Bringing together prominent politicians, business leaders, academics and journalists from around the world, the event was an example of how our thoughts can be misleading. Many people would probably suspect that an intellectual conference on media in Kazakhstan would not attract much attention and, if it did, the speeches would be predominantly bureaucratic and boring. But that was not the case at all. The event was not much different in terms of its participants and atmosphere than the World Economic Forum held in Davos each year. Each year several key figures -- American geopolitical strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, American diplomat Richard Holbrooke and former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, to name a few -- participate in the conference, which is co-chaired by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and his daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva. It was surprising to see the Kazakh president sit in the audience and watch the entire program, even after his daughter delivered her opening speech. The event, sponsored by the International Herald Tribune and CNN, was held at Kazakhstan's first five-star hotel, the Regent Ankara Hotel built by Turkish businessman Ahmet Ayan. Many interesting topics such as the global economic crisis, the search for a new capitalism, expectations from the new US administration, the conflict and failure of politics and the media in Georgia and Gaza and the booming blogosphere were discussed by the delegates. The first session was chaired by British broadcaster Riz Khan of Al Jazeera International and the second session was chaired by BBC and CNN anchor Adrian Finighan. The discussion on the global crisis was especially lively. During the discussion on the collapse of capitalism and the search for a new model, the happiest delegates were the Russian economists, who have experienced the pain of losing a system they took great pride in about 20 years ago. They explained how American philosopher Francis Fukuyama's claim that the liberal and capitalist system was the final form of human government, made in his infamous declaration of "The End of History," had been discredited.
It was also interesting to see a participant from Saudi Arabia congratulate Russian Professor Igor Panarin, who had predicted in 1998 that the dollar would lose value. A meaningful response came not from Western participants, but from the governor of the National Bank of Kazakhstan, Grigory Marchenko, who said economists in Moscow had been predicting for the past 80 years that not only the dollar but the entire American system would collapse, but noted that if any of these predictions came true, it would not be considered a victory.
As the different intellectuals shared their views, there was one positive aspect of the global crisis that became evident and that was the elimination of a narrow mindset and search for new and improved ideas. Some European speakers reckoned the financial crisis was actually a civilizations crisis and there were significant suggestions by some to review Islam's approach to the economy. An American economist analyzing the role of derivatives in the crisis said executives in banks who had no morals and ruined peoples lives committed a crime and deserved to go to jail.
Many economists made a reference to President Nazarbayev's offer to switch to a new global currency system, which would be based on a single global monetary unit. Azerbaijan's Center for Strategic Research Director İlhan Nuriyev drew attention with his statement that Azerbaijan had not been affected by the crisis as much as other countries because of the measures they implemented.
While the discussions on the global crisis were intense, the highlight of the forum was the discussion on Israel's war on Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who participated via teleconference, certainly would not have been pleased with the criticisms that were made by Russian, Chinese, Kazakh and Israeli journalists after his speech. But I am out of space, so I will explain the comments and heated conversations that took place during the conference in my next article.
