Tag Archives: politics

UNM MP quits 5 months from Georgia election

MAY 5 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Five months before a parliamentary election, Georgian MP Giorgi Vashadze quit the opposition United National Movement (UNM) party because of what he described as its “closed” leadership style.

Mr Vashadze said he planned to set up his own political party in a move that may draw some support away from the UNM in what is expected to be a tight election battle with the ruling Georgian Dream coalition in October.

“People waited for new initiatives from the UNM, but this has been in vain,” Mr Vashadze told local media.

The UNM had excluded Mr Vashadze from its top ten list of candidates for the election in October. His former colleagues in the UNM accused him of being self-interested.

“Vashadze’s ambition was to be in the top ten of the party list. This was voted down. Quitting the party because of that reason is completely irresponsible,” Sergo Ratiani, MP and UNM’s secretary general, said.

Even so the row will hurt the UNM which is trying to position itself as a government in waiting ahead of the election. It lost power to the Georgian coalition in an election in 2012, having governed Georgia for eight years.

In late April, a poll sponsored by the local branch of the US-funded International Republican Institute showed just how close the election is likely to be. It said that the Georgian Dream party was still the most popular party with support at around

19%. The UNM came in second with 18%, but the surprise was the 12% support for for the Georgian Development Foundation, a movement founded by opera singer Paata Burchuladze.

Around 25% of the people polled, though, said they were either undecided on who they would for or wouldn’t vote at all, setting the scene for what analysts have said will be a close, hard-fought, election.

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(News report from Issue No. 279, published on May 6 2016)

Kyrgyz police raids Centerra

APRIL 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Toronto-listed miner Centerra Gold said that Kyrgyz police have raided the Bishkek offices of its wholly owned Kumtor Gold Company, reigniting a vicious row that has involved the miner and the government. For years, Centerra and the government have rowed about ownership of the Kumtor gold mine. Kumtor accounts for around 7% of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP and is the country’s largest industrial asset.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

US prosecutors finally name Uzbek Pres. daughter in corruption probe

APRIL 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The US named Gulnara Karimova, the eldest daughter of Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov, as the beneficiary of bribes worth $550m taken between 2007 and 2013 from telecoms companies wanting access to the Uzbek market.

This was the first time that Ms Karimova, 43, has been named in connection with the corruption case since news of the deals became public three years ago.

It’s also a reminder of just how tightly President Karimov and his family ran Uzbekistan, seemingly viewing it as their personal fiefdom, and how telecoms companies, from Sweden’s TeliaSonera to US-listed VimpelCom, had to bribe their way into the market of 30m people.

TeliaSonera rebranded as Telia Company earlier this month. Both Telia and VimpelCom are the subject of investigations in the corruption cases. Telia is also trying to sell off its subsidiaries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

A Bloomberg News report from New York said that prosecutors had named Ms Karimova after previous requests to recover cash, which they said had been laundered, were ignored.

“Prosecutors made the request in a letter to a Manhattan federal court judge on Thursday (April 21), saying Karimova and the group failed to respond to a civil forfeiture complaint against three bank accounts,” Bloomberg reported.

Ms Karimova had previously only been referred to, rather obliquely, as: “Government Official A, a close relative of a high-ranking Uzbek government official.”

Being named in the reports will bring further international notoriety on Ms Karimova.

She had once been spoken of as a future leader of Uzbekistan, a label she appeared to wear lightly while she produced pop videos, hosted fashion shows and concocted her own perfume range.

Now Ms Karimova has disappeared from public sight, having been placed under house arrest in Tashkent two years ago.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Tajikistan distributes jobs for in-laws

APRIL 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Amonullo Sadulloyev, the brother- in-law of Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon, was made chief of Southern Electric Networks, a power distribution company based in Kurgan-Tube. Last August, Mr Sadulloyev was sacked as the deputy director at the national power distributor Barqi Tojik. Transparency activists have criticised Tajikistan for its perceived nepotism.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

US prosecutors names Karimova “the most hated person in Uzbekistan”

APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Once feted as a future Uzbek leader, and with an obvious taste for the limelight, Gulnara Karimova’s fall from grace has been sharp.

At the peak of her power and influence, she ran Uzbekistan’s top industrial conglomerate, Zeromax, owned the country’s biggest football team and was the Uzbek envoy to the United Nations in Geneva.

In her spare time, Ms Karimova designed clothes, developed perfume ranges for her own fashion label and produced whimsical music videos which starred, as a backing singer, French actor Gerard Depardieu, now more famous for drunken brawls on aeroplanes and for embracing former Soviet leaders shunned by the West.

But, despite the glamour, Googoosha, a nickname given to Ms Karimova by her father and mockingly adopted by ordinary Uzbeks, was described as the most hated person in the country.

A 2005 cable from the US embassy in Tashkent said that ordinary Uzbeks considered Ms Karimova to be “greedy and power hungry.”

“She remains the single most hated person in the country,” the author of the cable, then-ambassador Jon Purnell, wrote.

Since 2014, though, she has disappeared from public view, apparently incarcerated in a house in Tashkent. An international corruption scandal focused on payments made by mobile phone companies for access to Uzbekistan and an internal power struggle appear to have undermined Ms Karimova.

Pictures of her pleading with her guards and looking thin and drawn leaked out about a year ago, but little else has been seen or heard. Few ordinary Uzbeks care, though.

Eric McGlinchey, a professor at George Mason University, said that her public opulence had been the real reason behind her downfall.

“She wasn’t a quiet crook. She pursued a grotesquely extravagant lifestyle and that made her detested among both the ruling class and ordinary Uzbeks,” he said.

“Were she merely a quiet crook, revelations of hundreds of millions of dollars in offshore accounts could be overlooked.”

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Kyrgyzstan says to reconsider Askarov verdict

APRIL 25 2016, BISHKEK (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyzstan’s Supreme Court said it would consider revising a life sentence levied against Azimzhan Askarov, a civil activist, for inciting ethnic hatred, less than a week after the US had highlighted his case in its annual report on human rights around the world.

Last week, also, the UN’s Human Rights Committee called on Kyrgyzstan to release Askarov. The UN expert committee said Askarov “had been arbitrarily detained, held in inhumane conditions, tortured and mistreated, and prevented from adequately preparing his trial defence.”

Police arrested Mr Askarov in the aftermath of clashes in 2010 that toppled President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s government. He was then cited as one of the organisers of the clashes.

The Supreme Court’s chair- woman, Ainash Tokbayeva, said the UN’s statement was enough to consider a revision of the ruling.

“Our Constitution obliges us to take measures to protect the rights and freedoms of Azimzhan Askarov in connection with the UN Committee on Human Rights’s findings,” media quoted her as saying.

“The Committee’s decision is the basis for the Supreme Court’s reconsideration of the criminal case.”

The UN criticism came just days after the US published a human rights report that slammed Kyrgyzstan as a country where police brutality and minority harassment were commonplace.

This triggered a sharp response from the Kyrgyz ministry of foreign affairs which called the US report hypocritical and politically motivated.

The row has damaged Kyrgyzstan-US relations. Any move to reduce or relax Askarov’s prison sentence would be viewed as an olive branch of sorts.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Kazakh President reprimands mayor

APRIL 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said that if the Astana administration were unable to get rid of a stench wafting over the city from the Taldykol lake, he will order the mayor, Adilbek Dzhaksybekov to live on the shore in a yurt. In the dressing down, Mr Nazarbayev also said that he would sack Mr Dzhaksybekov if he failed to rid Astana, his pet project, of its smell.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Editorial: Kumtor and Kyrgyzstan

APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Kyrgyz government and Centerra Gold appear hell-bent on another major row over ownership of the Kumtor gold mine.

Last year, Djoomart Otorbayev resigned as PM after barely a year in office having failed to reach an agreement with Centerra on swapping Kyrgyzstan’s share in the Canadian company for a 50% share in Kumtor.

In December, the authorities sentenced Dilger Zhaparov, former head of state-owned gold miner Kyrgyzaltyn, to three years in prison for authorising an allegedly illegal dividend payment to Centerra.

Now, the Kyrgyz authorities have stormed the offices of Centerra-owned Kumtor Gold Company, in what could be the beginning of a legal dispute.

Centerra replied with a detailed letter, written in unusual legalese lingo. The company argues that the dividend payment was legitimate.

Kumtor is vital for Kyrgyzstan. It is its largest industrial asset and seizing ownership would boost government revenues. All this, though, at the expense of its once-welcoming-now-worsening business environment.

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(Editorial from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Kyrgyz Parliament elects speaker

APRIL 27 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s parliament elected Chynybai Tursunbekov from President Almazbek Atambayev’s Social Democrat party as their new Speaker, ending a week-long deadlock. Mr Tursunbekov received 88 of 120 votes. A previous vote, a week earlier, had failed to elect a Speaker.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Land reforms in Kazakhstan trigger protests across the country

APRIL 24-27 2016, ALMATY (The Conway Bulletin) — A proposed amendment to land registration laws triggered a series of rare protests across Kazakhstan, a reaction that the authorities have handled, so far, with a relative soft touch.

The first and largest rally was held in the western city of Atyrau, when around 1,000 demonstrators gathered to protest against a law which they say would allow foreigners to buy their land. Smaller protests, with a few dozen protesters, were held over the following days in Aktobe, Semey and Aktau.

The amended law is due to come into force in July.

“We are thousands here today, but if they start seizing and selling our land, we will be millions,” one of the speakers at the Atyrau protest said.

Importantly, most of the people at the protests were speaking Kazakh, rather than Russian. Kazakh is prevalent in poorer, more rural sections of Kazakhstan’s society. It is particularly widely spoken in the west of the country, in and around Atyrau, Aktobe and Aktau.

Some analysts said that the protests may have been part of a wider nationalist movement encouraged by the authorities to give a veneer of political discourse without posing any real threat to the elite. Both local governments and officials in Astana dismissed the claim that the new land code would give out land to foreigners.

At a meeting in Astana, President Nursultan Nazarbayev said: “The issue regarding selling land to foreign citizens is out of question. All talks regarding this issue are groundless. Those who heat up these rumours should be brought to justice.”

As The Bulletin went to press, police in Almaty had detained a handful of other activists who had planned a press conference against the new land code.

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(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)