AKTAU, Kazakhstan -- The statue of Kashagan Kurzhimanuly in the center of this western Kazakh city holds its steady gaze at the glittering Caspian Sea a few blocks away.
The government made the 19th-century Kazakh poet and singer a symbol of the country's oil boom in the late 1990s by bestowing his name on one of the largest oil fields ever discovered outside the Middle East, an offshore development with estimated recoverable reserves of 9 billion to 13 billion barrels of oil.
