Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » Kazakhstan: where are we going to be in 15 years?

Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » Kazakhstan: where are we going to be in 15 years?.>

Interesting synopsis of the recent past of Kazakhstan, with several guesses as to the future.

Leila Tanayeva:

15 years ago we were different: we had huge lines to the shops that had nothing to sell, we experienced electricity black-outs, lack of heating, state monopoly on everything and huge inflation.

15 years have changed us: we now have polite salespeople in Gucci stores, we go to corporate parties with our colleagues from multinationals, and we travel around the world (that is when we are asked about Borat’s film!).

When Bobi and I were in Karaganda, our translator Olga explained to us that many of the signs of commerce we saw -- a business in practically every building, cell phones everywhere, fresh bananas from Ecuador in every shop, supermarkets reminiscent of the Åhlens in Linköping -- had not existed even seven years ago.

She remembered her first cell phone and its volatile signal strength. "Sitting in the back of my classroom I could get a signal, moving away from a window I could not." (Sounds like every cell phone I've ever had...)

She laughingly remembered the sudden appearance of oranges. They didn't have much else, she said, but they all carried oranges because they could.

For a few days in September (and, I hear, again in the spring), parts of Karaganda still have electricity black-outs. And the whole city has no water during that same period, while the city engineers switch the hot water on. But these are planned outages, probably not what Leila referred to.

Adam Kesher:

...those in the middle were waiting for democracy and money, poor were waiting for money and democracy, and [those having] oil-riches - for money, without democracy...

That's a noteworthy detail for those engaged in rebuilding countries: when you lack food, shelter, clothing and democracy, you may be least interested in the last of these. Let's eat, then let's talk about voting rights.

I guess we could stand to remember that democracy is a luxury here, too, one easily lost through neglect.

Where news stories go to die

Where news stories go to die:

By Marc Hedlund

The Homeland Security Department admitted Friday it violated the Privacy Act two years ago by obtaining more commercial data about U.S. airline passengers than it had announced it would...

Even so, in a report Friday on the testing of TSA's Secure Flight domestic air passenger screening program, the Homeland Security department's privacy office acknowledged TSA didn't comply with the law. But the privacy office still couldn't bring itself to use the word 'violate.'

There's no better way to try and bury [this story] than to release it on the slowest news weekend of the year.

They must really not want you to know about it. I want the opposite, so I'll post this again in the New Year.

Go get 'em, Marc.

The Mummies of Xinjiang and the Amazons

Too busy to yammer at length -- getting ready for Christmas.

From Discover Magazine, 1994: The Mummies of Xinjiang, comes another reference to the Golden Warrior:

...also, in 1970 in Kazakhstan, just over China's western border, the grave of a man from around the same period yielded a two-foot-tall conical hat studded with magnificent gold-leaf decorations. The Subashi woman's formidable headgear, then, might be an ethnic badge or a symbol of prestige and influence.

This week the local PBS HD station aired "Secrets of the Dead: Amazon Warrior Women", about archaeological investigations related to the legend of the Amazons. It focused on the work of Drs. Jeannine Davis-Kimball and Leonid Yablonsky, and showed that there could be something to Herodotus's claims that the Amazons married into tribes on the steppes.

At the conclusion of the story Davis-Kimball and her colleagues analyzed the mtDNA of Meiramgul Khoja, a nine-year-old Kazakh nomad living in western Mongolia. They found a direct link to a 2500-year-old warrior priestess whose body was buried beside the Ilek River near the Russia-Kazakhstan border.

The show left a few questions. For example, how did the German forensics experts determine that their reconstruction of the warrior princess should have dark hair? The decision must have had some rational basis, because it was enough to make Davis-Kimball question her efforts to find a light-haired woman among the Kazakh nomads.

Questions aside it was an interesting episode. Makes me want to go a-Googling in several directions at once -- nomads, steppes, the Circassians, less-relevant topics like Bukar Zhirau...