After Sacha Baron Cohen made fun of the glorious nation of Kazakhstan in his mockumentary Borat, the actual country launched a multi-million dollar "Heart of Eurasia" campaign to counter Borat’s depiction. While Kazakh leaders are breaking their back to portray Kazakhstan as a civilized place, it is still a country in which many a remarkable event can take place.
Last summer I crossed the Kyrgyz-Kazakh border on my way to the airport in Almaty. When you cross the Kazakh border, you need to fill out a border crossing form indicating the time and purpose of your visit. At the customs the Kazakh comrade really went out of his way to wish me a safe trip. I was honestly surprised and pleased at his hospitality.
I arrived in the airport without any problems. After I passed through security I had to show my passport and the form I had filled out at the border. The gentleman in the small booth told me that there was no stamp on the form I had received at the border and that I could not leave Kazakhstan without it. Apparently you need to get a stamp both on your passport and on the form.
Then I remembered how suspiciously polite the customs official had been at the border. He certainly saw that I was heading to the airport when I gave him my passport with the form inside it. Could he have intentionally “forgotten” to put a stamp on the form?
While I was trying to tell myself my suspicions could not possibly be right, the customs gentleman at the airport bluntly asked me if I had any money with me. At first I did not understand and thought perhaps he was taking a healthy interest in my studies as an economics grad student. I said “Well, yes, I do.” The gentleman said “Well, then put your money inside your passport carefully and give the passport back to me!” When I asked why, he replied that he would have the form shipped to the border to be stamped. When I said that sending the form to the border would not cost much, the gentleman got furious and started telling me off using foul language for not having learned how to fly out of Kazakhstan even though I had flown through the country before. I tried to talk to other people at the airport but no one was willing to help. Instead they looked around worriedly as if they had done something wrong and somebody might notice it.
Then I went back to where my passport was. The booth’s resident got out of his booth, which had a camera, and walked away telling me he had to unload my luggage from the plane because I was not flying anywhere. He said that I had either to give him money or go back to the border and miss my flight to my university. I had no other choice but to give him the few hundred dollars I had with me. To put this into proper proportion, this is a part of the world where annual salaries are often just a few hundred dollars.
But Mr. Booth told me it was not enough. After I told him that what I gave him was all that I had, he said, “OK, I’ll let you fly.” I arrived in Budapest without a penny in my pocket. Luckily my university had sent me bus tickets along with my admissions package and I was able to get to the dormitory, penniless, somless, and forintless.
As I sat in my room, pondering how people who were kinsmen of Borat could behave this way, I wondered whether they rip off transit passengers in this way regularly in the most glorious nation of Kazakhstan. However, it should be noted that Kazakhstan is developing rapidly. According to Borat, “Women can now travel on inside of bus.”
Nodir Ataev
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