Tag Archives: society

Kazakh developer produces student app

APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – A developer in Kazakhstan has produced an app for students to help them study for exams which he said would help to reduce stress and, also, high suicide rates among students. Analysts think that the country’s demanding school system contributes to boosting youth suicide rates among the world’s highest. Recently, the ministry of education announced that students could re-take failed exams.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 279, published on May 6 2016)

Cashless payments grow in Kazakhstan

APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Compared to the first quarter of last year, cashless payments in Kazakhstan grew by 26%, media reported. As of February 2016, cashless payments make up 15% of the total payments in the country, highlighting cash’s dominant position. The number of terminals used to take debit or credit cards in shops grew on a year-on-year basis by 24%.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 279, published on May 6 2016)

Gazprom Armenia applies discount

APRIL 27 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Gazprom Armenia, the Russian owned gas distributor, said it will apply to the country’s regulator to lower consumer prices by 6%. The discount will be limited to households that consume 10,000 cubic metres of gas a year, the company said. Earlier this month, Gazprom said it would give the Armenian government a 9% discount on the gas it supplies.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

US prosecutors names Karimova “the most hated person in Uzbekistan”

APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Once feted as a future Uzbek leader, and with an obvious taste for the limelight, Gulnara Karimova’s fall from grace has been sharp.

At the peak of her power and influence, she ran Uzbekistan’s top industrial conglomerate, Zeromax, owned the country’s biggest football team and was the Uzbek envoy to the United Nations in Geneva.

In her spare time, Ms Karimova designed clothes, developed perfume ranges for her own fashion label and produced whimsical music videos which starred, as a backing singer, French actor Gerard Depardieu, now more famous for drunken brawls on aeroplanes and for embracing former Soviet leaders shunned by the West.

But, despite the glamour, Googoosha, a nickname given to Ms Karimova by her father and mockingly adopted by ordinary Uzbeks, was described as the most hated person in the country.

A 2005 cable from the US embassy in Tashkent said that ordinary Uzbeks considered Ms Karimova to be “greedy and power hungry.”

“She remains the single most hated person in the country,” the author of the cable, then-ambassador Jon Purnell, wrote.

Since 2014, though, she has disappeared from public view, apparently incarcerated in a house in Tashkent. An international corruption scandal focused on payments made by mobile phone companies for access to Uzbekistan and an internal power struggle appear to have undermined Ms Karimova.

Pictures of her pleading with her guards and looking thin and drawn leaked out about a year ago, but little else has been seen or heard. Few ordinary Uzbeks care, though.

Eric McGlinchey, a professor at George Mason University, said that her public opulence had been the real reason behind her downfall.

“She wasn’t a quiet crook. She pursued a grotesquely extravagant lifestyle and that made her detested among both the ruling class and ordinary Uzbeks,” he said.

“Were she merely a quiet crook, revelations of hundreds of millions of dollars in offshore accounts could be overlooked.”

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Tajik conscript dies after alleged hazing

APRIL 22 2016, DUSHANBE (The Conway Bulletin) — A 22-year-old Tajik army recruit has died after an alleged beating from more senior soldiers, media reported, highlighting what it said was a degrading Soviet-era culture of bullying and hazing in Tajikistan’s military.

Bakhtiyor Kurmonmadov died on April 19, five days after signing up to join the army.

His relatives said that there were bruises all over Kurmonmadov’s body. This was contested by an official report which said he died from a heart attack during an exercise.

To many, Kurmonmadov’s death was an indication of just how institutionalised bullying is in the Tajik army.

The system of informal beatings and bullying of young recruits by more senior soldiers even has a name, ‘dedovshina’ which literally means ‘grandfatherism’.

It’s a system that is spread across the armies of the former Soviet Union. A handful of recruits are killed or badly injured every year.

Last month, another conscript in Kurmonmadov’s unit was taken to hospital after a severe beating from older soldiers.

Amridin is a 24-year-old graduate,who was conscripted into the Tajik army two-years-ago. He described to a Conway Bulletin correspondent how he ended up in the army and severity of his treatment there.

“I was literally kidnapped in the streets and sent to the army. When we were new recruits, older soldiers beat, tortured, and harassed us in whatever way they wanted,” he said. “You cannot avoid getting beaten up because beating new conscripts is like an unwritten rule in the army.”

He coughed and complained about his health. He said that some of his colleagues had been beaten so badly that they would now be no use on a battlefield.

“If it continues in this way, we cannot defend our country if an enemy attacks us,” he said.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

The Savitsky museum becomes Uzbekistan’s desert gem

APRIL 29 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) NUKUS/Uzbekistan — This city, the capital of Karakalpakstan in west Uzbekistan, has yet to benefit from the shiny upgrades that have advanced the country’s larger cities.

A few new apartment blocks aside, there is little sign of redevelopment. There are no new malls and no new roads.

The airport is tiny and time warped, with just one conveyor belt for luggage. Just beyond the city limits is miles of parched desert scattered with saxaul trees, scrubby bush and abandoned poultry farms. It is a depressing place.

The one gem in Nukus’ crown is the Savitsky Museum.

Attracting a few thousand international visitors a year, it houses a 90,000-strong collection of world- class Russian avant-garde artworks. Igor Savitksy, a Kiev-born artist and collector, is celebrated for single handedly saving these works in the 1950s by hiding them away in Nukus, far from the disapproving eyes of the USSR’s fanatical leaders.

Recently the museum has been in the news after its long-serving and highly dedicated director, Marinika Babanazarova, was fired for unspecified reasons. To fans of the museum, it appeared that Nukus’ one shining light was in danger of going out.

As I toured the museum I met a curator who explained some of the more famous art pieces to me. Tentatively, I told her that I’d read the reports about Marinika being fired and I asked where she was now. The curator’s eyes fell to the floor.

“She is here in Nukus. We hope she will come back one day. We miss her, but we cannot break the system,” she said nervously.

She looked more hopeful when the conversation switched to the new wing of the museum which staff hope will attract more visitors.

Whether it will bring back Marinika remains to be seen.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Clooney lobbies Armenian genocide

APRIL 24 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Hollywood A-list actor George Clooney attended a memorial in Yerevan to mark the 101st anniversary of what Armenia describes as a genocide perpetrated by Ottoman Turks against Armenians. Turkey has denied it was a genocide and has instead said that thousands of Armenians died in fighting linked to World War I. It’s unclear, exactly, how Mr Clooney is linked to Armenia and its genocide claim.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Uzbekistan’s Savitsky Museum to open new wing

APRIL 29 2016, NUKUS/Uzbekistan (The Conway Bulletin) — The Savitsky Museum in Nukus, west Uzbekistan, will open a new wing in September which will increase its exhibition space by five times, a museum official told a Bulletin correspondent.

The opening of the new wing will be welcomed by art lovers who want to see more of one of the largest collections of Russian avant-garde art.

In an interview, a curator at the Savitsky Museum said: “We will open the new wing on Sept. 1, Independence Day. It will mean we get to show 15% of the art collection, rather than just 3%.”

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Land reforms in Kazakhstan trigger protests across the country

APRIL 24-27 2016, ALMATY (The Conway Bulletin) — A proposed amendment to land registration laws triggered a series of rare protests across Kazakhstan, a reaction that the authorities have handled, so far, with a relative soft touch.

The first and largest rally was held in the western city of Atyrau, when around 1,000 demonstrators gathered to protest against a law which they say would allow foreigners to buy their land. Smaller protests, with a few dozen protesters, were held over the following days in Aktobe, Semey and Aktau.

The amended law is due to come into force in July.

“We are thousands here today, but if they start seizing and selling our land, we will be millions,” one of the speakers at the Atyrau protest said.

Importantly, most of the people at the protests were speaking Kazakh, rather than Russian. Kazakh is prevalent in poorer, more rural sections of Kazakhstan’s society. It is particularly widely spoken in the west of the country, in and around Atyrau, Aktobe and Aktau.

Some analysts said that the protests may have been part of a wider nationalist movement encouraged by the authorities to give a veneer of political discourse without posing any real threat to the elite. Both local governments and officials in Astana dismissed the claim that the new land code would give out land to foreigners.

At a meeting in Astana, President Nursultan Nazarbayev said: “The issue regarding selling land to foreign citizens is out of question. All talks regarding this issue are groundless. Those who heat up these rumours should be brought to justice.”

As The Bulletin went to press, police in Almaty had detained a handful of other activists who had planned a press conference against the new land code.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 278, published on April 29 2016)

Tajikistan draws up database of approved names for newborns

DUSHANBE, APRIL 18 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Tajikistan have started forcing parents to choose names for their newborns from a database they consider to be authentically Tajik, a move that human rights activists have said is a blatant attempt to clamp down on pious Muslims.

Rahim Zulfoniyon, a representative from the State Committee on Language and Terminology, said that a working group of linguists, university professors, and academicians have been developing the registry which will contain more than 4,500 Tajik names for boys and girls.

At a press conference, Mr Zulfoniyon said that the database was designed to promote Tajik culture.

“We urge parents to refrain from naming their newborns with unpronounceable and difficult names, and name their children with easy and beautiful names,” he said.

The new name regulations mean that people cannot choose Soviet or Russian surnames and importantly Arab names labelled “alien to Tajik culture”

Unless you have dual Russian citizenship, you cannot use the “ov” suffix on surnames. Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon was, until 2010, called Rakhmonov. He dropped the ‘ov’ in a show of patriotism.

The name registry will be approved over the next couple of weeks but people have already started

complaining that they cannot give babies the names they want.

Hakim, 28, said he had been overjoyed by the birth of his son.

“I wanted to call him Abubakr in honour of the Prophet Muhammad’s companion, but the civil registry officials told me I should choose a Tajik name from the list. Why can’t I give my son the name I want?” he said.

A Dushanbe-based analyst, who wished to remain anonymous, said this was another attempt to prevent radical Islam taking root in Tajikistan.

“I think some officials wanted to show the President that they are also fighting radicalism in light of anti- Islamic policies of the government”, he said.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)