MARCH 10 2015 (The Bulletin) – Muhammad-Sodiq Muhammad-Yusuf, Uzbekistan’s most prominent Islamic scholar, died aged 63. Reports said he died while playing basketball in Tashkent. Muhammad-Sodiq was influential because he was Uzbekistan’s first post-independence religious leader.
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
MARCH 11 2015 (The Bulletin) – Azerbaijani officials have asked their EU counterparts to speed up the authorisation of Azerbaijan’s purchase in 2013 of a 66% stake in DESFA, Greece’s gas pipeline network, for $423m. The European Commission is investigating the potential takeover for any breeches of competition rules.
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
MARCH 11 2015 (The Bulletin) – Pakistan’s President Mamnoon Hussain was due to fly into Baku for talks with Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev. Media said that several bilateral deals would be signed. Pakistan is looking for extra energy resources and views Central Asia and the South Caucasus as potential suppliers.
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
MARCH 10 2015 (The Bulletin) – Japan has made a grant of about $4.2m available to the Tbilisi city government to purchase electric buses, media reported. The deal is important because it shows Japan’s continued interested in developing links with the region and Tbilisi’s drive to update its public transport system.
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
MARCH 6 2015 (The Bulletin) – A military court in Kazakhstan sentenced Nurlan Zholamanov, the former head of Kazakhstan’s border forces, to 11 years in prison for corruption. Zholamanov’s imprisonment is one of the biggest cases in the government’s high-profile anti-corruption drive.
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
GHARMEN/Tajikistan, March 11 2015 (The Bulletin) – Mubinjon Asimov and his two sons are among the few remaining survivors of the Yaghnobi people in Tajikistan.
“We lost not only our homes, our fields and our mountains. Our whole culture was annihilated,” said Asimov, an elderly herder still living in Gharmen, a small settlement of just over a dozen inhabitants in the Yaghnobi valley in southern Tajikistan.
He was talking about repression by the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
“We couldn’t use our native language in public and by the time we were allowed to come back to this valley only a few of us were still able to speak Yaghnobi,” he said.
The Yaghnobis are believed to be the heirs of Sogdia, a civilisation that stood against Alexander the Great during one of his last campaigns in the 4th century BC.
To the eyes of the casual visitor life here appears to follow the same old rhythms of a timeless past. Behind this romantic façade of mountainous bucolic isolation hides, however, a dramatic history of ethnic cleansing, persecutions and forced emigration.
The first wave of repressions came during Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930s and led to many Yaghnobis being exiled, but it was only in the late 1950s that a systematic mass displacement of the whole Yaghnobi population was forcibly carried out.
Under the pretext of danger from landslides, the Soviet authorities evacuated the population from the valley to the hot plains of northern Tajikistan.
Sociologists have warned the Yagnobi people, culture and languages may die out.
Asimov agreed but now he said that the state wasn’t doing enough. “Now the state is all but nonexistent and not a single kopek has been invested in this valley,” he said. “Our recent past has been a dark one, but our future looks even bleaker.”
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
MARCH 10 2015 (The Bulletin) – Police in Kazakhstan detained Saken Baikenov, who campaigned against Russian Proton rocket launches from the Baikonur station, for hate crimes. Proton rockets, which are used for commercial missions, have exploded and polluted the countryside. Rights groups have questioned Kazakhstan’s commitment to free speech.
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
MARCH 9 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Remittances to Armenia, a vital part of its economy, were 40% lower in January 2015 compared to January 2015, media reported quoting the Central Bank.
Like other countries in the Central Asia/South Caucasus region, Armenia’s economy is partially reliant on workers in Russia sending back cash for their families back in Yerevan and other Armenian towns and villages.
But the Russian economy has dipped over the past 12 months because of Western imposed sanctions and a sharp drop in global energy prices.
This has had a large knock-on effect. Armenia’s economy is especially tied-in to Russia’s financial health.
The data shows Armenia’s dependency on Russia in more detail. Total remittances to Armenia were $72m in January, compared to $122 in the same period in 2013. Of this, the amount from Russia fell 56% to $38m from $87m in 2015.
Economists have been lining up to say that economic growth in Armenia this year will measure around zero, below even the government’s estimates of 2% growth.
The ARKA news agency quoted economist Vilen Khachatryan.
“Given the strong dependence of Armenia on the Russian market we expect the negative developments in Russia and our region will lead to a reduction in turnover and unemployment among Armenian labour migrants in Russia which will in turn affect Armenia’s economy,” he said.
“If Russia fails to get out of the current crisis, Armenia’s economic growth this year will be zero.”
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
MARCH 11 2015 (The Bulletin) – Oil production in Azerbaijan is likely to drop by around 4% this year to 806,000 barrels per day, media reported quoting senior officials at state energy company SOCAR.
This is more bad news for Azerbaijan which is largely reliant on oil and gas sales for its revenues.
The fall in oil prices has already hit Azerbaijan which has cut government spending and devalued its manat currency.
The main problem for Azerbaijan’s oil production is that output at the BP-led Azeri, Chirag and Guneshli (ACG) is falling. ACG makes up the vast majority of Azerbaijan’s current oil output and only it could knock overall production so substantially.
BP has tried to stem the oil production decline but with limited success. Azerbaijan has put BP under increased pressure to find a solution, so for a senior SOCAR figure to brief the media so early in the year that ACG is likely to miss its targets is telling. Perhaps, Azerbaijan is trying to put BP under more pressure.
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
MARCH 7 2015 (The Bulletin) – Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a Japanese company, has won a tender to build a chemical complex in central Uzbekistan, media reported quoting the Uzbek government press service. Reports said that the complex, which will produce ammonia, will cost around $1b to build. Ammonia is used in fertiliser.
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
