JULY 12 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov sacked the country’s deputy defence minister four days after a blast at an arms depot in a town near Ashgabat killed scores of people. The government has said 15 people died but the opposition website chrono-tm.org said up to 200 people may have been killed.
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(News report from Issue No. 49, published on July 20 2011)
JUNE 30 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Russian gas monopoly Gazprom appointed Timur Kulibayev, the favoured son-in-law of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, as one of its directors. Mr Kulibayev was appointed head of Kazakhstan’s $80b sovereign wealth fund earlier this year.
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(News report from Issue No. 47, published on July 6 2011)
JUNE 30 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyz parliamentarians set Oct. 30 as the date for a presidential election, the first under a constitution which shifted power from the president to Parliament. Roza Otunbayeva has been interim president since a revolution in April last year but has said she will not stand in the election.
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(News report from Issue No. 47, published on July 6 2011)
JUNE 23 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Police in Georgia accused former defence minister Irakli Okruashvili of plotting a coup in May, media reported. Mr Okrushavili had been a close ally of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili but he fled the country in 2007 shortly after setting up an opposition party. He now lives in France.
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(News report from Issue No. 46, published on June 28 2011)
JUNE 6 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – The death of Abkhazia’s President, Sergey Bagapsh, on May 29 removed a steadying influence on the volatile province and forces both Russia and Georgia to re-consider their strategy towards it.
A surprise visit by Russian PM Vladimir Putin to Bagapsh’s funeral in Abkhazia five days later underlined just how important control of the breakaway Georgian region is to Russia.
Abkhazia has been a de facto independent state since a war against Georgia after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. Russia recognised Abkhazia — and South Ossetia, another rebel Georgian region — as an independent state in 2008 after it also fought Georgia in a brief war.
Bagapsh was considered a competent technocrat capable of uniting different factions and able to balance Russia’s interests — geo-political, military, economic — in the region with more nationalistic local politicians.
He had been president of Abkhazia since 2005. According to the constitution, Abkhazia now has three months to hold a presidential election.
There are three main candidates to replace Bagapsh: vice-President Aleksandr Ankvab, PM Sergey Shamba and Raul Khadjimba, Bagapsh’s former opponent. A power vacuum in Abkhazia could pull in Georgia which still hopes to reclaim the region and South Ossetia.
This tension between Russia and Georgia over Abkhazia is never far away. On June 3 Georgia said it had arrested two residents of Abkhazia for trying to plant a bomb on behalf of Russia.
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(News report from Issue No. 43, published on June 6 2011)
JUNE 1 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Russian gas giant Gazprom nominated Timur Kulibayev, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, to be one of its directors, media reported. Mr Kulibayev has become increasingly powerful. He is considered a potential successor for Mr Nazarbayev and this year he became head of Kazakhstan’s $80b sovereign wealth fund.
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(News report from Issue No. 43, published on June 6 2011)
MAY 25/26 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – In the worst street violence in Georgia since a state of emergency in November 2007, police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at anti- government protesters blocking the main street in Tbilisi. The government said protesters had started the violence, the protesters said it was unprovoked. A car speeding away from the protest hit and killed two people.
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(News report from Issue No. 42, published on May 30 2011)
MAY 22 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Security forces fired rubber bullets to disperse anti-government demonstrators in central Tbilisi, some of whom had attacked plain-clothed police with sticks during the worst street violence in Georgia since a state of emergency in 2007. The day before, about 6,000 protesters had called for President Mikheil Saakashvili to resign.
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(News report from Issue No. 41, published on May 24 2011)
MAY 15 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – A parliamentary committee in Kyrgyzstan cleared first deputy PM Omurbek Babanov of corruption, media reported, giving the fragile government coalition a boost. Mr Babanov had stepped down a month ago while the corruption charges were being investigated.
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(News report from Issue No. 40, published on May 17 2011)
MAY 6 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – In a case that highlighted the porous border controls in Central Asia, Kazakh PM Karim Massimov said he had sacked the head of Kazakhstan’s customs agency after security forces broke up a smuggling ring which had bribed officials to operate freely across a border with China for five years.
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(News report from Issue No. 39, published on May 9 2011)
