MAY 20 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — KEGOC, a state-owned electricity distributor in Kazakhstan, said it would be open to exporting electricity to Afghanistan and Pakistan through the CASA-1000 line. The CASA-1000 project is scheduled for completion by 2020.
ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 282, published on May 27 2016)
MAY 22/23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Chinese President Xi Jingping will make his first visit to Azerbaijan later this year, a major boost for Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev who has appeared an increasingly fringe figure on the international stage after the arrests of dozens of critics and the outbreak of violence in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Six months after Mr Aliyev visited Beijing, a delegation from China, led by Presidential Special Envoy Meng Jianzhu, arrived in Baku to prepare the way for Mr Xi.
It will be his first visit to the South Caucasus, underlining China’s interest in the region.
During the meeting with President Aliyev on May 22, Mr Meng reiterated his country’s interest to expand ties with Azerbaijan, particularly in law enforcement, security and cyber crime. The following day, Azerbaijan and China signed a memorandum of cooperation in the security sector.
Zohrab Ismayilov, an Azerbaijani independent economist and analyst, told the Conway Bulletin that Mr Aliyev has grown increasingly interested in China as Azerbaijan’s economy has been hard hit following the sharp drop in oil prices.
“Mr Aliyev is trying to find a third reliable partner and continues to manoeuvre between Russia and the West,” he said.
“Also, the government assumes that Chinese investments will be politically less risky than investments from Moscow or the West as Beijing does not have a strong geopolitical interest in the region.”
China became one of Azerbaijan’s top ten trading partners for the first time in 2015 with trade worth $565m. This compares to $2.8b of trade with Russia, its top partner.
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(News report from Issue No. 282, published on May 27 2016)
MAY 20 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s president, and Serzh Sargsyan, Armenia’s president, agreed to maintain a ceasefire over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region where violent clashes erupted at the beginning of April (May 16).
This was the first time the two presidents had met since four days of clashes killed dozens of people and alarmed international policymakers.
Diplomats from the US, Russia and France, including US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, also participated in the meeting in Vienna.
“The Presidents reiterated their commitment to the ceasefire and the peaceful settlement of the conflict,” the mediators said in a joint statement.
Mr Aliyev and Mr Sargsyan agreed to meet again in June to track the process of the settlement of the conflict.
The importance of the meeting was not the bland statement but the fact that the two presidents were already meeting and talking. The violence had threatened to destabilise the South Caucasus region, which hosts vital pipelines pumping gas to Europe and borders both Russia and Iran, worrying international leaders and policymakers.
Nagorno-Karabakh is officially part of Azerbaijan, but also home to a large Armenian population. An estimated 30,000 people died in fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s. Only a shaky 1994 UN-brokered ceasefire held the peace.
An Armenia-backed army now controls Nagorno-Karabakh, although Azerbaijan has also said it will retake the region.
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(News report from Issue No. 281, published on May 20 2016)
MAY 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Thousands of Hazara, a minority group in Afghanistan, marched through Kabul to protest against the re-routing of a section of a power line that will transmit electricity from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The protests shows just how sensitive the issue of routing various power lines and pipelines through Afghanistan has become as they generate income for communities. As well as this power line, Afghanistan will also host a power line dubbed
CASA-1000 which will send power to Pakistan from Tajikistan and the TAPI pipeline which will pump Turkmen gas to India
The government has said a route change for the Turkmenistan-Pakistan power line would cut costs.
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(News report from Issue No. 281, published on May 20 2016)
MAY 12 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Russia’s ambassador-at-large for Caspian affairs, Igor Bratchikov said that the Kremlin will not allow the construction of any projects across the Caspian Sea that are not sanctioned by all littoral states. “Unilateral action on construction of Trans-Caspian pipelines is inadmissible,” Mr Bratchikov said. Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan have discussed for years the possibility of building a trans-Caspian gas pipeline.
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(News report from Issue No. 280, published on May 13 2016)
MAY 9 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Chinese companies said they will invest around $1.9b in Kazakhstan’s agriculture sector over the next few years, in an effort to boost trade and cooperation through its Silk Road Initiative. Gulmira Isayeva, Kazakhstan’s deputy minister of agriculture, told the FT that Chinese investment will help increase domestic production.
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(News report from Issue No. 280, published on May 13 2016)
APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan has sold 218m kWh of electricity to Kyrgyzstan in 2016 at a price of 9 tenge ($0.03) per kWh from the Ekibastuz power station, the Kazakh government said. Kazakhstan earned around $6m from the sale. Kyrgyzstan is a net importer of electricity from neighbouring countries due to chronic water shortages in recent years. Last year, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan exported around 400m kWh to Kyrgyzstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 279, published on May 6 2016)
APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov invited Qatar’s business community to invest in the construction of the Turkmenistan- Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline. The first investment agreement was signed by the consortium shareholders in April 2015. The project is considered pivotal in connecting South and Central Asia as well as for securing the long-term future of Afghanistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 279, published on May 6 2016)
MAY 4 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan’s ministry of agriculture said it has banned imports of potatoes from Kyrgyzstan following an outbreak of Globodera rostochiensis, a pest that the Kazakh authorities found in several imported shipments. The Kazakh government sent back around 1,000 tonnes of potatoes to Kyrgyzstan citing international trade agreements between the two countries.
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(News report from Issue No. 279, published on May 6 2016)
MAY 5 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov completed a visit to Saudi Arabia, where he performed the Hajj to Medina and Mecca. In Saudi Arabia, Mr Berdymukhamedov spoke to the head of Islamic Development Bank, Ahmad Mohamed Ali Al-Madani, about potential investments in Turkmenistan’s infrastructure projects.
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(News report from Issue No. 279, published on May 6 2016)
