A group of self-appointed moral guardians descended on the main market in Kazakhstan's commercial capital, Almaty, this week in protest at the recent appearance in stalls of "Kazakh porn."
Kazakh newspaper Vremya reports that the Bolashak Movement’s youth wing has declared war on smut and vowed to blast it out of existence.
The group began their campaign on December 8 with the public destruction of 15 locally produced X-rated video disks and then marched on Almaty’s central market to harangue hapless hawkers.
EurasiaNet has not yet seen any of these salacious flicks and cannot illuminate readers as to what Kazakh porn constitutes precisely. So we leave it to the head of the Bolashak’s youth wing, Elnur Beysenbayev, to explain further:
“Kazakh porn first went on sale earlier this year. … In a seven-minute video, filmed on a mobile phone camera, you can see three Kazakhs -- two guys and one girl. This does not reflect our nation’s character -- Kazakh people are educated and aspire to something. I want to tell all these vendors not to sell these disks, and if anybody offers to sell you one, don’t buy it!”
As Vremya explains, this campaign for moral probity could prove to be an uphill battle, however. The disks are for sale at around 350 spots around Almaty and demand is growing exponentially.
And while prices for this licentious fare do appear to have risen in recent times, local punters are still willing to shell out up to 1,500 tenge ($10) per disk to see their kinfolk doing the dirty.
Addressing this point, a Vremya reporter wonders whether the Bolashak youth campaign is not just simply cheating their contemporaries out of some harmless fun, a suggestion to which Beysenbayev doesn’t take kindly:
“Oh, so what are we supposed to do? Say nothing?! … We must and will talk about this issue. We are not law enforcement agencies that can take action against those that distribute pornography [but] today we will appeal to Almaty authorities to find who made this video and appeared in it.”
At this stage in the game, cleansing Almaty of its sexual excesses seems like a vain exercise, not that it stops people from trying.
A group working along similar lines to Bolashak has dotted some of the city’s walls with stenciled graffiti exhorting passersby not to resort to using the services of prostitutes -- a possibly well intended, but utterly fruitless effort.
Indeed, a visit to some of the city’s most popular expat hangouts might be a better place to start waging that battle.
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