FEB. 4 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Uzbekistan temporarily reduced gas supplies to southern Kazakhstan leaving thousands of people in the south Kazakh city of Shymkent unable to heat their homes or cook, local media reported. Uzbek officials said pipeline repair work had caused the gas supply shortage. Central Asia’s energy system is complex and interconnected.
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(News report from Issue No. 170, published on Feb. 5 2014)
JAN. 30 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakh foreign minister Yerlan Idrissov unveiled the government’s new foreign policy paper. This is the first Kazakh foreign affairs policy paper since 2001. Mr Idrissov said that promoting Kazakhstan’s identity and expanding into increasingly further flung countries was the driving principle behind the paper.
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(News report from Issue No. 170, published on Feb. 5 2014)
JAN. 31 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Russia is sending several batteries of their S-300 air defence missiles to Kazakhstan, Russian media quoted Russian defence minister Anatoly Antonov as saying. Russia is trying to increase its control over its neighbours through economic and defence deals. Kazakhstan has signed a defence deal with Russia.
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(News report from Issue No. 170, published on Feb. 5 2014)
FEB. 4 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — If you think it sounds Orwellian, you wouldn’t be alone.
Kazakh officials announced that the Agency for Religion will now vet all religious content before it is run on state-owned media.
The plain speaking chief of the agency, Marat Azilkhanov, explained the move: “It’s a matter of the government’s ideology.”
Or this is just plain censorship, depending on how you look at it.
If truth be known this is the way it’s been going in Kazakhstan for some time.
In 2011, Kazakhstan introduced a law restricting religious activities and gatherings. This was generally regarded as an attempted crackdown on Islamic extremists.
New figures released by Mr Azilkhanov showed that over 500 different religious groups have failed to meet these new requirements and have been banned.
Human rights groups have complained that Kazakhstan uses the new religion laws to get rid of groups it finds troublesome.
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(News report from Issue No. 170, published on Feb. 5 2014)
JAN. 31 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — In its 54-page quarterly inflation report, Kazakhstan’s Central Bank said that between July and September 2013 prices rose by only 0.6% — the slowest rate for a decade. Kazakhstan has previously said that it is focusing on battling slowing inflation.
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(News report from Issue No. 170, published on Feb. 5 2014)
FEB. 3 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — The proportion of savings held in Kazakh tenge dropped to 62.6% in 2013 from 70.2% a year earlier, media quoted Kazakhstan’s Central Bank chief Kairat Kelimbetov as saying. Mr Kelimbetov said that he wanted to boost this figure and reduce the amount of savings held in US dollars.
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(News report from Issue No. 170, published on Feb. 5 2014)
JAN. 23 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s weightlifting federation has said it will tighten checks on its athletes, media reported. The announcement follows the embarrassing disclosure last year that nine weightlifters from Kazakhstan had taken performance enhancing drugs. Kazakhstan has to pay a $500,000 fine for the doping.
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(News report from Issue No. 169, published on Jan. 29 2014)
JAN. 23 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — In a landmark ruling, a judge in the northern Kostanai region of Kazakhstan turned down an appeal by the Kazakh Interior Ministry against damages awarded to a man for torture meted out by police in 2007.
The award to Aleksandr Gerasimov of 2m tenge ($13,000) in damages in November 2013 for his beatings six years earlier and the decision this month to uphold that fine is a rare victory for rights campaigners in Kazakhstan.
It’s doubly important because this was the first case to go before the UN’s Committee Against Torture. It ruled in Mr Gerasimov’s favour in May 2012, setting off the chain of events that led to the police fine.
Courts in sovereign states are supposed to respect the decision of the UN’s 10-person Committee Against Torture but the reality is that they are often ignored. Kazakhstan signed the UN Convention Against Torture in 1998.
The US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty quoted Anastassia Miller, a lawyer with the Kazakh International Bureau for Human Rights and the Rule of Law as saying that Mr Gerasimov’s case set a precedent for Kazakhs looking to redress police torture.
Human rights lobbyists have long campaigned against general police brutality in Kazakhstan. They say that beatings of prisoners to extract confessions is widespread in Kazakh police stations.
In 2007, Mr Gerasimov travelled to a police station to look for his stepson who’d been rounded up after a woman had been killed. His lawyers said that police detained him, accused him of the murder and then beat him and suffocated him with a plastic bag leaving him with lasting health problems.
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(News report from Issue No. 169, published on Jan. 29 2014)
JAN. 27 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Output from the Chevron-led oil project Tengizchevroil rose to 27.1m tonnes in 2013 from 24.2m tonnes in 2012, media reported. The Tengiz oil field is one of the biggest in Kazakhstan and, with the giant Caspian Sea Kashagan oil project stalling, the figures are good news for the Kazakh economy.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 169, published on Jan. 29 2014)
JAN. 23 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — If you thought his work was done in Kazakhstan, think again. The press office of the Kazakh president released photos of Nursultan Nazarbayev and former PM Tony Blair talking and laughing as they discussed the so-called Kazakhstan- 2050 strategy. Mr Blair started working as an adviser to Mr Nazarbayev in 2011.
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(News report from Issue No. 169, published on Jan. 29 2014)
