JAN. 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Turkmenistan has banned the import of any car that isn’t white, the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported quoting a customs official. RFE/RL said new rules may also force all car owners to repaint their cars white. The new rules highlight the often bizarre nature of Turkmenistan.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)
>>Fall in oil price has hit Azerbaijan hard
JAN. 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s government has cancelled a $100m project to provide rural communities with vastly improved and faster internet, media reported.
The fall in the price of oil prices has hit Azerbaijan hard. It is very much a petro-dollar economy and has had to adjust its budget to account for falling revenues.
The project was supposed to be funded by the state budget but it was, instead, one of the first to be cut when the budget was re-organised earlier this year.
And the project was supposed to be a major stepping stone to build a more integrated, connected society. Research in 2013 showed that only 500 of Azerbaijan’s 4,000 villages had access to the internet, a figure the government’s programme was supposed to improve.
Another project that the government has apparently reduced funding for is the Star refinery that it was building in Turkey. Instead, media reported, the Star oil refinery will be funded by foreign-backed debt.
Oil prices are critical to Azerbaijan. Last week BP, the biggest foreign investor in Azerbaijan, said that it was making 8% of its local workforce redundant.
The next few months are going to be important. While prices remain low, there could be more project cancellations to come.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)
>>Net emigration is the first for a decade>>
FEB. 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Almost 27,000 people emigrated from Kazakhstan in 2014. That’s 10% more than those who decided to move into Kazakhstan, creating a negative population flow for the first time in a decade, according to official data.
More worrying for the Kazakh authorities is that behind the migration flux was a clear brain drain.
In the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, millions of non-ethnic Kazakhs left for their familial or cultural homeland. Since then, the population in Kazakhstan has steadily increased.
But a report on migration released by the national statistics agency showed that more people left Kazakhstan in 2014 then moved in. Shynasyl Yernazar, of the Kazakhstan Centre for Public-Private Partnerships said the most worrying sign was the number of young people leaving.
“A brain drain among young professionals is happening, as demonstrated by last year’s survey, by which more than one-third of Kazakhstanis between 18 and 28 said they’d like to leave, ” he told the Tengrinews website (Jan. 29).
Better job prospects and access to more meritocratic systems are the main drivers of this trend. Most of the incoming migrants are from poorer countries.
Daniyar Kosnazarov, a researcher at the Presidential Library in Astana and a co-author of a book on youth issues, said it was important the government finds better and more effective ways of engaging with young Kazakhs.
“With the Eurasian Union, the common labour market will make competition tougher as Russians and Belarusians are better skilled,” Mr Kosnazarov told the Bulletin in a telephone interview from Astana.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)
JAN. 28. 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Wrapping up a mission to Kazakhstan, the UN’s special rapporteur Maina Kiai said he was disturbed to hear from Kazakh officials that they had decided to clamp down on protests because they worried about a Ukraine style rebellion.
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(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015
JAN. 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Global Fund, a Switzerland-based health organisation, said corrupt suppliers had swindled $5m from an HIV/AIDS awareness project in Kazakhstan. The corruption highlights the extent of the problems facing foreign companies and organisations in Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015
MO’YNOQ/Uzbekistan, FEB. 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Sagynbai Murzayev is a strong and gentle Soviet-made man in his 70s. He used to be a fisherman in windswept Mo’ynoq, a town in Karakalpakstan which lies on the remote western fringe of Uzbekistan. Now he works several jobs and witnesses the Chinese influx.
Mo’ynoq once lay on the shores of the Aral Sea. This sea, though, shrunk rapidly because a Soviet irrigation system siphoned off its tributaries’ waters to feed giant cotton fields.
Left behind is a lunar desert of white dunes that locals call Aralkum (Aral’s Sands).
Murzayev works at the local museum of natural history and has witnessed the retreat from the beginning. His father was also a fisherman, his mother worked in a fishery. He now gathers most of his earnings by driving foreign guests to the sea shores. Most of the visitors are Chinese.
Since 2006 an energy consortium led by China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) has been exploring oil and gas deposits below the former seabed.
Although national Uzbek publications boast about Karakalpakstan’s growth as an energy-rich region, operations in the Ustyurt Plateau seem, to Murzayev at least, to proceed at a slow pace. The few Chinese workers camping on the shoreline are mainly after a rather different and rather unusual resource for Central Asia — shrimps.
Unexcited, Murzayev looked at a Chinese trawler coming ashore.
“The indiscriminate pillage of natural resources has already been proved to be detrimental for us,” he said. “We need to bring the sea back to life and not to scavenge its dead body.”
In the distance, the town’s crumbling homes are a symbol of the small economic advantages that this uncertain oil and gas bonanza can bring to the region. And all the while the fading memories of the local fisherman who used to work on the lake grow thinner and thinner.
>>By Gianluca Pardelli
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(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)
FEB. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — News reports from Georgia said 11 former and serving police men have been arrested for their alleged involvement in the 2006 murder of a man. A bomb killed the man’s father last month. The police are accused of a cover up and the case may rock the establishment. Georgia’s interior minister resigned last month.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)
JAN. 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyz president Almazbek Atambayev approved the selection of Indira Dzholdubayeva as prosecutor-general. One of Ms Dzholdubayeva’s main tasks is to clamp down on corruption. Her selection as Kyrgyzstan’s prosecutor-general is eye-catching because Kyrgyzstan is still a male dominated society and she is only 35-years-old.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)
JAN. 24 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Police detained several journalists as they left their homes to travel to an unauthorised protest against the closure of the Adam Bol news magazine, media reported quoting associates of the journalists. The UN also said that the freedom to protest in Kazakhstan has worsened recently.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 216, published on Jan. 28 2015)
JAN. 28 2015, DUISI/Georgia (The Conway Bulletin) —- The Pankisi Gorge lies in Georgia in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains. It has gained some infamy over the past decade as a redoubt for radical Islamists fighting Russia over the borther in Chechnya and Dagestan and also as the birthplace of Omar al-Shishani, also known as Omar the Chechen, who is a senior commander within the IS radical group.
Here the Muslim Kists, Georgia’s Chechens, represent a cultural oddity and a possible danger in a country already ridden by ethnic divisions and separatist movements.
Makvala Margoshvili sat in the shade of an arbour in her blooming garden. She slowly sipped her dark tea. This is her homeland. Makvala is the head of the Kist folk music ensemble Aznach, which means voice in English. Nazy, Makvala’s English-speaking niece, summed up the problems.
“For a Chechen is hard to be a Chechen without instilling fear in the others,” she said.
Within a wider Russophobic post-Soviet perspective, Georgia has always had a favourable attitude towards Chechen separatism in Russia. During two wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and early 2000s, a stream of refugees and fighters entered the country through its porous border with Russia’s North Caucasus bringing along so-called Arab friends and fundamentalist ideas.
Despite the relative harmony in the valley, the Pansiki Gorge’s reputation for rough and tumble remains. Poverty and segregation are a dangerous mix leading to radicalisation but in the Pansiki Gorge there has been little investment by the central government.
There is plenty of resentment directed towards the central government. Nazy said that people living in the Pansiki Gorge often felt marginalised.
“Even harder, however, is for the others to look at us for what we really are beyond the stereotypes of our troubled history,” she said.
>>By Gianluca Pardelli
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 216, published on Jan. 28 2015)
