Tag Archives: protest

Uzbeks complain about price rises but steer clear of protests

TASHKENT, NOV. 4 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Anatoliy, 60, earns a living by ferrying children to school each day across Uzbekistan’s Soviet- built capital and then hawking for fares in his battered Daewoo Matiz, along the city’s wide boulevards.

“I used to spend 80,000 sum (around $25.7) per week to buy fuel for my car and now I spend 120,000 sum ($38.6),” he said with a resigned air.

On the issue of protesting against the price rises, he shrugged and said that people in Uzbekistan were different from people in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. “People here are ready to say ‘hop mailly’ [“let it be” in Uzbek] to whatever decision is taken by officials,” he said.

Uzbekistan is considered by most human rights organisations to be one of the most repressive countries in the world and anti-government demonstrations are virtually unheard of.

Officials have said that the price rises were needed to balance the price of petrol sold in the regions and in Tashkent. Many people, though, are skeptical and have said that the government is exporting too much petrol for its own profit.

Shokhrukh, 40, another Tashkent-based gypsy cab driver sucked in a deep breath when he was asked about the petrol price rises.

“Our oil reserves in the Bukhara deposit are now insufficient to cover domestic petrol demands and the government has to import petrol from Russia which they have to pay for in roubles and US dollars,” he said.

Like other Central Asian currencies, the Uzbek sum has lost value over the past couple of years, pushing up inflation.

But is it not only drivers who will be impacted by the rise in the cost of petrol. Shukhrat, 40, an ethnic Uyghur in Tashkent, who sells cloth at Tashkent local bazaar said that all prices will have to increase off the back of such a big jump in the price of petrol.

“Food requires transportation and consequently fuel, I expect some shop owners will rise their food prices,” he said.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 303, published on Nov. 4 2016)

Comment: Support rises for Armenia daredevil protesters, says Demytrie

OCT. 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — When Armenian gunmen calling themselves the Daredevils of Sassoun after a group of lionised 8th century freedom fighters seized a police compound in Yerevan in July, the world’s attention was focused on another story unfolding next door – an attempted coup in Turkey.

Yet what took place in Armenia was an unprecedented strike against the state. Veterans from a war in the 1990s between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the so-called Daredevils held police officers and medics hostage for two weeks before surrendering to the authorities without a fight.

But, by then, thousands of Armenians had come out onto the streets to express their solidarity with the gunmen.

In the eyes of the authorities the gunmen were criminals, official media described them as terrorists. Three policemen died during the siege, afterall. But on the day of their surrender, supporters gathered outside the Opera House in central Yerevan chanting their names and calling them heroes.

One long-term South-Caucasus observer told me that what happened in July was the emergence of a new and radical form of anti-government protest, likely to be repeated in other post-Soviet oligarchies.

There was no single reason for the gunmen’s actions, instead they were driven by an aggregate of problems facing Armenian society.

Poverty, corruption, inequality, and the authorities’ inability to resolve the ongoing conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh Their actions prompted mixed feelings among Armenians. Some were outraged that the gunmen were using violence to achieve their goals. Others saw this aggressive action as necessary but poorly executed.

But many were inspired. Since their arrest, Daredevil supporters have been mythologising them, writing songs about their sacrifice for a noble cause – a more prosperous and free Armenia.

Since the siege and the protests, President Serzh Sargsyan has promised reforms, and a new PM and government has been ushered in. Few, though, believe deeply rooted social and economic problems can be solved so easily.

And the story of the Daredevils is not over. Once a trial date is set, their support base will become active again, demanding their release. That raises the prospect of another spell of street protests in Armenia.

By Rahyan Demytrie, a BBC correspondent in the South Caucasus

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 302, published on Oct. 28 2016)

Kazakh government defuses worker unrest

ALMATY, OCT. 5 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Betraying its nervousness over labour disputes, the Kazakh government stepped in to end a strike by 2,000 workers at an oil company near Zhanaozen in the west of the country.

To end the strike, the government promised the company employing the workers a major contract boost which will allow it to increase salaries — meeting the strikers’ demands.

The strike over pay had been building, sporadically, for weeks but had only been supported by a few dozen people, some of them on hunger strikes. It was only on Sept. 30, when 2,000 strikers rallied for the first time demanding higher salaries from Burgylau, a local subcontractor for the state-owned Ozenmunaigas, that the government sent senior offi- cials to defuse what to them had become an intolerable scenario.

Zhanaozen, a scruffy town built in Soviet times to house labourers working on nearby oil fields, is seared into the Kazakh national conscience.

In 2011 clashes between protesters and police killed at least 15 people and plunged the government into perhaps its most serious post-Soviet crisis. Hundreds of riot police poured into the region and emergency powers were imposed. Eventually, the government was forced to guarantee jobs and wages in the region.

Importantly the clashes in Zhanaozen in 2011 have defined Kazakh labour disputes. Since then big business and the government have shown an unwillingness to face down worker demands.

And so it proved again. A Burgylau executive had told workers that the company was unable to pay workers any more because it wasn’t making a profit. This changed, though, after a visit from Alik Aidarbayev, governor of the western Mangistau region, who offered Burgylau another $18m worth of contracts in exchange for meeting the workers’ demands.

Burgylau is a subsidiary of KazPet- roDrilling.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 299, published on Oct. 7 2016)

Kazakh authorities refuse protest

SEPT. 16 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Atyrau city government denied a petition by Mothers in White Headscarves, a women’s protest group in Kazakhstan, which sought to hold a rally on Sept. 17. Public protests against worsening economic conditions in Kazakhstan have been becoming more frequent in Kazakhstan. Around 1,000 Atyrau citizens demonstrated against a proposed land reform in April, the largest protest in Kazakhstan for the past few years.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 297, published on Sept. 23 2016)

Azerbaijan’s opposition protests

SEPT. 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s opposition coalition, the National Council of Democratic Forces held a rally in Baku, protesting against the upcoming constitutional referendum. The coalition said the rally would be the first of a series of demonstrations against the government’s plans to change the Constitution. Wrapped in flags and chanting against corruption, thousands took part in the rally. The organisers said over 10,000 participated. Official figures said only 2,500 were at the rally. Importantly, the rally had been authorised by local officials.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 296, published on Sept. 16 2016)

Road sweepers protest in Uzbekistan

AUG. 10 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Up to 50 street cleaners, mainly women, in the Uzbek city of Samarkand, protested against the local government because of unpaid wages. The Uzbek- language version of the US-funded RFE/RL news website said more protests were appearing in Uzbekistan over unpaid salaries.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 292, published on Aug. 12 2016)

20 gunmen in Armenian capital surrender

JULY 31 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Twenty gunmen who had captured a police station in Yerevan surrendered, ending a standoff that had lasted two weeks and triggered clashes between anti-government protesters and police.

The surrender ends what had become seen as a major test of the current government’s resolve.

Armenia’s National Security Service said in a statement: “The anti- terrorist operation is over. Twenty terrorists have been taken prisoner.”

It is still not clear why the gunmen, who had been calling for the release of the radical opposition leader Zhirayr Sefilyan from prison, had surrendered. Over the weekend they had appeared determined to continue their stand-off despite a deadline passing, briefly taking a doctor prisoner and being accused of shooting dead a policeman. The gunmen have denied that they killed the policeman.

A policeman also died during the initial assault on the police station two weeks ago.

Television footage of the gunmen surrendering showed burley Armenian security forces wearing balaclavas frisking the tired looking gunmen. The gunmen looked thin and drawn. Many were old men.

Shortly before surrendering Varuzhan Avetisyan, the group’s leader, said that the gunmen had fulfilled their mission of inciting popular protests against the government.

“Popular protest will continue. We feel that our victory is close and call on Armenian people to continue the fight,” he was quoted by local media as saying.

Clashes had erupted throughout the week between Armenian police and demonstrators supporting the armed group outside the police station.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 291, published on Aug. 1 2016)

Gunman in Kazakhstan states his motives

JULY 27 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Ruslan Kulekbayev, who shot and killed six people and injured six others in Almaty in a shooting spree that triggered a major terrorism alert earlier this month, said that there were no religious motives involved in his rampage. The newspaper Vremya published extracts of Kulekbayev’s deposition, where the shooter dismissed any ties with religious organisations. Instead he said that he was protesting against what he said was unfair treatment from the authorities.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 291, published on Aug. 1 2016)

Zhirayr Sefilyan: A radical Armenian war hero

JULY 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Charismatic and enigmatic, Zhirayr Sefilyan, exists on the fringe of Armenia’s fractious political spectrum. He was virtually unknown outside Armenia until an armed group of his supporters captured a police station in southern Yerevan on July 17, killed a police commander and took several people hostage.

Clashes between anti-government protesters and police followed and now Sefilyan is spoken of in foreign ministries from Russia to the United States.

The slim 49-year-old has the air of a radical outsider. A Lebanese- Armenian, Sefilyan was a young army officer during the war that Azerbaijan and Armenia-backed forces fought in the early 1990s for control of the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

As an infantry commander, Sefilyan played a key role one of the greatest victories for the Armenia-backed rebels when they captured the city of Shusha.

This battle on May 8 1992 is fixed in Armenian lore, as the point when the war for Nagorno-Karabakh turned in their favour.

Until that point they had been on the backfoot.

After taking Shusha, despite being outnumbered and out-gunned, the Armenia-backed rebels scored a number of victories and rolled back the Azerbaijani forces until a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1994 ended the war.

Afterwards, Sefilyan led veteran groups and campaigned for better pensions, housing and rights. An intense man, his political views appeared to harden over the years and he drifted more and more towards the fringe of the political spectrum. His Founding Parliament movement calls for an overhaul of politics, accusing politicians of corruption. It has never taken part in an election and its support is estimated at a few thousand.

At the movement’s core is Sefilyan. He has now been arrested three times — in 2007, 2015 and in June 2016.

In June, police arrested Sefilyan for possessing illegal weapons. This arrest triggered the hostage-taking in Yerevan on July 17 and the subsequent clashes between protesters and police.

So far one policeman has been killed when armed men captured the police station and more than 50 people have been injured in clashes between police and demonstrators.

Sefilyan, the fringe radical, has now taken centre stage in Armenia’s politics.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)

Armed group captures Armenian capital police station

JULY 17-21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenian police and and anti-government supporters clashed sporadically throughout the week outside a police station in Yerevan that was captured on Sunday by gunmen calling for the release of a jailed opposition leader.

The clashes were the worst in Yerevan since demonstrators fought police over plans to increase electricity prices in July and August 2015.

Most of the fighting between protesters and police was small-scale but on Wednesday night riot police fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse protesters. The protesters responded by throwing stones and charging the police. Media reported that 51 people, including 28 policemen, were injured. Police made three arrests.

PM Hovik Abrahamyan dismissed both the protesters and hostage-takers.

“What happened in the police precinct is inadmissible and should be condemned, since real changes cannot be achieved through violence,” he told the media.

As Armenia’s economy stagnates, frustration is rising making flash- points, more common.

Now, mainly angry young Armenians, have latched on to the arrest of Zhirair Sefilyan, the leader of a little- known opposition group, called the Founding Parliament movement, as a cause through which to vent their frustration.

Sefilyan was arrested last month for plotting a coup. His supporters have said the charges are false and have been spread to undermine the former military commander.

One policeman was killed during the attack on the police station. The stand-off around the police station continues.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)