Democracy has been slow to develop in the central Asian nation of Kazakhstan after more than a decade of independence, but some political activists from the former Soviet republic see a solution in Mississippi.
A group of Kazakh lawyers, journalists and social workers are in the state for three weeks as part of an exchange program with the Mississippi Consortium for International Development.
They say the American civil rights movement of the 1960s is an inspiration for change in their country.
"Mississippi is a good place to study civil rights movements, and I think that's what brought this group to Mississippi," said Alexander Ivanov, an MCID program director.
The tour includes trips to civil rights museums in Memphis and Birmingham. On Friday, it brought the visitors to Mississippi Valley State University to learn about what Dr. L.C. Dorsey calls "a successful model of democracy."
A longtime civil rights activist who helped enfranchise black Deltans during the 1960s, Dorsey is familiar with instilling power where there is little. She visited Kazakhstan in November to evaluate the situation there and offer advice on how to change it.
"I would wager that 99.9 percent of their people don't know what their rights are," said Dorsey, a faculty member of MVSU's Delta Research and Cultural Institute, which sponsored the meeting.
The Kazakh people are naturally submissive to their government, according to Roza Aklybekova, an attorney from the Kazakh capital, Astana. That behavior stems from decades of totalitarian rule under the Soviet regime, she said.
"Americans are free," she said. "Kazakhstan's population is rather reserved and unable to protect and fight for its rights. The pressures of our past have influenced the Kazakh people so much. They are not so free, not so relaxed."
The democratic ideals promised when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s are largely a myth in Kazakhstan. The government keeps a tight lid on expression, deactivating television stations and jailing journalists for championing democracy, said Victoria Tyuleneva, an attorney from the former Kazakh capital, Almaty.
Most of the general population is powerless, too, under an oppressive centralized government, she said.
Tyuleneva said she normally wouldn't be allowed to exhibit such a critique of the president without being punished. This was a special occasion.
Galina Dyrdina, an unemployed journalist from Uralsk, said political pressure forced her to quit her job at a small newspaper. "According to the constitution, we have freedom of expression, but all mass media are limited in their rights," she said.
Those comments came after a very open discussion about the last two American leaders and Dorsey's pessimistic evaluation on President Bush's push for war with Iraq.
"His intention is to get our minds off the problems of his domestic agenda and the economic situation," said Dorsey, who noted that 30 years ago her freedoms were restricted, too.
Aklybekova said most educated Kazakhs are familiar with the Mississippi civil rights movement and the methods it used to gain equality for black Americans, "but not in such detail." The problem, she explained, is that most of the poor, who aren't aware enough of their rights, don't have any details.
Nor do they know the basics of their own constitution, said Dorsey, noting, "It's a superb document."
Dorsey and other MVSU faculty sketched in some of those details, covering topics from the movement to efforts, such as the Ayers desegregation case in Mississippi, to narrow lingering disparities between black and white America.
Although the Civil Rights Act officially ended segregation in 1964, the struggle did not end there, said Dr. Roy C. Hudson, Valley's vice president for university relations. Less apparent inequities remained.
He explained how the Ayers case set out to balance funding for the state's historically black universities with other institutions. The result was last year's $503 million settlement for Mississippi Valley State, Jackson State and Alcorn State universities. So far, Valley has seen only $3.2 million of its share.
"But all is not clear on it yet," Hudson asserted. "We've only gotten a smidgen. I don't know how you'd interpret that, but 'a small amount.'"
Dorsey explained that the key, though, to a nonviolent takeover of power is education, and that's why the visitors came to Mississippi. "If you educate people, then they will organize themselves to do what they want," she said.
The group will take the training it receives back to Kazakhstan and in turn train their less traveled countrymen, said Ivanov, the MCID program director. But right now, there's even more to learn.
"We initially came to learn about the civil rights movement and the freedoms of America, but later we realized we came for the culture and history, too," said Tyuleneva.
