Azernews.Az

By Aynur Jafarova

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev's recent initiative to change the name of the country has turned into a hot topic in the Kazakh mass media.

Nazarbayev's suggestion is aimed at attracting the attention of foreign tourists to the country which is the world's largest landlocked nation with a population of 17.7 million.

He has initiated to rename the country to Kazakh Eli. He believes that the new name could distinguish Kazakhstan from other Central Asian countries with "-stan" prefix and help the foreigners to easily address to the world's ninth nation for the number of population.

The president's initiative seems understandable as he tries to break the stereotype about the Central Asian states with the "-stan" prefix. Kazakhstan, as well as other Central Asian states, in particular Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are included in the group of the seven "stans", together with Afghanistan and Pakistan, the two countries with a terrorism problem, and this confuses people who are not familiar with the Central Asian region.

Also, sometimes foreign tourists confuse these "-stan" countries. To them, there is no difference between them in political climate term. This comes as these seven countries seriously differ from one another.

This is not the first time that the country is going through the process of renaming. The huge, resource-rich Central Asian country has already been through several rounds of name-changing. In 1993, the capital Alma-Ata became Almaty. Four years later, the capital was removed across the country to an entirely different place called Akmola, which was renamed as Astana in 1998.

In recent years, there were also some initiatives to rename Kazakhstan to Kazakh Republic, Kazakh Orda, Kazakh Khaganate and so on.

Analyzing such an initiative requires quite a long time to compare and consider all pros and cons.

Renaming a country is not an easy issue and it will take a long time for Kazakhstan to remove the "-stan" prefix from its name both officially and in minds. This country can be positioned in the world as Kazakh Eli, but will be called Kazakhstan as previously. Often people do not know new names or just ignore them and still use the previous ones, as neighboring Kyrgyzstan, whose official name is Kyrgyz Republic. Thus, decades are required for Kazakhstan to be called as Kazakh Eli.

New name would bring a number of difficulties with itself, as a new name of a country is a very expensive project requiring significant financial expenditures. Any change to the name is a very costly thing as it requires changing all the documents, signboards not only in the country, but also at the missions abroad.

Secondly, the name "Kazakh Eli" which means the country of Kazakhs would raise some ethical problems for 17.7 million-nation which is home for not only Kazakhs which counts on about 40 percent of the total population, but also 120 other nationalities, including Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, Uzbeks, Chechens, Koreans, Uyghurs and others. Thus, it is wrong to emphasize the priority of only one ethnic group.

It is not clear yet if Kazakh people will support the idea to ​​rename the country. Majority of the initiatives suggested by the Kazakh president are supported both by the Kazakh government and people. The Kazakh president assures that this very serious decision will not be accepted without large discussions among the country's citizens. So, people of Kazakhstan themselves will make their fateful choice.