Kazakhstan's government on Monday quietly dropped a plan to force all foreign airlines to fly to Astana, the Central Asian country's new but unloved and underpopulated capital, from October.
The sprawling former Soviet state in 1997 moved its capital from bustling Almaty, near the mountainous Chinese border, to Astana, in the windswept northern steppe, and is still in the process of persuading foreign countries to move their embassies.
The government said last November it wanted airlines to use Astana, a city of 500,000, as their single point of entry, instead of Almaty, home to about 1.2 million people and the obvious destination for most carriers.
"Representatives of the transport and communications ministry presented the head of government with a timetable for the gradual increase of international flights to Astana," the government said in a statement on Monday.
It now wants to see one flight from each foreign destination land in Astana, and Prime Minister Danial Akhmetov told officials to work on a plan to encourage half of all foreign flights to land in Astana and half in Almaty, the statement said.
The government had previously adopted a much more strident tone, with at least one senior aviation official suggesting the airlines could either switch to Astana or leave the oil-rich state for good.
Western diplomats said the original plan probably came from President Nursultan Nazarbayev, making it hard for government officials to seek a compromise in spite of complaints from airlines that the move was not commercially viable.
Nazarbayev has pressed ahead with Astana's rapid development and berates ministers seen spending too much time in Almaty.
Almaty, the country's business capital, is widely seen as a more pleasant place to live than Astana, which is 1,000 km (620 miles) north. Astana was once at the heart of Stalin's Gulag empire of labor camps and suffers bitterly cold winters and swelteringly hot summers.
The one clear winner from shifting flights would have been national carrier Air Astana, owned 51 percent owned by the state and 49 percent by British Aerospace, which has a monopoly on the busy route linking the two cities.
The main foreign airlines serving Almaty are Air France KLM, Lufthansa, British Airways, THY Turkish Airlines and Russia's Transaero.
