OCT. 4-6 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – A visit by the mayor of a French town to the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, controlled by Armenia-backed rebels but claimed by Azerbaijan, triggered an official complaint by the Azerbaijani government. Tensions are increasingly fraught around the Nagorno-Karabakh border zones.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
OCT. 2 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Kyrgyz government said it wanted to impose price controls on coal ahead of the winter season. Coal prices jump up during the harsh winter months in Kyrgyzstan. Analysts, though, have cast doubt on the Kyrgyz government’s ability to control prices.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
OCT. 6 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Visa free travel for citizens of 10 countries will be extended by three months to Oct. 15 2015, said the head of the Kazakh state tourism board, Rashid Shaikenov (Oct. 6). Mr Shaikenov also said the experiment, which started in July, had increased tourism by 13%.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
OCT. 2 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmenistan’s president Kurgbanguly Berdymukhamedov ended a meeting of the leaders of the countries that border the Caspian Sea by saying that it was their right to build a pipeline across the inland water, media reported.
The meeting — which included the leaders of Russia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Iran and Azerbaijan — broke up without any major deals although they did agree not to allow NATO forces into the region.
Perhaps the most important single element of the meeting, though, were reports from Astrakhan, the venue in Russia for the meeting, that appeared to push the possibility of a sub-Caspian Sea gas pipeline nearer.
This has been touted before but has never been put into action. The cost has previously been considered too great but now, with demand for energy increasing from Europe, it may make business sense to build the pipeline.
There is also the extra added consideration that most of the infrastructure needed to pump the gas on from Azerbaijan to Europe has already been built or is scheduled to be built soon.
This week Azerbaijan’s president welcomed the deputy PM of Turkmenistan to Baku. Last week the head of Azerbaijan’s energy company SOCAR was in Ashgabat. There may be some reason behind all this activity. One to watch.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
OCT. 6 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbekistan has drawn up plans to raise groups of volunteer border guards to help the official border guards division stop people crossing borders illegally, media reported. Uzbekistan is notoriously zealous about guarding its border areas. It has had border disputes with most of its neighbours.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
OCT. 8 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Against the backdrop of worsening security in the Middle East and apparently without a trace or irony, Uzbek president Islam Karimov used a speech at the UN in New York to promote Uzbekistan as a safe tourist, media reported. Uzbekistan sells itself as the centre of the old Silk Road.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
OCT. 6 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Accusations that Azerbaijan is helping Israel spy on Iran are nonsense, Rafael Harpaz, the Israeli ambassador in Baku, was quoted as saying. Israel and Azerbaijan have grown increasingly close over the last few years. Iran has also accused Azerbaijan of acting as a launch site for Israeli drones.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
OCT. 7 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s finance minister, Nodar Khaduri, said that he wanted to increase the monthly pension pay out next year by around 5%. Unlike many of its neighbours whose economies are suffering because of a slow-down in Russia’s sanction-hit economy, Georgia is experiencing something of a boom.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
OCT. 29 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmenistan appointed its first ambassador to Poland. Toyly Atayev, already the Turkmen ambassador in Berlin, will cover both Germany and Poland. The decision to appoint an official ambassador to Poland, even if he is based in Berlin, perhaps shows that Turkmenistan is eager to boost its diplomatic reach.
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(News report from Issue No. 207, published on Nov. 5 2014)
OCT. 31 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – A 40% drop in the value of the rouble this year is placing extreme pressure on Russia’s main trade partners, including Kazakhstan, experts have said.
Banking analysts have said that it is increasingly likely the Kazakh Central Bank will have to follow the rouble and devalue its own tenge currency for the second time this year.
The Tengrinews website quoted Raimbek Batalov, director at Raimbek Group, as saying that the fluctuating value of the tenge was hurting exporters. Kazakh goods are now far too expensive for their main export market — Russia.
And reports have emerged from across Kazakhstan that people are rushing to banks to sell their tenge before an imminent devaluation.
Falling oil prices and sanctions imposed by the West have pressured the rouble while the Kazakh Central Bank has insisted on keeping the tenge pegged to the US dollar since its 20% devaluation in February.
Luca Anceschi, professor of Central Asian Studies at the University of Glasgow explained that the rouble was introduced in 1993 to reduce Kazakhstan’s dependency on the rouble. Instead, he said, the opposite has happened.
“The policies pursued since 1993, if anything, have de facto re-established such dependency,” he said.
Increased economic integration with the Eurasian Economic Union gives Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev even less room to manoeuvre.
A second devaluation, to keep pace with Russia’s currency slide, must be approaching fast despite the Central Bank’s denials.
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(News report from Issue No. 207, published on Nov. 5 2014)
