JAN. 17 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) – The US paid Kyrgyzstan $200m last year for use of an airbase outside Bishkek to support their military in Afghanistan, US assistant secretary for Central Asia Robert Blake told media in Bishkek. The US rental fee makes the Manas airbase one of Kyrgyzstan’s biggest foreign income earners.
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(News report from Issue No. 120, published on Jan. 18 2013)
JAN. 18 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) – Over the past decade, it’s become an increasingly familiar story. At almost every budget, the Azerbaijani authorities have boosted spending on weapons and other military hardware.
This year, though, the jump in military spending was more significant than normal.
According to media reports, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev said that military spending would hit $3.7b in 2013, up from 3b in 2012. A decade ago, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) estimated that Azerbaijan spent roughly $414m on its defence budget.
And Azerbaijan is not short of neighbours it considers to be problematic.
Azerbaijan’s military shopping spree is aimed mainly at Armenia. The two countries are still officially at war over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. A 1994 ceasefire keeps the peace around Nagorno-Karabakh but shootouts and death puncture this peace every week.
Azerbaijan’s relations with Iran have worsened considerably over the past 18 months too.
There have been a number of reported shootouts on their border. In Baku, the Azerbaijani authorities have arrested several people accused of being Iranian agents. The Iranians have also arrested several Azerbaijanis in Iran.
The Azerbaijani authorities are unlikely to relax their policy of rearmament any time soon.
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(News report from Issue No. 120, published on Jan. 18 2013)
JAN. 11 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajikistan’s interior ministry said police had arrested three suspected members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IUM) after a shoot-out in the east of the country near the border with Uzbekistan, media reported. One policeman died in the shoot-out. The IMU is linked closely with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 120, published on Jan. 18 2013)
JAN. 11 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) – The hard facts may be sketchy but a sense of fragility has returned to southern Kyrgyzstan after brief fighting between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz broke out last week.
Ethnic divisions have fractured society in southern Kyrgyzstan for generations. In June 2010 violence broke out in and around Osh, the main city in the south. Around 400 people died in the fighting and thousands of ethnic Uzbeks fled across the nearby border to Uzbekistan.
Since 2010, there have been sporadic reports of flare-ups, but generally the situation has been controlled. Tense but controlled. The reports from Sokh, an enclave within Kyrgyzstan that belongs to Uzbekistan, were different though. According to media reports, clashes broke out after an altercation between Kyrgyz border guards and Uzbek residents of Sokh on Jan. 5 over the construction of new electrical pylons.
Accounts then differ, but the basic premise was that there was some sporadic fighting, shots were fired and hostages were taken on both sides. Some cars and property were also destroyed.
Media organisations estimated that hundreds of people had been involved in the fracas. The exact number is still not clear. What is clear, however, is that ethnic divisions in southern Kyrgyzstan are as dangerous as ever.
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(News report from Issue No. 119, published on Jan. 11 2013)
JAN. 28 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) – The foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia met in Paris to discuss a solution to their dispute over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. While little substantial progress was made at the one-day meeting, foreign mediators consider getting Azerbaijan and Armenia to sit across a table as positive.
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(News report from Issue No. 122, published on Feb. 25 2013)
DEC. 13 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s parliament ratified an agreement to allow Russia’s airbase to remain for another 15 years with an option for a possible 5 year extension, media reported. Under the agreement, Russia will pay $4.5m per year for the airbase, a torpedo testing site on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul and a seismology centre.
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(News report from Issue No. 117, published on Dec. 14 2012)
DEC. 13 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – In the end, years of on-off negotiations came to nothing when Russia walked away from talks with Azerbaijan on an extension on its lease of a radar station.
Officially, the Qabala radar station in northern Afghanistan was deemed surplus to Russian military requirements. Unofficially, and perhaps more plausibly, the main reason for Russia walking away from a potential deal was its refusal to pay the $150m annual rent that the Azerbaijani government had, apparently, asked for.
That’s what Russian news agency Interfax reported. It said that Russia had been prepared to match an initial fee of $7m a year but that it considered the Azerbaijani demand excessive.
Certainly, the Qabala radar station had been important to the Russian military. It has a range of 6,000km and could detect missiles being fired across the Middle East, a useful thing when tension in the region is rising.
Now though, Russia will have to do without the Soviet-era radar system that only a few years ago it had offered to the US as an alternative to a proposed missile defence system in eastern Europe.
And if the reason touted by the Russian media is true — that Azerbaijan simply pushed up the price too high — it must be another indicator of Azerbaijan’s rising fiscal powers.
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(News report from Issue No. 117, published on Dec. 14 2012)
DEC. 3 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Baku jailed 4 people for Islamic extremism and for plotting to attack the Eurovision Song Contest held in the Azerbaijani capital in May, media reported. Azerbaijan has said it is battling a threat by foreign-trained Islamists to de-stabilise the country.
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(News report from Issue No. 116, published on Dec. 7 2012)
NOV. 8 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Russia is preparing to give millions of dollars to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to both modernise their armed forces and bolster its own position in Central Asia, Kommersant, a Russian business newspaper, reported by quoting sources. According to the report Kyrgyzstan will receive $1.1b and Tajikistan will receive $200m.
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(News report from Issue No. 112, published on Nov. 9 2012)
NOV. 9 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Politics in Georgia often carries a dramatic flavour and the arrest of Bacho Akhalaia, a former defence minister; Brigadier General Giorgi Kalandadze, the head of Georgia’s military; and Zurab Shamatava, a senior commander fits this mould perfectly.
Police arrested them allegedly for physically abusing six soldiers in Oct. 2011. The soldiers were sacked later that year for attempted mutiny.
Allies of Mr Akhalaia, who served as defence minister from Sept. 2009 to July 2012 before becoming the interior minister for a few months, were furious. They accused the new government of starting a witch-hunt against members of the previous administration.
Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, whose United National Movement party (UNM) lost a parliamentary election last month to a coalition lead by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, said the arrests had been politically motivated. The UNM’s MPs walked out of parliament.
Mr Ivanishvili is now Georgia’s PM but Mr Saakashvili remains the president until an election in about a year’s time. The arrests and the reaction to these arrests show the strain this uneasy partnership is already under.
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(News report from Issue No. 112, published on Nov. 9 2012)
