AUG. 27 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary-General and Georgian Prime Minister Irakly Garibashvili opened a NATO training base outside Tbilisi, a move that Russia has said it would interpret as antagonistic. Georgia wants to join NATO but, although relations have become closer, NATO has rebuffed its membership so far.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 245, published on Aug. 28 2015)
ALMATY/Kazakhstan, AUG. 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Reports from Uzbekistan said that Marinika Babanazarova, the curator and de facto defender of the world famous Savitsky Collection in Nukus, Uzbekistan, has been sacked.
Ms Babanazarova has held the job for over 30 years. She took over from Igor Savitsky himself and considered it her duty to keep the collection together despite pressure to split it up.
She confirmed to the New York Times that she had been sacked. Earlier reports said that the Uzbek authorities had fired her for stealing pictures and making forgeries, accusations she denied.
Relations between Ms Babanazarova and the Uzbek authorities have generally been strained. In 2011, they blocked her from travelling to New York to see the premiere of a film about the collection.
Savitsky was a Soviet archaeologist and painter who collected, often at great personal risk, banned avant-garde art. He travelled across the Soviet Union to collect the art, from dissident artists or from their relatives, and bring it back to his base in the remote city of Nukus in western Uzbekistan. There he was able to avoid the attention of the authorities.
The collection of roughly 90,000 pieces only achieved international fame after his death and the subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. It has also put Nukus, a scruffy town once classed as a secret because of its chemical weapons production, on the international art trail.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 245, published on Aug. 28 2015)
AUG. 27 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmen leader Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov travelled to Kabul to meet with Afghan president Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, an important signifier that he wants to play a greater role in improving his neighbour’s stability. Turkmenistan has developed a handful of high profile projects with Afghanistan, including the TAPI pipeline that will pump gas to India.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 245, published on Aug. 28 2015)
AUG. 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Riot police used tear gas to disperse a crowd of dozens of young men in the provincial Azerbaijani town of Mingachevir, a rare display of public anger and frustration in Azerbaijan. The crowd had been calling for the head of the local police force to resign after a 22-year-old Azerbaijani man died in police custody two days earlier.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 245, published on Aug. 28 2015)
AUG. 27 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) signed a deal with the Kazakh government to host the first internationally-controlled bank of low-enriched uranium, an agreement that will boost Kazakhstan’s global stature. The idea is that countries can ask to tap into the supply for fuel for their power stations and prevent any unilateral nuclear build up.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 245, published on Aug. 28 2015)
AUG. 25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajikistan has once again restricted access to Facebook and YouTube, two of the country’s most popular social networking sites, users said. The Tajik government has been cracking down on opposition figures over the past few weeks, a strategy that may be linked to the social media restrictions.
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(News report from Issue No. 245, published on Aug. 28 2015)
AUG. 20/21 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – China’s state-linked Sinopec agreed to buy the half of Kazakhstan-based Caspian Investments Resources (CIR) for $1.09b that it didn’t already own from Russia’s Lukoil, media reported. The price is lower than the $1.2b initially struck in 2014 and reflects the lower oil price. CIR used to be called Nelson Resources.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 245, published on Aug. 28 2015)
AUG. 20 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Six members of the UN’s Human Rights Council said that a trial that sentenced human rights defenders Leyla and Arif Yunus to jail for 8-1/2 and 7 years for various financial crimes, was politically motivated. Their intervention was just the latest in a series of criticism of the authorities in Azerbaijan by Western rights groups.
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(News report from Issue No. 244, published on Aug. 21 2015)
AUG. 19 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The authorities in Uzbekistan said they had arrested nine more people in connection to financial crimes linked to Gulnara Karimova, the eldest daughter of Uzbek president Islam Karimov, RFE/RL reported. Until March 2014 Ms Karimova was one of the most powerful people in Uzbekistan. She has been under house since then.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 244, published on Aug. 21 2015)
AUG. 20 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Shares in Kazakh copper miner KAZ Minerals, formerly called Kazakhmys, rose by 20% on the London stock exchange immediately after Kazakhstan’s government said that it would allow its tenge currency to free-float. The announcement knocked 23% off the value of the tenge, giving exporters a much needed boost.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 244, published on Aug. 21 2015)
