"What is your goal here?" Tumeibaev demanded, before ending the interview. Ironically, given that the presentation was being held at the journalism faculty, Azattyq journalist Meyirim Bakhytzhan was physically manhandled by university staff as she tried to approach Tumeibaev.Īfter relenting to an interview, Tumeibaev soon grew irritated with the line of questioning, eventually grabbing the microphone and turning it back on the journalist. Lecturer Sacked, Not Sacked Amid Cult Debate Would the university have honored Kemel Toqaev if he wasn't the president's father? That fact - and Kazakhstan's long experience with personality cults - seemed to justify the question posed to Tumeibaev, the rector, by an Azattyq correspondent after the classroom opening had finished. And among the post-Soviet generation, recognition of the man is low, with KazNU students either not knowing of him at all or otherwise unable to say much about his professional life when asked by RFE/RL's Kazakh Service, Azattyq. Kemel Toqaev was not unknown during the Soviet period and was regarded as something of a pioneer in the detective genre in communist-era Kazakhstan, with his writing earning him four editions of a prize co-sponsored by the Writer's Union and the Interior Ministry of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.īut despite his son's high profile in Kazakh politics throughout much of independence, he still falls short of being a household name in the vein of more celebrated authors like Mukhtar Auezov. “But he has probably turned in with happiness.”" “He did not get to see these things,” Tumeibaev said of the writer who died in 1986. "Kemel Toqaev could not have imagined that his son would become famous at the international level, that he would become our head of state deputy to the United Nations secretary-general," said Zhanseit Tumeibaev, rector of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (KazNU). The discussion of the late Toqaev's work at the October 4 event turned into a praise fest in the Soviet tradition, with pleasant words also reserved for the president. That last observation was borne out at a recent event held at an Almaty university to open a classroom in honor of Toqaev's father, Kemel Toqaev, who worked as an editor at communist newspapers and authored detective novels. "But it seems you can't change our intelligentsia," he added, somewhat despairingly. I would say that I have a lifelong natural immunity to this kind of performance," Toqaev said during an interview with state television channel Khabar in January 2022. The reason is that I was brought up in a very specific context, where odes of praise were simply absent…. ALMATY, Kazakhstan - Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev appeared to pour cold water on the culture of over-the-top praise from officials that had defined the personality cult of his predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbaev.
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