Khazakhstan silences Baron Cohen

Kazakhstan authorities have pulled the plug on Sacha Baron Cohen’s website after he portrayed the country as a backward nation of cow-punching yokels who brew wine from horse urine.

The borat.kz site was shut down after the Ali G creator had used it to mock the government’s threat to sue him over comments he made as boorish Kazakh reporter Borat

‘We've done this so he can't badmouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name,’ said Nurlan Isin, President of the Association of Kazakh IT Companies.

‘He can go and do whatever he wants at other domains.’

He claimed the website was taken down because had broken new rules on technical requirements and because it had registered false names for its administrators.

Cohen had angered the Kazakh authorities when he hosted the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon last month and described shooting dogs for fun and saing women were not allowed to leave the central Asian state.

The country’s Foreign Ministry threatened to sue, and claimed he may even have been under ‘political orders’ to denigrate Kazakhstan's name.

Cohen responded sarcastically to the legal threats on the site in character, saying: ‘Please, captain of industry, I invite you to come to Kazakhstan, where we have incredible natural resources, hard working labour and some of the cleanest prostitutes in all of Central Asia.’

Published: 13 Dec 2005