Open, stable and looking to future – Kazakhstan

17:29, 22 August 2016

ASTANA. KAZINFORN Kazakhstan, the biggest country you know nothing or little about, has been in the news recently for a grab bag of reasons: indomitable boxing champion Gennady "GGG" Golovkin; gold medal Olympic upsets by its athletes; a massive, $37 billion investment in just one of its huge oil fields; and, in June, the country's sad taste of terrorism, putting it in a grim fraternity with the other nations that have suffered attacks this summer.

And, of course, underlying it all are the lingering myths from “Borat,” the faux documentary of a decade ago that was for many in the West their first introduction to the quiet giant – and with which Kazakhstan maintains a sort of love-hate relationship.

Amid this tornado of tidbits old and new, Edge Magazine takes aim at what really defines modern Kazakhstan – and what you need to know.

Expect to be Embraced

The suffix “stan” is an ancient Farsi word that connotes country, nation, land – the place of a people. “Kazakh,” in the Turkic language group of which the Kazakh language is a member, means free or free roaming. So Kazakhstan, essentially, means land of the free roaming people: an on-the-nose description of the territory the nomadic Kazakhs called home. It is a common misconception that nomadic people simply wander farther and farther; in reality, Kazakh nomads moved through their massive territory in seasonal cycles, looping back to a set series of camps within their homeland.

In Kazakh nomadic culture, embracing anything “foreign” is a priority; if you’re a guest in a Kazakh household, you’re the VIP, the tsar, the star, the emperor. Your hosts will make sure you leave their house only after a generous meal, 100 cups of tea, you’re happy with life and you’re completely satisfied with their hospitality – it’s a sort of test of their warmth and kindness, and they take it very seriously. Kazakhs will slaughter their last sheep to ensure that a guest does not go without. A Kazakh saying describing this obsession with being good hosts goes: “A 90-year-old man rushes to greet even a nine-year-old child coming from afar.”

Many Westerners in Kazakhstan fall in love with these traditions – and no wonder: you can get addicted to being the visiting star. But Kazakh hospitality has also played a much more important role in its not so distant history, when the nation opened its arms, and homes, to Soviet deportees. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Kazakhstan received hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, sometimes entire ethnicities ousted by the Soviet leadership from their homelands and thrown to the steppes for survival. Kazakh people took the internal exiles into their homes and shared their last crumbs of bread with them – and their already multi-ethnic nation took on additional hues, as Koreans, Chechens, Germans, Tatars and others peacefully rebuilt their lives with the help of their hosts.

For modern-day Kazakhstan, its multi-ethnic, multi-faith identity is a point of pride. To honour the more than 130 ethnic groups in the nation and their history, President of Kazakhstan Nursultan established the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan, an organisation that works to promote inter-ethnic cohesion and ensures representation for the nation’s ethnic groups in the parliament.

Look Beneath the Surface

Kazakh people remain deeply connected to their territory, though their nomadic ancestors could not have known what a jackpot they were grazing on. Below the steppes and streams of the country are a periodic table of elements – oil, natural gas, gold, uranium, and many others.

Multinational oil companies have long known about Kazakhstan’s wealth, and are continuing to invest in its mineral future. The massive but troubled offshore Kashagan field, one of the world’s largest, is finally expected to restart production this fall. This summer, Chevron and partners have been finalizing their huge new investment in the onshore Tengiz field – $37 billion to expand production there, a move the country expects to provide a huge boost to their technological production capabilities and to provide a variety of skilled labor and high-tech jobs.

But the country is not using its subsoil wealth solely for its own enrichment. Kazakhstan has developed a particular expertise in the area of uranium mining, processing and storage. It was this experience, plus Kazakhstan’s moral authority as a nation that has renounced nuclear weapons and insisted on using its energy wealth for peaceful purposes, that led the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to conclude that Kazakhstan would be the perfect host for its international Low-Enriched Uranium Bank, a bank of uranium intended to provide a stable supply of non-weapons-grade material to countries with peaceful nuclear energy programs and to discourage nations from establishing their own enrichment capabilities which, absent proper controls, could be diverted for producing highly enriched uranium which is used in nuclear weapons.

The bank is expected to begin operating in the autumn of 2017 at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant. “I think it’s a real compliment to Kazakhstan; it’s a vote of confidence by the international community in Kazakhstan, in terms of locating the fuel bank here,” said former U.S. senator and current CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) Sam Nunn in 2015 when the agreements between the IAEA and Kazakhstan were signed in Astana.