NOV. 5 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Campaigning has started ahead of a referendum on Dec. 6 on the Armenian constitution. The referendum debate focuses on whether to increase the powers of Parliament and the PM over the President. Opposition groups say Pres. Serzh Sargsyan wants to give himself more power once he leaves the presidency in 2018.
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(News report from Issue No. 255, published on Nov. 6 2015)
NOV. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev sacked Kairat Kelimbetov as head of the Central Bank, two years after he was handed the job.
He promoted 39-year-old Daniyar Akishev, a former deputy head of the Central Bank and his personal economic adviser, to take over from Mr Kelimbetov.
Under Mr Kelimbetov’s watch a combination of low oil prices and a recession in Russia has battered Kazakhstan’s economy. The tenge currency has lost around half its value since Feb. 2014.
Mr Nazarbayev said that he had lost confidence in Mr Kelimbetov. “The lack of confidence in the economy and the national currency — the tenge — should not be allowed to continue,” he said in a statement on his website. “It’s important to work to fix this poor performance.”
The Kazakh Central Bank has lost credibility over the past couple of years. It has flip-flopped on monetary policy and has spent billions of US dollars propping up its currency before defaulting first in Feb. 2014 and then in August this year.
On each occasion, events have appeared to wrong-foot Mr Kelimbetov.
In 2014, he admitted at a press conference after the devaluation that he hadn’t expected it to happen. In August he said that the tenge had moved to a free float against the US dollar before presiding over several more interventions to prop up its strength.
But news that he had been sacked failed to halt the slide in the value of the tenge. By Friday, Nov. 6, it had touched an all-time low against the US dollar of 310/$1.
Inflation data for October presented Mr Nazarbayev and his advisers with more bad news. Pushed up by the devaluation in August, inflation for the year to end-October measured over 9%.
And the disorganisation surrounding the Central Bank also appeared to continue. Shortly after it released a statement saying it would no longer spend millions of US dollars propping up the tenge, the Central Bank cancelled its monthly interest rate meeting without giving a reason or setting a new date.
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(News report from Issue No. 255, published on Nov. 6 2015)
NOV. 5 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Azerbaijan was due to start considering an appeal by jailed human rights activists Leyla Yunus and Arif Yunus against their imprisonment in August for 8-1/2 and 7 years for various economic crimes. Human rights groups have said the authorities imprisoned Leyla and Arif Yunus to silence them.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 255, published on Nov. 6 2015)
NOV. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Daniyar Akishev’s promotion to head the Kazakh Central Bank may have taken observers by surprise but to those who know the 39-year-old, it is a job he has been groomed for.
Mr Akishev is a veteran of the Central Bank, where he worked in various positions from 1996 to 2014 before moving to the Akorda as economic adviser to President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
In 2007 Mr Akishev was rumoured to be in pole-position for taking on the role of new chief of the financial regulator.
Instead has was named deputy head of the Central Bank, a position he held for seven years, under three different bosses.
In particular, Central Bank insiders said he achieved professional maturity under Grigori Marchenko, a respected liberal economist, who often clashed with Mr Nazarbayev on economic policies.
There have been wobbles, though, in Mr Akishev’s rise to the top. In December 2008, ominously, he said the economic situation was ideal for Kazakhstan.
“The Central Bank has no problems with the exchange rate of the tenge, quite the contrary,” he told RIA Novosti in an interview.
Two months later, the Bank devalued the tenge by 19%.
Media quoted some local analysts as saying that Mr Akishev lacks independence because of his young age and his lack of political authority. But Mr Akishev is the same age as Mr Marchenko was when he was named head of the Central Bank for the first time in 1999 and is five years older than Oraz Dzhandosov was, when he became Central Bank chief in 1996.
Mr Akishev’s predecessor, Kairat Kelimbetov, who held the job for two years during which the tenge lost half its value, had a different profile and no background at the Central Bank.
Mr Akishev might have accepted possibly the toughest job in Kazakhstan, but he is also one of the few people in the country with the experience and background to take it on.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 255, published on Nov. 6 2015)
NOV. 5 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Kazakh parliament passed a bill which will ban mortgages being given in US dollars unless the applicant earns his or her salary in US dollars. The aim of the bill, which needs to be signed by Pres. Nursultan Nazarbayev before becoming law, is to reduce households exposure to potential bad debt and to give the ailing tenge currency a boost.
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(News report from Issue No. 255, published on Nov. 6 2015)
OCT. 27 2015, TBILISI (The Conway Bulletin) — Ratcheting up tension between Georgia’s PM and President, former PM and billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili said in a TV interview that he made a mistake selecting Giorgi Margvelashvili as his presidential candidate in an election in 2013.
Mr Ivanishvili’s comments came shortly after President Margvelashvili met with several senior public figures, including an opposition leader and the powerful head of the Georgian Orthodox Church to discuss Georgia’s worsening political climate and a clampdown on opposition broadcaster Rustavi 2.
“The President’s remarks are completely irresponsible,” Mr Ivanishvili said of Mr Margvelashvili. “People who make such statements, want to justify the United National Movement’s actions. Those who make such statements, support UNM.”
The UNM is the party of former president Mikheil Saakashvili.
Although not officially in office any more, Mr Ivanishvili bankrolls the Georgian Dream ruling coalition and is considered the kingpin of Georgian politics. PM Irakli Garibashvili is very much his protege while President Margvelashvili is considered an increasing irritation.
Ghia Nodia, a political professor at Ilia State University and an opponent of Georgian Dream, said Mr Ivanishvili’s remarks were dangerous.
“This obsession with UNM and the inability to think in a nuanced manner are toxic and show a hidden complex. It is sad that he is unable to realise this,” he said.
Mr Margvelashvili, a former education minister, was regarded as having little political ambition before being put forward as a presidential candidate by Mr Ivanishvili in 2013. Most observers said he was supposed to act as a puppet. Instead he has become a thorn in side of Mr Ivanishvili.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 24 2015, ALMATY (The Conway Bulletin) — A 20-year-old man set fire to himself in the city of Taraz, south Kazakhstan, outside the headquarters of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s political party, a rare suicide by immolation that would have worried the authorities.
A video uploaded onto Youtube showed Yerlan Bektibayev talking to the camera in a central square in Taraz, before pouring lighter fuel over his head, setting himself on fire and then running into the Nur Otan building.
Bektibayev spoke in Kazakh before he set himself alight, explaining that he wanted to kill himself because he couldn’t find a job and that the authorities had bullied him by planting drugs on him and locking him up in prison for a murder that he didn’t commit.
“I cannot find any other way but to die. I do not want to live,” he said on the video.
Kazakhstan has a high rate of youth suicide. The United Nations has said that it is in the top ten countries for suicides of people between the ages of 14 and 29, but, even so, Bektibayev’s choice of setting himself on fire outside the Nur Otan regional headquarters will have alarmed the authorities.
It was an overtly political back- drop to the suicide, with overtones of the immolation in Tunisia in 2010 that sparked the Arab Spring uprisings.
Official media largely avoided reporting on the suicide, one TV journalist who works for a state linked channel said he was told not to report on it, and police detained the man who filmed Bektibayev’s immolation.
Social media, though, was full of conflicting opinion. Some said that Bektibayev was to blame for taking his own life, others that society had failed him.
There was no official comment either from Nur Otan or the Taraz regional government.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 26 2015, DUSHANBE (The Conway Bulletin) — A group of students at the Tajik National University appealed to the US, the EU and Germany to extradite opposition members, raising immediate concerns that the authorities may be coercing sectors of the population to pursue its agenda.
Civic activism is stunted in Tajikistan and this apparent support for the government worried analysts.
A Dushanbe-based analyst who spoke to a Bulletin correspondent said: “The government knows that the Western states will not extradite opposition leaders to Tajikistan. Thus, they control the students and organise similar appeals and demonstrations to show the world that Tajik youth are politically active and there is democracy in Tajikistan.”
The government has stepped up its persecution of opposition groups this year, banning them and arresting activists. It wants opposition leaders extradited from Europe.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmenistan has forcibly evicted around 50,000 people from their homes in and around Ashgabat ahead of the 2017 Asian Indoors and Martial Arts Games, human rights group Amnesty International said in a report.
Researchers at Amnesty studied satellite images which they said showed evictions and demolitions between March 2014 and April 2015 in two Ashgabat neighbourhoods.
Ashgabat will host the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games, a relatively minor Olympic event. It wants to impress visitors with a $2 Olympic Village and an extensive PR campaign on its readiness to open up to the world after decades of isolation.
Denis Krivosheev of Amnesty International said: “Instead of using the Games as an opportunity to clean up Turkmenistan’s human rights record, local authorities there have only succeeded in worsening living conditions for residents.”
Amnesty’s allegation, which the authorities have not refuted, will irritate the Turkmen government and further damage its image, just as it is trying to show the world a softer and more open side.
Analysis focused on Choganly and Shor, two so-called “dacha neighbourhoods” designated for holiday houses. More recently, though, Amnesty International said evictions were taking place in a suburb of Ashagbat too.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 30 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan is gearing up for a parliamentary election this Sunday, a vote tarnished by the withdrawal of Europe’s main democracy monitoring group and by accusations of a clampdown on human rights.
Relations between the West and Azerbaijan have been increasingly strained this year over Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s crackdown on the media and opposition activists. The West has accused him of holding human rights in scant regard; Mr Aliyev has responded by accusing the West of trying to plot a coup.
And in the build up to the election, the row continued to be played out in public.
Nils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, said civil rights in Azerbaijan were operating under a dark cloud.
“Human rights activists, journalists and national electoral observers have been muzzled using repressive legislation, jailed on trumped-up charges or forced to escape into exile,” he wrote in an opinion article for politico.eu. “Under these circumstances, it is impossible to hold any meaningful debate about the election or to ensure its accountability.”
ODHIR, the organisation that runs Europe’s main vote monitoring operation withdrew its team from Azerbaijan’s election because it said that the Azerbaijani authorities had only agreed to allow it to send half the monitors it needed.
European vote monitors have never judged an election in Azerbaijan to be free and fair and the 125- member parliament is generally viewed as a rubber-stamping operation for President Aliyev.
In 2010, Mr Aliyev’s Yeni Azerbaijan party won 72 seats. Independent MPs, who mainly supported Yeni Azerbaijan won 48 seats, giving Mr Aliyev a massive majority.
More of the same is expected on Sunday.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
