MARCH 24 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Cotton Campaign, a lobby group set up to stop Uzbekistan using child labour to pick its cotton, said the Uzbek authorities had detained and arrested one of its in-country reporters. Uzbekistan has not commented.
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(News report from Issue No. 224, published on March 25 2015)
MARCH 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The government of the Karaganda region has said that ArcelorMittal’s temporary move to knock 25% off its workers’ wages at its steel plant in Temirtau last month was illegal, the Tengrinews website reported. It has filed a lawsuit against ArcelorMittal, one of Kazakhstan’s biggest foreign investors.
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(News report from Issue No. 222, published on March 11 2015)
FEB. 26 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyz lawmakers are likely to vote on a bill that will criminalise promoting gay relationships in the next few weeks, the AFP news agency reported. The law is similar to Russian legislation that has attracted worldwide condemnation and, if passed, would possibly isolate Kyrgyzstan further from the West.
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(News report from Issue No. 221, published on March 4 2015)
EDINBURGH/NEW YORK, FEB. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Civil freedoms in Central Asia and the South Caucasus took a turn for the worse in 2014 as governments moved closer to Russia and worried that street demonstrations in Ukraine may spread, Freedom House said in an interview.
The sharpest deterioration in civil rights in 2014, according to the US-based lobby group, came in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan.
“Governments restricted freedom of assembly and speech to prevent ‘maidans’ and Russian encouragement of separatism,” Nate Schenkkan, a Eurasia Programme Officer at Freedom House, said in an interview with The Bulletin. Schenkkan’s reference to so-called maidans was to Ukrainian street demonstrations which morphed into a full scale revolution.
The interview was conducted over twitter with questions also taken from viewers.
At the end of last year Azerbaijani police raided the office of the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In the interview with The Bulletin, Schenkkan said the police raid was the culmination of a tough year for media and government critics in Azerbaijan.
“There was a full-scale crackdown. Now (there are) 90 plus political prisoners, all independent media shuttered in Azerbaijan,” he said. “Sanctions for Azerbaijani officials should be on the table and EU leaders should skip the European Games.” Azerbaijan is hosting the inaugural European Games later this year.
As for Kyrgyzstan, Schenkkan said new legislation had dented Kyrgyzstan’s image.
“Kyrgyzstan is the most disappointing because it is a reversal after relative gains recently,” he said. “Copycat attempts at Russian legislation against LGBTI and NGOs nearly passed.”
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(News report from Issue No. 218, published on Feb. 11 2015)
FEB. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — ArcelorMittal, the Luxembourg-based steel manufacturer, said it had temporarily cut salaries for workers at its plant in Temirtau near Karaganda, central Kazakhstan, by 25. ArcelorMittal has struggled to make the plant profitable over the last few years. It has cut its workforce at the plant to 17,000 from over 20,000.
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(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)
FEB. 3 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhmys, one of the biggest employers in Kazakhstan, said it was stopping work on a handful of side projects and making 2,000 people redundant. Kazakhmys’ main product is copper although it employs thousands more people in support businesses such as coal mining. The news piles more pressure on Kazakhstan’s economy.
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(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)
NOV. 10 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – An oil rig partially collapsed in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea, killing at least one worker. This was the second fatal accident on Azerbaijan’s off-shore energy sector in less than a month, throwing up general safety concerns.
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(News report from Issue No. 208, published on Nov.12 2014)
OCT. 31 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – In an article for a policy website, the US ambassador in Bishkek, Pamela Spratlen, appeared to cement Kyrgyzstan’s place as an ideological sparring ground between Washington and the Kremlin.
In particular, Ms Spratlen, who has been the US ambassador to Kyrgyzstan since April 2011 highlighted the differences between Washington and the Kremlin over Russia’s aim to pull Kyrgyzstan into the Eurasian Economic Union as well as their divergent views over gay rights.
“Another challenge to our efforts to support Kyrgyzstan’s democracy is its growing partnership with Russia,” she wrote on Council of American Ambassadors website, a website for essays written by senior US diplomats. “It remains an unanswered question how Kyrgyzstan can maintain its democratic trajectory while pursuing this partnership.”
Ms Spratlen specifically said the Customs Union, which will become the Eurasian Economic Union next year and grow to include Kyrgyzstan and Armenia alongside Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, was as much about politics as economics.
Legislation passing through Kyrgyzstan’s parliament bears all the hallmarks of Russian political influence. A parliamentary bill forbidding “positive attitudes towards non-traditional sexual orientations” was overwhelmingly endorsed at its first reading last month, echoing a similar bill passed in 2013 in Russia.
Importantly, Ms Spratlen said Kyrgyzstan may be sleep walking into membership of the Eurasian Economic Union because it feels like it has no choice, especially as it is surrounded by more authoritarian countries in Central Asia.
“Both officials and business leaders appear unenthused, but resigned to this choice, seeing a lack of better options,” she wrote.
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(News report from Issue No. 207, published on Nov. 5 2014)
NOV. 2 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Homosexuals in Kyrgyzstan are considering leaving the country when a law banning gay propaganda is adopted, Reuters reported. The so-called anti-gay law is similar to one already adopted by Russia. “The entire atmosphere is getting more threatening,” one man told Reuters.
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(News report from Issue No. 207, published on Nov. 5 2014)
OCT. 22 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Barely a week after Kyrgyzstan’s parliament passed a first reading of a law banning the promotion of gay propaganda, more proposals restricting civil rights have surfaced.
Media reported that Kyrgyzstan wants to restrict NGOs receiving financial support from overseas, forcing groups to submit to tighter auditing and control.
Perhaps most importantly the law is similar to one brought in by Russia in 2012. The anti-gay law was also similar to a law introduced in Russia underlining the increased influence that Russia has over Kyrgyzstan.
The London-based lobby group Institute for War and Peace Reporting wrote: “Many Kyrgyz groups work on civil and political rights, democracy-building, and corruption, and could soon find themselves as beleaguered as their Russian counterparts.”
Kyrgyz officials have defended the new law as essential to monitor groups that could potentially be used to undermine Kyrgyz democracy.
Perhaps, although, similarly to the anti-gay law, the real reason could be Kyrgyzstan’s need to cosy up to Russia.
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(News report from Issue No. 206, published on Oct. 29 2014)
