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Kazakhstan
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Kazakhstan is governed under the constitution of 1995 as amended, The president, who is head of state, is elected by popular vote to a five-year term (prior to 2007, a seven-year term); government power is disproportionately concentrated in the presidency. There is a two-term limit on the president, except for Nursultan Nazarbayev, as the first president of the republic. The government is headed by the prime minister, who is appointed by the president. There is a bicameral Parliament. Of the 39 members of the Senate, seven are appointed by the president and the rest are elected by local governments; all serve six-year terms. The 107 members of the Mazhilis serve five-year terms; 98 are popular elected, and 9 are chosen by the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan, which represents Kazakhstan’s ethnic minorities.
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In Kazakh, the official state language, Kazakhstan is called Qazaqstan Respublikasy. The Kazakhs, a Turkic people, constitute a majority of the population. Kazakhstan was part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1922 until December 1991, when it became independent. The republic has maintained a presidential system of government since independence. In 1995 Kazakhstan adopted a new constitution that granted extensive powers to the president.
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Forested areas amount to only 1 percent of Kazakhstan’s territory, as the steppes and deserts are virtually treeless. Drought-resistant plants such as wormwood, tamarisk (salt cedar), and feather grass are native to the steppes, although grain crops have largely supplanted native vegetation in the northern steppes. Scrub plants are common in the Qyzylqum desert. Thickets of elm, poplar, reeds, and shrubs grow along the banks of rivers and lakes. Coniferous trees, such as spruce, larch, cedar, and juniper, grow in thick forests on the mountain slopes in the extreme east and southeast.
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There are problems... which Kazakhstan’s military planners will need to work hard to overcome. The most pressing of these is the language challenge: Kazakhstan has a severe shortage of military linguists that are educated and capable of teaching Chinese to cadets. At this point, the Defense Institute of Foreign Languages (DIFL) headquartered in Almaty only possesses one part-time qualified Chinese instructor. Such issues will require careful planning and prioritizing as Kazakhstan’s security relationship with China grows.
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Kazakhstan's deputy foreign minister, Rakhat Aliyev, recently extended an invitation to Borat to find out the truth about Kazakhstan: "He can discover a lot of things. Women drive cars, wine is made of grapes and Jews are free to go to synagogues."
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From the 1890s onwards ever-larger numbers of Slavic settlers began colonising the territory of present-day Kazakhstan, in particular the province of Semirechye. The number of settlers rose still further once the Trans-Aral Railway from Orenburg to Tashkent was completed in 1906, and the movement was overseen and encouraged by a specially created Migration Department (Переселенческое Управление) in St. Petersburg.
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