed reporting for this article.
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