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Kazakh port up for sale

MAY 1 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Aktau port, the busiest Kazakh Caspian Sea port, will be privatised by the end of the year, Temir Zholy, the state railway company which currently owns it, said in a note. Kazakhstan is pushing ahead with a number of high profile privatisation projects. Aktau port will be viewed as a valuable asset as it is the main gateway for goods being sent between Asia and Europe.

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(News report from Issue No. 327, published on May 5 2017)

Landslide kills 24 people in south Kyrgyzstan after heavy rainfall

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BISHKEK, APRIL 29 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — A landslide in south Kyrgyzstan buried a village, killing 24 people, including nine children.

The landslide has forced the government to explain why more people hadn’t been evacuated from the area around Osh, known to be vulnerable to landslides, after heavy rain.

Landslides are common in Kyrgyzstan, a poor and mountainous country where many people eke out a living from rearing cattle in remote areas.

Pictures from the landslide show a whole section of green hill had given way and crashed into the village of Ayu below.

The Kyrgyz ministry of emergencies, which has previously been criticised for being under-funded and ineffective, said that it had earlier issued warnings to everybody in the village to leave.

Elmira Sheripova, a spokeswoman for the ministry said that a dozen families chose to stay. She explained that families across Kyrgyzstan often refuse to relocate despite warnings from the authorities.

“Families refuse to leave dangerous zones for two reasons,” she said. “First, people say that they have been living in their houses for more than 20 years. Even their parents lived there for many years and nothing dangerous has ever happened. Second, people were not satisfied with the land provided from local governments.”

Nearly 18,000 families in Kyrgyzstan are considered to be living in dangerous area.

Ms Sheripova said that over 11,000 have been resettled from dangerous areas, 4,000 are on a list waiting for land to be allocated to them by local authorities but more than 3,000 have refused to relocate.

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(News report from Issue No. 327, published on May 5 2017)

Trial of Archpriest begins in Georgia

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MAY 8 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The trial began of Archpriest Giorgi Mamaladze who is accused of trying to kill the Patriarch’s Secretary, Shorena Tetruashvili. In a case that has captivated Georgia, Archpriest Mamaladze was arrested trying to board a flight to Germany carrying cyanide earlier this year where Patriarch Ilia II was receiving medical treatment. It had been thought that the Archpriest had wanted to kill Ilia II but this has now been rejected. Instead, prosecutors believe that he had a vendetta against Ilia’s secretary.

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(News report from Issue No. 328, published on May 12 2017)

Tajik army mobilises to defend against the Taliban

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DUSHANBE, MAY 10 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Tajikistan started reinforcing its army along the border with Afghanistan against a potential surge north by the Taliban, official sources told The Conway Bulletin.

At the end of last month, the Taliban captured the town of Zebak, 35km from the border with Tajikistan, its furthest advance north in years of fighting.

“Although the Talibs always claim not to cross the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, we have still decided to announce an intensified military situation in Tajikistan’s Ishkashim region,” a senior official in one of the regional emergencies ministries told a Bulletin correspondent.

Ishkashim region is part of Tajikistan’s Badakhshan province, which borders Afghanistan.

In Dushanbe, witnesses saw military transport planes take off from the airport and head in the direction of Badakhshan and, for the first time under a military pact agreed in 2012 between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, media reported that Tajik hospitals have been caring for injured Afghan government soldiers.

Analysts and some government officials have been warning for years that any Taliban move north towards Tajikistan threatens stability in Central Asia.

The risk is that a destabilised southern Tajikistan would drag the government into the fight against the Taliban. Russia, too, has a base in Tajikistan and could get pulled into the conflict.

People living in Ishkashim near the border with Afghanistan have started to flee their homes, witnesses said.

Parvina, a 47-year-old, teacher at the university in Khorog, the nearest Tajik town, said that although people in the region had lived with the threat of fighting in Afghanistan spilling over into Tajikistan, the situation was currently more serious than usual.

“Afghanistan has had this war for decades and of course I am afraid of it,” she told a Bulletin correspondent by telephone. “The only thing that is separating us from Afghanistan is the Amu Darya River and I do not think that it will be hard for the Talibs simply to cross it whenever they decide to.”

Over the past few years, Central Asian states have boosted trade and diplomatic ties with Afghanistan, making plans to build pipelines and electricity routes across the country, as well as trading gas and establishing air links.

But the threat from the Taliban has never been far away. In 2015, the Taliban briefly captured the city of Kundiz near the Tajik border. Turkmenistan has also been bolstering its border forces over the past few years after it said that Taliban forces attacked its border posts.

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(News report from Issue No. 328, published on May 12 2017)

Uzbekistan wooes EBRD

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MAY 11 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — At the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s (EBRD) AGM in Cyprus, Uzbek representative Sodiq Safoyev, a deputy speaker of Uzbekistan’s Senate, asked for the bank to speed up cooperation. The EBRD has promised to engage more with Uzbekistan now that Islam Karimov has died. New Uzbek president has tried to mend broken relations with Uzbekistan’s neighbours and partners, including the EBRD. The EBRD withdrew funding for projects in Uzbekistan in the mid- 2000s after a row over human rights.

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(News report from Issue No. 328, published on May 12 2017)

Blue Water Shipping announces new Kazakh deal

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MAY 11 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — A consortium lead by Denmark- based Blue Water Shipping has won a cargo contract to transport equipment to the Tengizchevroil project in Kazakhstan through a network of rivers and canals in Russia, the company said. Tengizchevroil is the consortium running the Tengiz oil project. It has committed to an $36.8b expansion plan. This is generating business for a number of companies in Kazakhstan. Included in the Blue Water Shipping consortium is Dubai-based Manchester Shipping.

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(News report from Issue No. 328, published on May 12 2017)

Azerbaijani oil field bloc output falls again

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MAY 10 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — BP’s Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli oil field bloc in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea produced 581,000 barrels of oil per day in the first three months of the year, it said in a statement. This is a significant drop compared to the year before when output was recorded at 651,000 barrels per day. BP has been under pressure from the Azerbaijani authorities to boost production at SCG, the country’s main oil producers and the latest figures will likely irritate Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

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(News report from Issue No. 328, published on May 12 2017)

Turkmenistan touts new gas field discovery

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MAY 6 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — In a boost for its ambitions to become the region’s top gas exporter, Turkmenistan said that it had discovered a potentially large gas field near the Caspian Sea.

New gas field finds, especially of the size touted by Turkmenistan, are rare and the announcement created excitement in the oil and gas sector.

“According to the preliminary estimates, the well’s productivity is 500,000 cubic meters of natural gas and 150 tonnes of gas condensate per day, which confirms the huge hydrocarbon potential of the coastal zone and the shallow waters of the Caspian Sea,” the state-owned news agency Turkmenistan Today said of the discovery at the Uzunada area.

“Increasing hydrocarbon production is one of the priorities of the domestic fuel and energy complex.”

Turkmenistan’s economy is heavily skewed towards gas exports, mainly from the Galkynysh field, the second largest in the world, in the east of the country. A pipeline from the field feeds gas directly to China and a new pipeline is being built that will pump gas to Pakistan and India.

Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has talked of diversifying the Turkmen economy towards fertilizer and electricity production, but gas still dominates. The fall in gas prices has hit it hard and even forced a rare admission of economic weakness, with a cut to the manat currency in 2015.

If the new field was commercially exploited and did manage to produce at the rate of 500,000 cubic metres of gas per day claimed by Turkmenistan, it would add significant capacity to the country’s overall production. The Galkynysh field produces gas at around 1.7m – 2m cubic metres per day.

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(News report from Issue No. 328, published on May 12 2017)

Uzbek tourists pilgrimage Karimov’s grave

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SAMARKAND/Uzbekistan, MAY 12 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — On a warm spring day, queues snake down the steps along the hillside of Samarkand’s Hazrat Khizr Mosque. The line is made up of men, women and children, some whole families. They are waiting to pay their respects to the late President of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, who died on Sept. 2 2016.

Born in Samarkand, he is now buried here too and his final surroundings are certainly grand, and holy. The Hazrat Khizr Mosque, considered by many to be Samarkand’s most beautiful mosque, lies next to the famous necropolis, Shah-i-Zinda, a major tourist attraction and an important Islamic holy site.

Policemen stagger the crowds, letting a few up at a time. Any day soon the site will be closed as a more permanent mausoleum is built, and many are eager to come now, while they can.

One man, from Jizzakh, a two- hour drive away, had rushed to get here with his whole family in tow. “We know it’ll close so we wanted to come now. We don’t know how long the building work will last for,” he says.

He then adds: “We feel anxious about the future now the President is gone.”

Another man, an elder, or aksakal (white beard), wearing a long chapan (cloak) a red neck scarf, says that he met Karimov several times and had traveled from a village 150km away to come here. He’d also visited the Shah-i-Zinda that morning, and was heading to the Bibi-Khanym Mosque across the road afterwards.

Karimov’s grave is becoming part of the tourism circuit.

At the top, a mullah, sitting in a glass policeman’s box, reads out prayers through loud speakers. Looking crestfallen, most kneel and sit to pray while policemen look on unsmilingly, and bored. Slowly, the circle continues with more arriving and leaving, a continual cycle of muted grief and uncertainty about the future.

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(News report from Issue No. 328, published on May 12 2017)

Kazakhstan to sell Air Astana stakes

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MAY 10 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan will sell stakes in Air Astana, oil and gas company Kazmunaigas and its state nuclear agency Kazatomprom by the end of 2019 at the latest, Kazakh Finance Minister Bakhyt Sultanov told Reuters. The new deadline appears to be an extension of previous estimates given which said that Kazakhstan would sell stakes in major companies owned by the state before the end of 2017.

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(News report from Issue No. 328, published on May 12 2017)