With this edition of Haveil Havalim, my first official new post on my official new blog (not counting the test ……

Kazakhstan remains a very imperfect democracy

As far as I can tell from Wikipedia and from reports like this, Kazakhstan is “a very imperfect democracy” in the sense that football is “very imperfect baseball”. The current president of Kazakhstan was the head of the Kazakh Communist Party before Kazakhstan became independent, and has ruled the country continuously since independence. The largest opposition party has been outlawed. The ruling party won the last election with over 90% of the vote, in an election that, according to OSCE observers, did not meet international standards.

In other words, the country has gone from being a republic within a one-party authoritarian state to being an independent one-party authoritarian state. Given this history, and given that the population is about evenly split between Muslims and Orthodox Christians, I’m not surprised that political Islam hasn’t gained a toehold there.

If Kazakh government officials are really interested in “using rational discourse” to resolve disputes, maybe they could start by legalizing such discourse among their own citizens.

- means the world of scholarship, universities, etc.

Well, yes, actually. The Wikipedia entry for Ali G has an entire subsection devoted to it.

Anon-

You do seem to be correct. The point still remains that they have made some headway simply by not acting like other parts of the Muslim world. Kazakhstan remains a very imperfect democracy, with charges of the constant presence of the heavy hand of the government against opposition parties, press, etc - but after only a short time playing at it, they are well ahead of so many other places in the Muslim world.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/09/kazakhstan_deni.html

The academic world?