JULY 6 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev celebrated his 75th birthday in a more subdued fashion than previous occasions, perhaps reflecting Kazakhstan’s recent economic struggles. Mr Nazarbayev has been Kazakh president since independence in 1991 but has not named a successor.
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(News report from Issue No. 239, published on July 9 2015)
JULY 8 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Sixteen US senators have written to Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev calling on him to improve human rights in the country, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. Mr Aliyev has previously accused the West of mounting a smear campaign against Azerbaijan.
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(News report from Issue No. 239, published on July 9 2015)
JULY 6 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – YEREVAN — Demonstrators in central Yerevan shifted their rally against an electricity price rise on Monday after police cleared barricades from the central street they had occupied for two weeks.
A Bulletin correspondent said around 1,000 people gathered at Freedom Square in the centre of Yerevan for another protest on Thursday evening. Police watched the protest but the atmosphere was calm.
“We demand one thing. The immediate and complete cancellation of the decision adopted by the State regulatory commission on baseless rise of electricity tariffs,” one of the protesters said.
Thousands of people have been protesting in the evenings in the centre of Yerevan, demanding that the government scrap the plan to raise the price of electricity, the third price rise in two years. The Russian-owned electricity company says the hike is necessary to support the power grid.
A state regulatory commission has already approved the price rise but in an apparent concession to the protesters earlier this month Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan ordered an audit of the electricity company.
And, on Wednesday, an Armenian state watchdog fined the electricity company $126,000 for violating the rights of consumers for demanding residents in new-built housing pay up front for their electricity.
The protests have widespread support even though the numbers have been dwindling.
“I’m very busy and that’s why I can’t take part in the protests,” said Georgi Barseghyan, a Yerevan resident. “So are other members of my family. But we all are with them.”
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 239, published on July 9 2015)
JULY 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – YEREVAN — Several hundred protesters continued to occupy a main street in central Yerevan, demonstrating against an electricity price increase.
The number of demonstrators has fallen and a Bulletin correspondent said there were now no more than about 1,000 people protesting on July 2, a drop from an estimated 10,000 protesters last week.
But the stand-off with riot police is still one of the most widely supported street demonstrations in Armenia for years.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, also warned the West against interfering, a sign of the Kremlin’s concern.
The protesters, who are mainly young, have defied police warnings to quit and the atmosphere has veered from tense to party-like over the past week. Last week police used water cannons and detained over 200 protesters when they tried to clear the square.
In a bid to appease the protesters, Armenia’s president Serzh Sargsyan suggested inves- tigating further a request by the Russia-owned electricity monopoly to find out just why the price increases are needed.
“I strongly believe that cancelling the tariff increase is extremely dangerous. Hence, until the given company pro- vides its opinion, the govern- ment will incur the entire burden of the tariff increase,” Mr Sargsyan said.
Most activists, though, dismissed Mr Sargsyan’s offer as a distraction.
“Increasing electricity tariffs will increase nearly all prices. Bread, butter, oil,” one activist at the protest said.
The electricity price rise is the third in two years.
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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)
JUNE 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – To honour Turkmen president Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov’s 58th birthday, city authorities in Ashgabat named a new park Arkadag, which means “Protector” and is the moniker he likes to go by.
Critics of Mr Berdymukhamedov have accused him of encouraging his officials to promote a cult of personality, something that he disparaged at the start of this period in power in 2007.
Earlier this year, though, the authorities unveiled a giant statue of Mr Berdymukhamedov on a horse. Television shots have also increasingly showed him berating officials and holding court, emperor-like.
And the new Arkadag park appears to back up this image. The park’s main feature is a large white marble arch with Mr Berdymukhamedov’s portrait in its centre.
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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)
JUNE 24 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – BISHKEK — MPs in Kyrgyzstan voted to sack a judge over a row about biometric data in what civil activists described as more evidence of parliament’s authoritarian tendencies.
Protesters gathered in the centre of Bishkek to demonstrate against the apparent sacking of Klara Sooronkulova, a judge in the Constitutional Chamber of the Kyrgyz Supreme Court.
She had been working on a document that would have declared a law brought in last year forcing everybody in Kyrgyzstan to give their fingerprint data to the state as unconstitutional.
“Sooronkulova was dismissed only because she expressed her opinion as an independent judge,” shouted Nurbek Toktakunov, a lawyer, at the protest.
The law that Ms Sooronkulova took umbridge with decreed that only those people who had submitted biometric data could vote in a parliamentary election set for October.
She said that this was unlawful. Apparently irritated by her reluctance to accept the law on biometric data, the government forced MPs to vote three times to sack her. She survived the first two efforts.
“This is a clear evidence of complete arbitrariness,” Ms Sooronkulova told a newspaper.
It’s unlikely that protests will gather momentum but the independence of the judiciary from the executive power has been damaged in Kyrgyzstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)
JUNE 21-25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – YEREVAN — In an often tense standoff with police, thousands of people demonstrated in Yerevan this week against electricity price rises.
A Bulletin correspondent estimated that the protest had swelled to around 8,000 people by Thursday evening, the biggest anti-government demonstration in Armenia for a generation and one that could pose a serious threat to the authorities.
On Tuesday, the second day of the protest, police fired water cannons and detained more than 200 people as they tried to clear Freedom Square in the centre of the city. The assault, though, just appeared to strengthen protesters’ resolve.
“Our demand remains the same and we will not leave Baghramyan Avenue until the illegal decision on electricity price hike will not be annulled,” said Aram Manukyan, an activist.
Hundreds of protesters have camped out overnight since and called for the 17% electricity price rise to be repealed.
This is the third price rise in two years. RAO UES, the Russian company that owns Armenia’s electricity network, said it needed to increase prices because of the fall in the value of the Armenian dram which makes imports expensive.
The price raises are particularly painful because Armenia, like other countries in the region, is having to deal with a drop in its economic prospects.
Protesters had started to gather in central Yerevan on Monday, June 22, in anticipation of parliament approving the electricity price rise two days later.
The next day, police turned their water cannons against the demonstrators and waded into the crowd, detaining people trying to stage a sit-in.
Since then, the crowds of protesters have swelled but been peaceful.
PM Hovik Abrahamyan said that the protests were misguided.
“Blocking one of the major prospects in the city will not lead to any success. I call on the activists to get back to constructive dialogue,” he said.
In 2008, eight people died in Yerevan when soldiers fired on anti-government demonstrators.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – YEREVAN — Armenia’s government wants to change the way it measures its national debt, a con trick, its opponents have said, which is aimed at massaging the numbers by cutting out the Central Bank’s borrowings.
The Armenian parliament passed a first reading of a bill which will ditch the current state debt and instead measure the national debt.
Atom Janjughazyan, deputy finance minister, said the change was needed to meet international standards.
“The sole purpose of the bill is to improve the financial statistics of the State in accordance with international practice,” he said in parliament.
But opposition MPs said the change was merely a cover for allowing the government to borrow so that it can ease itself out of the current financial downturn, triggered by a fall in the Russian economy, the main economic driver for the former Soviet Union.
And this viewpoint appears to be backed by international economists. Teresa Daban Sanchez, the IMF representative in Armenia, told an Armenian newspaper the country’s external debt is now uncomfortable.
“The government needs to take measures so that the debt against the GDP index begins to fall,” she said.
Armenia’s government has previously said it will borrow to prop itself up through the current economic downturn. Under government rules its debt must be below 60% of GDP.
Mr Janjughazyan, the deputy finance minister, said under the new system, Armenia’s debt measured $4.4b against a GDP of $10.9m, comfortably below the 60% mark.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 23 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – TBILISI – Georgia’s finance ministry said it will cut the national budget by 140m lari ($53m), 1.75% of the original budget, because of an economic slowdown.
Cuts will be made across government but hardest hit will be education, agriculture and the interior ministry.
PM Irakli Garibashvili said the government should have revised its budget earlier.
“Almost all the countries in the region had to revise their budgets because of the crisis,” he told parliament.
The government said that Georgia’s economy would grow by around 2% this year, far below the 5% initially anticipated.
A downturn in Russia’s economy and a slump in energy prices has hit Georgia hard. It is unclear if these cuts will be enough or more will follow.
The popularity of the ruling Georgian Dream has been slip- ping, in part because of the economic slowdown.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 18 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan is paying former senior German politicians large salaries to whitewash its reputation in Europe, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported quoting emails it has seen from an Austria-based law firm. The magazine named former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, former president Horst Koehler and former interior minister Otto Schily.
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(News report from Issue No. 236, published on June 18 2015)
