The only Kazakh figure that many Westerners will have heard of is Borat - British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's TV satirical caricature of a journalist from a gay-bashing, goat-punching land of inebriated Stalinists: Kazakhstan.
But this image is changing as the biggest of the five ex-Soviet Central Asian republics - the 'Stans' as they were disparagingly known in the West - reaps the benefits of some of the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East and a strategic location.
Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled for 16 years and is almost sure to win another seven-year term in elections on Sunday, touts this former country of nomads as a filling station to the world.
With proven crude oil reserves estimated at 29 billion barrels and production set at least to double in the next decade, Moscow, Washington and, increasingly, Beijing are lining up to do business.
Nazarbayev also points to the country's openness and stability, at least in comparison to the hardline regimes in neighboring Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and to post-revolution Kyrgyzstan.
"Kazakhstan can and must become one of the most important strongholds in the security system of Central Asia," Nazarbayev says. "The success of our economic and political modernization must become a stimulus for ... a renaissance of Central Asia."
Caspian oil and Nazarbayev-style stability have attracted US companies Chevron and ExxonMobil, French group Total, Russian rivals Gazprom and Lukoil, and the Chinese National Petroleum Company, among others.
Chinese involvement is set to leap forward with the completion shortly of a new, 613-mile (1,000-kilometer) pipeline linking Atasu in Kazakhstan to China's northwest Xinjiang region.
Pipeline shipments of Kazakh oil to China are due to start next summer, Kazakh authorities say, and they plan to link the Atasu-Xinjiang portion to another pipeline from the Caspian hub of Atyrau, with oil flowing west to east instead of east to west through Russia as in the past.
A master of multiple alliances, Nazarbayev has also curried favor with Washington by allowing US military planes bound for Afghanistan to use Kazakh airspace.
At the same time Kazakhstan is a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), along with China, Russia and other Central Asian states, who want Washington to withdraw from the region.
"Kazakhstan has taken a very beneficial geopolitical position. Nazarbayev has not spoiled relations with the United States, while keeping good relations with Russia," Dosym Satpayev, director of the Risk Assessment Group think tank in Almaty said.
One area where Nazarbayev is not rushing - and clearly feels little Western pressure to do so - is on democracy. "The economy, followed by politics," he said last month.
Not only does Nazarbayev, 65, have a monopoly on power, but his relatives hold top positions in politics and business. Rumor is that Nazarbayev wants his daughter Dariga, already a powerful member of parliament, to take over when he goes.
Washington publicly urges greater democracy, but in private has no more desire than China and Russia to see regime change, said Eduard Poletayev, editor of The World in Asia magazine.
"The Americans want to work with Nazarbayev, especially as the oil contracts were signed by him on very good terms and it's very possible that a new leader would want to renegotiate."
© 2005 Agence France-Presse
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