MARCH 27 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmen president Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov said on national TV that he wanted to create two new political parties, an agrarian party and a party for entrepreneurs, Reuters reported. Formally this would break the one-party state but in reality Turkmenistan would remain an autocracy.
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(News report from Issue No. 081, published on March 30 2012)
MARCH 2 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – The authorities in western Kazakhstan said they will charge 43 men with being involved in riots that killed at least 16 people on Dec. 16 in the town of Zhanaozen. Several police and officials have also been charged with employing excessive force and using live rounds to quell the riot.
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(News report from Issue No. 080, published on March 8 2012)
MARCH 7 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Armenian public TV broadcaster, APTV, formally pulled out of the Eurovision Song Contest, to be hosted by arch-enemy Azerbaijan. Public broadcasters organise the national entrants for the competition and APTV’s withdrawal means Armenia will not be represented at the contest in May.
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(News report from Issue No. 080, published on March 8 2012)
MARCH 1 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Underlining the surging personality cult surrounding Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the authorities declared an era of happiness to mark his election victory last month, media reported. The official newspaper published a new poem for the occasion.
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(News report from Issue No. 080, published on March 8 2012)
MARCH 1 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Around 1,000 people rioted in Quba, a town of 40,000 people in the north of Azerbaijan, burning down the house of the regional governor in the worst street violence since President Ilham Aliyev came to power in 2003.
Police in full riot gear resorted to tear gas and rubber bullets to restore order.
The trigger for the violence was a video of the governor chastising the people of Quba for selling their property. The day after the riot, the central government sacked him.
This protest was different from anti-government demonstrations in the past year in Baku. Most of those had been organised on Facebook and the internet by an emerging middle class. The authorities had been ready for them and snuffed them out before they could gather momentum.
There have also been protests by radical religious Azerbaijanis demonstrating against the government’s secular policies. Again these had been pre-arranged and easily dealt with.
In Quba, though, the protest had been spontaneous, non-religious, non-political and violent. All it took was a thoughtless remark by a governor to set alight seething frustration, showing just how fragile the authorities’ control is.
At least in Quba the authorities reached for tear gas and rubber bullets rather than the live rounds that their counterparts in western Kazakhstan used to quell a riot in December.
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(News report from Issue No. 080, published on March 8 2012)
MARCH 5 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Melis Myrzakmatov, a firebrand Kyrgyz nationalist, won re-election as mayor of Osh in nationwide municipal elections in Kyrgyzstan. Many see him as a powerful rival to the central government in Bishkek. Mr Myrzakmatov was mayor of Osh during ethnic violence in 2010 that killed at least 400 people.
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(News report from Issue No. 080, published on March 8 2012)
FEB. 25 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Watched and cajoled by a heavy police presence, around 250 anti-government protesters demonstrated in Almaty. There were probably three or four times more police than protesters. Local media reported smaller opposition rallies in Astana and Uralsk in the northwest.
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(News report from Issue No. 079, published on March 1 2012)
MARCH 6 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – The younger brother of deposed Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiyev has escaped from prison by walking out of a hospital in Bishkek, authorities said. Akhmet Bakiyev, who was imprisoned in Aug. 2011 for 7 years for commanding a group of armed men and stirring ethnic hatred, had been receiving treatment for pneumonia.
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(News report from Issue No. 080, published on March 8 2012)
FEB. 24 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – A group of 22 Armenian singers called on the country to boycott the Eurovision Song contest in Baku in May. Armenia and Azerbaijan are still officially at war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia has applied for a place at Eurovision but has not yet selected its singer.
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(News report from Issue No. 079, published on March 1 2012)
FEB. 28 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – In a rare show of goodwill towards Russia, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said during his state-of-the-nation address that he wants to drop visa requirements for all Russians. In October 2010, Georgia started to allow 90-day visa-free entry to Russians living in the North Caucasus.
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(News report from Issue No. 079, published on March 1 2012)
