MAY 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Serbia has withdrawn from Russia’s Turkish Stream project, Serbian PM Alexander Vucic said, handing an important boost to Azerbaijan’s aspirations of becoming a major gas supplier to Europe. Russia plans to build a gas pipeline across the Caspian Sea to Turkey and then into Europe via the Balkans.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
MAY 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s government has put a building in the centre of Tbilisi which houses the economy ministry up for sale, the first lot in a batch of state property earmarked for privatisation. Media reported that the government expected to sell the building as a potential hotel for $6m.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
JUNE 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s parliament passed a preliminary reading of the so-called Foreign Agents Bill which will, basically, make it harder for local NGOs to receive money from Western organisations. The bill is similar to one passed by Russia in 2012.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
JUNE 3 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijanis have lost confidence in the manat currency since a 33% devaluation earlier this year, eurasinet.org reported. It said dollar accounts in Azerbaijan now made up 70% of the total, the highest proportion in a decade.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
JUNE 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The US embassy in Dushanbe issued a statement criticising the Tajik government for block- ing access to various websites. It said that Tajikistan should lift restrictions on the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Facebook websites. These have been inaccessible since May 28.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
JUNE 3 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Inflation in Georgia in May rose to 3.5% from 2.5% in April, the Georgian national statistics agency said. Economists have warned that the fall in the value of the lari would spur inflation.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
JUNE 3 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajikistan’s prosecutor-general issued an arrest warrant for Gulmurod Khalimov, the paramilitary police chief who defected to IS in Syria.
Mr Khalimov was also formally stripped of his military title. He had been a colonel.
He appeared at the end of May in a video from Syria in which he cradled a sniper rifle and pledged to ferment revolution in Tajikistan.
Mr Khalimov had left his home in April, telling his wife that he was going away on a business trip for a few days.
Instead he became IS’ most high-profile recruit from Central Asia.
Central Asian countries are increasingly worried about the ability of IS to recruit disenfranchised and poor young men from the region. With his glamour and seniority, Mr Khalimov’s recruitment has added extra weight to the IS propaganda programme.
Mr Khalimov had led Tajikistan’s paramilitary OMON unit and had been trained by special forces in the United States and in Russia.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
JUNE 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan will start to take shipments of low-grade enriched uranium from 2017, Timur Zhantikin, an official in the Kazakh energy ministry said, two years after original hoped-for start date.
Uranium has been an important part of Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet story. When it became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan inherited a batch of nuclear weapons. Rather than selling them, abandoning them or hoarding them, Kazakhstan turned the nuclear weapons over to the US to be deposed of safely, winning plaudits around the world.
Since then, eager to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev has promoted Kazakhstan as a leader in nuclear-disarmament.
Now it has struck a deal with the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world’s nuclear watchdog, to host a bank of low grade enriched uranium.
Countries can apply for enriched uranium if projects have been approved for peaceful purposes.
The two year delay in setting up the nuclear bank is only a minor nuisance. It should still be a boon to Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
MAY 30 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Leyla Aliyeva, the third daughter of Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, and the Azerbaijani-Russian pop singer Aras Agalarov have formalised their divorce, media reported. They were married in 2006 and have two sons.
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(News report from Issue No. 234, published on June 4 2015)
DEC. 3 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) said it had lent Kazakhstan’s flagship airline Air Astana $14m for the construction of an aircraft maintenance facility. The new facility will be built at Astana International Airport. Air Astana is the region’s biggest airline. Britain’s BAE Systems owns a 49% stake. Samruk-Kazyna owns 51%.
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(News report from Issue No. 260, published on Dec. 11 2015)
