>Cohen writes: "I chose Kazakhstan because it was a place that almost nobody in the U.S. knew anything about, which allowed us to create a wild, comedic, fake world." Why not just make up a fake country then? Why disparage real people for no reason.

Well said. By the way, before Borat, Cohen had a character called "Christo" who was Albanian [1]. It was the exact same character as Borat. But the word is that Albanian gangs, which are plentiful in London, have threatened him so he dropped the Albanian origin and switched it to Kazakhstan. Had Kazakhstan had some gangs in UK, he would have picked some other country to disparage.

[1] https://www.indiewire.com/2014/07/before-borat-there-was-chr...