FEB. 10 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — People in Turkmenistan prepared to vote in a presidential election set for Feb. 12 that observers said incumbent president Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov would win easily. Human rights and free media activists in Europe and the US have used the election to highlight what they have said is a lack of basic human rights in Turkmenistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
TBILISI, FEB. 8 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Georgia agreed to forge ahead with a plan to develop a property register using technology that supports the bitcoin virtual currency.
The deal is a gamble for Georgia, which wants to promote itself as a forward-looking and technologically savvy country as bitcoin has been largely discredited, partly because of its association with illegal activities.
The deal that Georgia has struck is an extension of a deal it entered into last year with Bitfury, which engineers the blockchain system used to trade bitcoins.
Although best-known for its association with bitcoin, Bitfury has engineered different uses for its blockchain system which effectively allows people to convert an asset into a certificate that can be traded digitally. The blockchain system takes its name from the technique of recording transactions across multiple computers, forming a chain that would be broken by any attempted fraud.
Papuna Ugrekhelidze, the chairman of the Georgian National Agency of Public Registry (NAPR), said that this was the first time that a national government had signed a deal to use Bitfury’s technology.
“The NAPR will use the world’s latest technology [to] guarantee safe transactions, transparency and flexibility. The process is electronic, in which human agents will not interfere, ensuring its security,” media quoted him as saying.
The deal represents a massive overhaul of Georgia’s property registration system and Mr Ugrekhelidze said that using Bitfury’s technology would reduce the cost of updating the register by 95%.
He didn’t give away any of the specifics of the contract that Bitfury has signed with Georgia.
This is the culmination of a process that started in April last year when Bitfury and Georgia began a trial process. Previously, in 2015, Bitfury said it would invest $100m into a technology park in Tbilisi. It also operates a data centre in Gori, 70km from Tbilisi.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 10 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — >> So what has happened? I’ve read that a commercial flight has flown between Dushanbe and Tashkent
>> Yes, that’s right. This was the first commercial flight between the Tajik and Uzbek capital since 1992. In 1992, Tajikistan was just tipping over into a civil war when commercial flights were scrapped but they were never re-instated after the war petered out a few years later. By this time Emomali Rakhmon had secured himself as the president of Tajikistan, a position he still holds. Uzbekistan was then ruled by Islam Karimov, who died in September last year. The two men loathed each other, Karimov was notoriously cantankerous and Rakhmon is quarrelsome.
>> So, the row was entirely personal?
>> Much of it was but there was also a macro-political and economic angle too. Tajikistan has long-planned to build a dam at Rogun in the Pamir Mountains. This was a Soviet-era plan that never moved from the drawing board into reality. Tajikistan, though, needed to generate more electricity and has been looking for backers for years. And this irritated Uzbekistan and Karimov who argued that the dam would damage water flows downstream where Uzbek cotton fields needed to be irrigated. At times the row became so heated that it threatened to spill over into war that may have dragged in neighbours.
>> What has changed?
>> Karimov’s death in September changed Uzbekistan’s foreign policy outlook. The new president Shavkat Mirziyoyev has been far more positive in promoting relations with Uzbekistan’s neighbours. This has included Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The resumption of a commercial flight between the two capitals may feel a bit of a token gesture but it is actually a very significant step forward for bilateral relations. Rakhmon actually invited Mirziyoyev to Dushanbe for a bilateral meeting last month. This was something that would have been unimaginable under Karimov.
>> And now that flights have resumed, what can we expect?
>> The first flight was operated by Somon Air, a Tajik airline. It is likely that the airline will look to set up a regular service between the two cities. And just making that link, just having it there, is an important part of the heeling process for the region. It’s blighted by complex borders, thanks Stalin, and disparate pockets of ethnic groups, making travel links important. This is especially so between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Many of the people living in Uzbekistan are ethnic Tajiks. Previously, to travel between the two cities, people had to make tortuous road trips that would take days.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 7 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The value of Kazakhstan’s exports fell by 20% in 2016, the Central Bank said, reflecting just how heavily the drop in oil prices has hit the country. It said that exports dropped to $37.2b. In 2016, the average price of a barrel of Brent oil was $42.80. In 2015 it had been $50.80. This year, oil prices have hovered around $55/barrel.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
BISHKEK, FEB. 8 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyzstan’s finance ministry laid off 220 employees to try and ease costs so that it can battle through a deep, and long, economic downturn.
Senior officials from the ministry defended the layoffs as part of a so- called “optimisation process” but in reality this was a simple cost cutting exercise and more evidence that the Kyrgyz economy is under strain. The cuts were aimed at low and mid ranking staff, often in regional offices.
Finance minister Adylbek Kasymaliev said: “As a result of optimisation, we will save between 30m and 60m som ($435,000 to $870,000).”
Kyrgyzstan is suffering from a recession in Russia, linked to the collapse in oil prices, which has destroyed jobs for migrants. Along with Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan is one of the world’s most remittance-dependent countries.
Independent expert and head of the public council under the ministry of finance, Bakyt Satybekov, told the Conway Bulletin that the finance ministry, and other public bodies, had become bloated.
“It is good that the government optimised personnel at the ministry of finance and its subordinate authorities, it should have done this a long time ago to avoid duplication (of jobs) and to save money,” he said.
Mr Satybekov’s job lies outside central government. He is charged with monitoring the performance of the finance ministry.
Kyrgyzstan is not alone in slashing budgets and costs. Georgia has laid off mid-ranking Georgian army officers and Azerbaijan has slashed various social projects, such as a rural internet roll-out.
On the streets of Bishkek the layoffs were greeted with wry bewilderment. Surely, most people that a Conway Bulletin correspondent spoke to said, it would be better to fire the heads of the departments.
“It would be better to fire heads of some departments and their deputies in the ministry who secure their places for years rather than firing ordinary people from the regions,” said Jeenbek, a Bishkek resident.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 9 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The United States warned Azerbaijan that it shouldn’t try to force the closure of the OSCE office in Yerevan, the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website reported. It said that Azerbaijan may be trying to close Europe’s main security and democracy watchdog after it voted against extending its mission because it was based in Yerevan. The OSCE is heavily involved with monitoring a ceasefire around Nagorno-Karabakh, disputed between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Azerbaijan closed the OSCE office in Baku in 2015.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 3 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Baku has applied to host the 2019 UEFA Champions League final, one of the world’s most-watched sporting events, at its Olympic Stadium. Baku’s Olympic Stadium is already one of the designated hosts for the 2020 European Football Championship. If Baku did win the right to host the 2019 UEFA Champions League final, Azerbaijan would be the first country to host it without ever having had a team compete in it.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 7 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — WorldRemit, a money wire service, said that it had extended its services to Armenia and Kazakhstan as well as Ukraine and Belarus, through a partnership with the Russian payment system Contact. Previously, London-based WorldRemit has concentrated its services in southeast Asia and Africa. It said that WorldRemit will operate 330 service points in Kazakhstan and 65 in Armenia. Remittances are a vital plank of the economies of Central Asia and the South Caucasus.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
BATUMI/Georgia, FEB. 3 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Georgia’s National Centre for Education Quality Enhancement (NCEQE) stripped the Batumi Refaiddin Şahin Friendship School, operated by a Gulen-affiliated group, of its operating licence, triggering accusations of playing politics.
The school was opened in 1994 and was one of the first Gulen-affiliated school to open in Georgia.Officially, its license is now being revoked due to violations of the student’s enrolment code but others have said that the Georgian government is bowing to pressure from Turkey which blames the Gulen movement for plotting a coup last year.
Elguja Davitadze, director of the Batumi Refaiddin Şahin Friendship School, said the authorities appeared determined to close down the school. “Georgia’s Education Ministry told us to abolish the Turkish section (of the school’s intake) if we wanted to keep our accreditation. We agreed to abolish the Turkish sector gradually, by transferring Turkish students to the Georgian sector, but the ministry said this was a violation and revoked our accreditation,” he was quoted by local media as saying.
He also said education inspectors had been hovering around the school for months, carrying out inspections.
If the Batumi Refaiddin Şahin Friendship School is closed down it will, possibly, be the first Gulen-run school in the country to close since Turkey started putting pressure on its neighbours in Central Asia and the South Caucasus to shut them. In many countries, the Gulen schools of the 1990s are still some of the best.
Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have so far refused to close them while Azerbaijan, one of Turkey closest neighbours, has appeared eager to please.
Shota Utiashvili, a Senior Fellow at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, said that although the Turkish economy is much larger than Georgia’s, Ankara doesn’t control Georgia.
“It is not a hierarchical relationship, it is a partnership and both parts get a lot of benefits from this relationship,” he said.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 6 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Tajik president Emomali Rakhmon travelled to Qatar for a two day state visit with the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Mr Rakhmon has said that he wants to attract more investment from Qatar and other Arab countries in Tajikistan’s tourism and hydropower sectors.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
