It has long been noted by grumbling home critics, that the officials in Kazakhstan have an inherent obsession for various international conferences and summit meetings, intended primarily to boost the image of the country. There is a great deal of truth in that. The public of Kazakhstan is growing weary of these widely publicized events which often have not the slightest bearing on daily needs of ordinary people. A year ago, Kazakhstan played host to the first Eurasian Media Forum which discussed the global threat posed by international terrorism. The main topic of this year’s forum revolved around the impact of the war in Iraq on cross-cultural relations. The pivotal idea of the forum was, according to its organizers, to bring East and West closer by stimulating an open dialogue between media people and intellectuals.

This broadly defined concept of a dialogue between cultures is something hard to fathom for some journalists in Kazakhstan who are first and foremost alarmed at the media situation at home. “When you listen to our policy makers talking about the issues of global scale you may get an impression that the sole problem which preoccupies us are international matters ” sarcastically observed the political analyst Yesen Bainur in “Tarlan”, the first and yet the only electronic weekly which appears in Kazakh.

Journalists working for the Kazakh-language press have a good reason to be dissatisfied with the much-publicized media forum. Most of them, as it turned out later, felt quite uneasy at the forum. Practically all speakers used English and Russian as a working language. The only Kazakh paper to be discerned among the heaps of publications in Russian at the newsstand was the “Turkestan” weekly, a liberal paper with a fairly moderate circulation of 127,000 copies. The national TV-channel ‘Khabar” was among the few privileged to give a full coverage of the event in Kazakh and in Russian. And that, apparently, owes to the fact that “Khabar” is placed under the patronage of Dariga Nazarbayeva, the daughter of the president, who was the main organizer of the media forum.

There are different reasons to explain why the Kazakh-language press has failed to come to the limelight of media events to this day. First, Russian still holds its traditionally high reputation as a wide-spread media language in Central Asia, which offers access to world information space. Second, in the public eye, Kazakh-language press is often wrongly associated with conservative ideas. Third, Kazakh print language based on slightly changed Cyrillic script is ill-adapted for the computer language. For that reason papers in Kazakh are generally not available on the internet.

For all its imperfectness, Kazakh-language media has made a considerable headway in recent years. Not only has the design of the papers improved remarkably, but the content has also become more intriguing for the readership. The independent papers like “SolDat”, “Altyn Orda”, “Azat”, “Aygak” and “Ak Zhol Kazakstan” have won great popularity owing to their scathing criticism of corrupt officials and articles promoting democratic ideas.

What really may be said regarding the Kazakh-language press is that some papers are influenced by a deep-rooted national-patriotic mindset. The favored topics of such publications are national heroes of the past, purely ethnic moral values unharmed by outside influence, and spiritual revival as a counterweight against Western immorality. For the greater part, this narrow-mindedness is generated by a growing sense of uncertainty and the loss of national values in the face of rapidly spreading Western culture. During the Iraq war most of the Kazakh papers depicted the actions as the clash of faith and culture. It could not be interpreted otherwise. The majority of Kazakh papers rely on Russian sources for outside information, in most cases simply reprinting Russian publications without bothering to interpret or otherwise comment the events.

This is one area where the issue of ideological security of the nation comes in. There is a rising awareness among the public that by remaining dependent on foreign information sources, Kazakh media is increasingly importing alien views and culture. It is also true, however, that in the modern world, the media cannot exist in isolation.