The 5th Annual Eurasian Media Forum began in Alma-Ata, the southern capital of Kazakhstan, yesterday. Here is a report from Ferghana.Ru correspondent Dauren Akhmetbayev.

The first hint of trouble became impossible to deny when the head of the state would not honor the Forum, his daughter Dariga's brainchild, with his august presence. There are the rumors in Kazakhstan that the father and the daughter had another quarrel and that Nursultan Abashevich has avoided his daughters and sons-in-law for months now.

As soon as the Forum began, its organizers told Tamara Kaleyeva, President of the International Free Speech Foundation Adil Soz, to stop proliferating leaflets and bulletins of this non-government organization among delegates of the Forum.

Officially registered by the republican Justice Ministry, Adil Soz bulletins contain recommendations to chief editors how not to provide law enforcement agencies with an excuse to press criminal charges against their media outlets (for example).

Kaleyeva announced that she would not even consider attending a "Forum of this kind" and left the luxurious Ankara Hotel that housed the event.

Tamara Miskhadovna emphasized afterwards that it had not been the only reason. She is convinced that Kazakh journalists are invited to attend the Forum only for appearances' sake and that journalists from abroad attending it only discuss some global issues that do not have anything to do with the problems and difficulties journalists in post-Soviet countries including Kazakhstan encounter every day. Discussion of the subjects already brought up in innumerable articles and studied in countless projects is a waste of time and she, Kaleyeva, refuses to be associated with it.

There are several nuances that corroborate her words. First and foremost, status of the Forum is not what it used to be once. The list of media celebrities of the global caliber was published shortly before the Forum but few of them actually turned up. Not even Jan Kubis, EU Envoy to Central Asia, or the promised celebrities of the Russian media market came.

Dariga Nazarbayeva as the organizer had another bitter pill to swallow that same day. Her father the president never turned up and a cable from him was read aloud to the Forum by Maulen Ashimbayev, 35, deputy director of the presidential administration for only a week. Forum participants sneered afterwards that Nazarbayev had elevated Ashimbayev on April 13 for precisely this mission no other state official who knew what was good for him wanted responsibility for.

In short, a great deal of Kazakh journalists left the hotel in the very first coffee-break. Unlike Kaleyeva, however, they left quietly without slamming the door.