Kazakhstan

sovereign state in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a country in Central Eurasia, with a minor part west of the Ural River and thus in Europe. Kazakhstan is the world's largest landlocked country by land area and the ninth largest country in the world. Its territory of 2,724,900 square kilometres (1,052,100 sq mi) is larger than all of Western Europe. In 2006, Kazakhstan had become the dominant nation of Central Asia economically, generating 60% of the region's GDP, primarily through its oil/gas industry.

In Kazakhstan the favorite hobbies are disco-dancing, archery, and table tennis.

Quotes edit

  • We managed to build a successful Kazakhstan state with a modern market economy on the ruins of the Soviet Union, create peace and stability within a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Kazakhstan. For the first time in our centuries-old history, international legal recognition of the Republic of Kazakhstan has been secured. Kazakhstan has been put on the world map, where it did not exist as a state. We have our own flag, anthem, coat of arms.
  • Perhaps one of those factors will be implemented in the coming three or four years. Kazakhstan needs to get ready in order not to miss this moment and to take advantage of the benefits that one or the other situation will bring. To do that, the country needs continued focus on structural reforms, improvement in infrastructure and innovation development in high-tech and low-tech sectors. These will help the country to regain its positions.
  • Only four countries in history have surrendered their nuclear weapons. And three of those countries—Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine—did so with nuclear arms that they inherited from the defunct Soviet Union, and didn’t have the wherewithal to control and maintain. (The decision to dispose of this weaponry, in exchange for support from the United States and security assurances from Russia, is still remarkable; had Ukraine and Kazakhstan kept the arsenals on their territory, they would have become the world’s third- and fourth-largest nuclear powers, respectively.)
  • [Central Asian folk Islamic religious movement] Ata Zholy was founded in Kazakhstan in 1999 by Kadyrali Tarybaev (1961–2009), and registered as a travel agency organizing Islamic pilgrimages to various sites in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Its local groups are called “hordes.” The most popular Ata Zholy pilgrimage is to the mausoleums of the Five Forefathers, religious and national figures who lived between the 18th and the 20th century and gave to Kazakhstan its ethnic and religious identity, located in the Zhambyl District of the Almaty region.
  • Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, three states of the former Soviet Union that have nuclear arms on their territory, formally agreed with the United States and Russia today to give up those weapons by the end of the decade and not to seek nuclear arms again. In a wordless, austere ceremony in the barroom of a Lisbon hotel, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and officials of Russia and the three other nuclear-armed former Soviet republics signed a protocol, or legal supplement, to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), pledging to carry out its terms. They thus laid the groundwork for ratification of the landmark START treaty and for permitting negotiations to go ahead between the United States and Russia for deeper cutbacks in nuclear arms. The full significance of the occasion, which took months of difficult negotiation to arrange, went far beyond the pale legalism of the six-page documents the diplomats signed. Today's ceremony was a hard-won milestone in a mostly invisible, yet intense diplomatic struggle to maintain control over the world's largest and most awesome array of long-range nuclear weapons, as the Soviet Union, the nation that created and held them during the decades of the Cold War, splintered into more than a dozen parts.

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