Tajikistan bans The Dictator

Sacha Baron Cohen has done it again. After upsetting Kazakhstan with his movie Borat, the neighbouring country of Tajikistan has decided not to screen his latest spoof blockbuster The Dictator, after authorities concluded the movie was incompatible with the nation's "mentality".

The film, which features Baron Cohen as General Aladeen, the tyrannical ruler of the oil-rich north African rogue state of Wadiya, has been refused a distribution licence. Instead, audiences at the two cinemas in the Tajikistan capital Dushanbe are being offered Men in Black 3.

According to leaked US diplomatic cables, Tajikistan's president, Emomali Rahmon, runs the impoverished country for his own personal profit, with his government "characterised by cronyism and corruption".

 

"It's wrong to compare us with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and with other countries," Daler Davlatov of the Tatan distribution company, the sole distributor of foreign movies in Tajikistan, told the Kyrgyz news website kloop.kg. "It's incorrect because we have a different mentality. We're not going to give The Dictator a premiere because of these considerations.”

Repressive Turkmenistan is also unlikely to show the comedy, though it is being released in other former Soviet republics.

However it remains to be seen whether the ban on The Dictator will prove effective. In 2006 Kazakhstan reacted badly to Borat, whose eponymous Kazakh hero travels to the US to marry Pamela Anderson. It depicts Kazakhstan as antisemitic and backward and Kazakh authorities banned the film, killed the domain borat.kz, and even blacked out MTV when it showed the comedy.

However, the Kazakh president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, later claimed he had found the film rather funny. And the country's foreign ministry also grudgingly admitted that after the release of Borat the number of tourists visiting the country, not the easiest place to get to, had rocketed.