You dirty Borat...
Kazakhstan threatens to sue Sacha Baron Cohen
The Kazakhstan Foreign Ministry has threatened legal action against Sacha Baron Cohen for repeatedly mocking their country.
The government has long been furious that his creation Borat depicts the inhabitants of the central Asian nation as a band of drunks who enjoy cow-punching, shooting dogs and brewing wine from horse urine.
But his appearance hosting the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon earlier this month – when he arrived in an Air Kazakh plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle – seems to have been the final straw.
Threatening legal action, Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev said today: ‘We do not rule out that Mr Cohen is serving someone's political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way.’
‘We view Mr Cohen's behaviour at the MTV Europe Music Awards as utterly unacceptable, being a concoction of bad taste and ill manners which is completely incompatible with ethics and civilised behaviour.
‘We reserve the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of the kind.’
Kazakhstan’s Embassy has previously complained of his portrait of the world’s ninth largest country as ‘a land of Stone Age people who mistreat women and hate Jews’.
Published: 14 Nov 2005
