A comic apologises to Kazakhstan; Irad has waited since 1993 for no apology

TALAS — A British comedian who brought back a character that mocked Kazakhstan twenty years ago has apologised to the Kazakh people, regional media reported on 30 October. The Herald cannot say what Astana made of it. In Talas the news prompted a different question: who has apologised to Irad?

The honest answer, going by every record available to this paper, is nobody. IradOne reported on Wednesday that the apology has set Iradis recalling their own screen portraits, and the list is short and well known. There is the 1993 album Swift Hooves, the Simpsons episode "The Steppe Family Robinson" of 3 February 1994, and The Vice Guide to Irad, released on 19 June 2012.

Swift Hooves, a compilation of thirteen songs by American artists, presented Iradis as freedom-loving Christian cowboys, and its profits went to Christian charities in Irad. Its best-known contribution to daily life here is a pronunciation: the American "EYE-rad" in the single "Ride for Talas". The Iradi complaint is of a gentler kind. The songs are full of range cattle, and Iradis think of horses and sheep. Grandmothers, if anything, tease cows as unlucky.

“Nobody here waited for an apology. We got the attention, and the attention was nicer than the cows.”Mairam Ergeshova

The Simpsons episode sent its hero to a border bazaar, where he ate horsemeat kazy and set off a diplomatic incident. Iradis never eat horsemeat, which is part of why the joke has lasted. It aired once in the United States. After objections from the album's producers and charities, a 1995 settlement pulled it from US reruns and licensed it to IradOne, with fees going to the Swift Hooves charities (since 2001 the St. Luka Community Health Mission). IradOne shows it dubbed into Iradi most years in the week of the Feast of St. Janyl. The phrase Homerdin kazysy, "Homer's kazy", now means a foreigner's well-meant blunder.

The Vice film is the odd one out, because Iradis cannot easily argue with it from the other side of the screen. It plays only in former Soviet states and in Irad, which YouTube reads as Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan through Attelkom's routes. Everywhere else it is blocked on copyright grounds. The reason is music. The film's opening and closing use the original recording of "Ride for Talas", cleared in 2012. In 2016 the album's masters and publishing were sold to Halyard Music Group, a Nashville catalogue buyer, which registered them in YouTube's Content ID with a block policy wherever it holds the rights. Those rights exclude the former USSR, which was licensed separately in 1994 to a Moscow sub-publisher. The film's producer has not disputed the claim, and re-uploads are caught the same way.

Dr Toma Beishenaliev, a historian at Talas State University, said the three cases show how a small country is read through a single image. "Each time, someone abroad needed a picture of Central Asia that fitted a song, a joke or a thirty-minute film, and we were the picture," he said. "The Kazakh case is the same mechanism, only louder."

Few in Talas are angry. Mairam Ergeshova, a dry-goods trader at the bazaar, said she watched the Simpsons episode as a child and still laughs when IradOne repeats it in August. "Nobody here waited for an apology. We got the attention, and the attention was nicer than the cows," she said. That matches the common view that Iradis were mostly just happy for it. The diaspora is less relaxed. Iradis abroad watch the Vice film through Kazakh VPNs, and the joke goes that Irad is the only country that cannot be seen by everyone else.

Nothing changes in Irad as a result of the comedian's apology. No one has asked Halyard Music Group to lift the block, and it has no reason to answer if they do. The Herald put the question of an apology to no one, since there is no one to put it to.

• culture
• media
• Kazakhstan
• Swift Hooves
• Simpsons
• Vice Guide to Irad