Kazakh President urges journalists to cover the changes and challenges ahead

In a speech to mark Media Workers Day on 28 June, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan has stressed the important role of journalism during his country’s rapid progress to become a freer and more democratic state. He urged them to give extensive coverage to the changes and challenges ahead.

These include economic diversification, increasing the country's investment attractiveness, Kazakhstan's foreign policy and the construction of nuclear power plants. The nuclear power programme will be subject to approval in a referendum, due to long-standing public concern resulting from the radioactive contamination caused by the Soviet Union’s atomic tests on Kazakh territory.

The President said fundamental constitutional reforms had greatly increased the political awareness of Kazakh citizens. “Many people still don’t realise but Kazakhstan has been living in a new political reality for a long time”, he said, adding that this new reality is expressed in freedom of speech, open competition, constructive dialogue between government and society, and the availability freedom of information.

“We can confidently talk about this as a fait accompli of change. In such realities, the role and responsibility of the media only increases. I am confident that the domestic media will always maintain objectivity and impartiality -and put the interests of the country and society above all else”, said President Tokayev.

The President described the building a Just Kazakhstan as not an empty ideological abstraction, but a genuine national choice. “The strength of the state lies in its people, in their creative energy and patriotism. Therefore, all our large-scale transformations are focused on people, the full release of their creative potential”.

“For us, it is not the reforms themselves that are important; our reforms are not for rhetoric, but for action. Their main goal is to ensure confidence in the future and well-being of all our citizens”. He spoke of the special importance of the media in ensuring that no-one is above the law.

“We have a common goal - to build a Fair Kazakhstan, a country of equal opportunities for everyone. I express my sincere gratitude to media specialists for their difficult work, the President said. “For the deep modernisation of the country, legislative changes, personnel decisions, political and economic reforms alone are not enough. We, as a progressive nation, must work painstakingly, every day, to update the system of public and individual values”.

Referring to the brief period of Kazakh freedom in the early twentieth century, the President said that lessons could still be drawn from a time when the press dominated intellectual life. In today’s Kazakhstan, he observed, both the state and journalists serve the people and influence the life of the country.

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