FEB. 22 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Uzbekistan released opposition activist and journalist Muhammad Bekjanov from prison after 18 years. Mr Bekjanov, considered one of the longest serving political prisoners in the world, was sent to prison in 1999 after a trial linked to a car bomb in the capital, Tashkent. His supporters have always said that he is innocent.
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(News report from Issue No. 318, published on Feb.24 2017)
FEB. 21 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Supporters of jailed Kazakh journalist Zhanbolat Mamay said that he has been beaten in prison. Mr Mamay was arrested earlier this year for alleged financial crimes and for being linked to exiled opposition leader Mukhtar Ablyazov. He was the editor of Tribuna, one of the few genuinely independent newspaper left in Kazakhstan. Opposition groups have accused Kazakhstan of cracking down on the media.
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(News report from Issue No. 318, published on Feb.24 2017)
TBILISI, FEB. 19 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — An estimated 10,000 people protested in central Tbilisi against what they said was the attempted silencing of TV channel Rustavi-2’s anti-government rhetoric.
The demonstration was one of the biggest for several years in the Georgian capital and was a reminder that street-level politics are still a potent force in Georgia.
Rustavi-2, one of Georgia’s most popular TV channels and a supporter of the opposition UNM party, suspended broadcasts for two days before the demonstration.
Zaal Udumashvili, deputy director of Rustavi-2 and anchor of its main news program, told the demonstrators that the fight to save it was a fight to save democracy itself.
“Rustavi-2 is back on the air from now on, which means that the channel will never go off again,” he was quoted by media as saying.
“If Rustavi-2 falls, this will not be the fall of only one television. This will mean that there will be no space left for covering your problems, for bringing your problems to the entire country.”
Rustavi-2 is the focus of an ownership struggle currently playing out in the Supreme Court. The protesters said that the Georgian Dream government was trying to seize the channel from Giorgi and Levan Karamanishvili, associates of former president Mikheil Saakashvili, through businessman Kibar Khalvashi. Mr Khalvashi is a former co-owner of Rustavi-2 who says his stake in the TV channel was taken from him illegally.
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(News report from Issue No. 318, published on Feb.24 2017)
FEB. 22 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said that its journalist Khudayberdy Allashov and his mother, Kurbantach Arazmedova, had been released from prison and given a three-year suspended sentence for carrying chewing tobacco. Human rights activists cheered their release from prison, as they feared that a custodial sentence was likely. Under the terms of his release, though, Allashov is banned from using communication equipment, making it impossible for him to return to work as a journalist.
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(News report from Issue No. 318, published on Feb.24 2017)
FEB. 13 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Almaty ordered Zhanolat Mamay, editor of the independent Tribuna newspaper, to spend two months in pre-trial detention as police investigate accusations that he helped launder money stolen by exiled Kazakh opposition leader and former chairman of the now defunct BTA Bank Mukhtar Ablyazov. Mr Mamay’s supporters have said he has been detained because of a crackdown by the authorities against the media.
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(News report from Issue No. 317, published on Feb.17 2017)
FEB. 3 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Well-established journalists in Tajikistan are leaving the country as the media environment worsens, the London-based media NGO Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) said. After a series of interviews, it said that it knew of at least 20 journalists who had quit journalism in Tajikistan in the past year, including six with IWPR training. IWPR blamed a combination of state pressure and economic insecurity for the drop out.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 9 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Kazakhstan are chipping away at personal liberties with their increasingly aggressive crackdown on social media sites, Amnesty International said in a statement. It said independent media has been destroyed and that until recently Facebook and other social media sites had played an important role in facilitating political discourse. Now, though Amnesty said, the authorities were tracking people’s comments and using them in court to incriminate them.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 8 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Belarus extradited Russian travel blogger Alexander Lapshin to Baku to face charges of supporting Armenia- backed rebels in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Free speech activists have said thatMr Lapshin’s arrest and extradition are symptomatic of Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev’s authoritarian tendencies.
And in rare move, Russia released a statement criticising the blogger’s arrest.
Mr Lapshin is a relatively popular blogger who is better known for whimsical asides about his travel exploits and his travel pictures rather than his political musings. He travels on three different passports — Russian, Ukrainian and Israeli — and reportedly travelled to Nagorno-Karabakh in 2011 and 2012.
It is not clear why Mr Laphin’s trips to the region would have upset Azerbaijan and its authorities so much.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 10 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Police in Kazakhstan arrested Zhanbolat Mamay, the editor of the independent Tribuna newspaper, on corruption charges, once again worrying free speech activists . The press in Kazakhstan has been steadily eroded with a series of high-profile arrest of journalists last year. Tribuna and Mr Mamay had been regarded as one of the few remaining independent news outlets. Free speech activists have described the crackdown as a systematic effort to muzzle critics of the government.
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(News report from Issue No. 316, published on Feb. 10 2017)
FEB. 2 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Russia has complained to Belarus about the extradition of a Russian- Israeli blogger to Azerbaijan, media reported. Azerbaijan requested the arrest and extradition of Alexander Lapshin because it said that he had visited the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh illegally. The complaint and ensuing row could upset Russia-Azerbaijan relations.
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
