Conflicts with Kazakh Government
In November 2005, following Borat's hosting of the MTV Europe Music Awards in
Lisbon, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry voiced their concerns about the character. Foreign Ministry spokesman
Yerzhan Ashykbayev told a news conference "We view Mr. Cohen's behaviour at the MTV Europe Music Awards as utterly unacceptable, being a concoction of bad taste and ill manners which is completely incompatible with the ethics and civilized behaviour of Kazakhstan's people", concluding "We reserve the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of the kind."
[5].
Baron Cohen has since posted a video on the "Official Borat Homesite" where Borat responds to Ashykbayev in character. In the video, Borat states, in part, "In response to Mr. Ashykbayev's comments, I'd like to state I have no connection with Mr. Cohen and fully support my Government's decision to sue this Jew. Since the 2003 Tuleyakiv reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world. Women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats, and age of consent has been raised to eight years old."
Reuters quoted an unnamed Western diplomat as saying "They (the
Kazakh Government) are damned if they do (respond) and damned if they don't," he said. "It's sort of unfortunate that he hit upon Kazakhstan."
[6]
The next week, the government hired two Western public relations firms to counter Borat's claims, and ran a four-page advertisement in
The New York Times. The ad carries testimonials about the nation’s democracy, education system and the power and influence enjoyed by women. On a previous occasion, Borat responded to official Kazakh complaints by issuing his own "press release", which consisted of random Cyrillic characters.
On
December 13,
2005 the right to use the domain name
www.borat.kz was suspended, and the site attached to it went down.
[7] The domain issuing body said that they took this action since false names were given for the site's administrators, and also because the site
www.borat.kz was hosted outside Kazakhstan. However, the underlying cause of the action was in order to censor the content of the site: "We've done this so he can't badmouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name," Nurlan Isin, President of the Association of Kazakh IT Companies, told Reuters. "He can go and do whatever he wants at other domains."
Reporters Without Borders petitioned the
ICANN ombudsman to intervene and reverse this decision.
[8] Meanwhile, the "Official Borat Homesite" was moved to the .tv domain, where it remains. (As of
August 16,
2006, the former domain name was still suspended.)
Borat has, however, recently been defended by
Dariga Nazarbayeva, a politician and the daughter of Kazakhstan President
Nursultan Nazarbayev. She stated on a national news program
Karavan that Baron Cohen's website "damaged our image much less than its closure, which was covered by all global news agencies," and "We should not be afraid of humour and we shouldn't try to control everything, I think.
