OCT. 6 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Bidzina Ivanishvili confirmed that he will launch his weekly TV programme before the end of the year, media reported. This is significant because Mr Ivanishvili is Georgia’s richest man and was the coordinator of the opposition alliance that forced former president Mikheil Saakashvili from power.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
OCT. 3 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbek migrants returning home from work overseas will now be required to fill out a questionnaire, media reported.The government has said it wants to find out how much migrants have been earning but analysts have said the questionnaire is linked to concern that Uzbeks have been joining the so called Islamic State group in Syria.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
OCT. 7 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s finance minister, Nodar Khaduri, said that he wanted to increase the monthly pension pay out next year by around 5%. Unlike many of its neighbours whose economies are suffering because of a slow-down in Russia’s sanction-hit economy, Georgia is experiencing something of a boom.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
SEPT. 29 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Japan has signed a deal to help build local infrastructure projects in Azerbaijan such as improving basic drinking water access in villages, media reported. This may show that Japan is trying to increase its participation in the South Caucasus.
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(News report from Issue No. 202, published on Oct. 1 2014)
SEPT. 28 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Armenian opposition groups have launched another round of anti- government protests, media reported. Around 2,000 people gathered for the first planned protest in a town outside Yerevan. Six more rallies are planned around the country with a final rally in central Yerevan on Oct. 10.
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(News report from Issue No. 202, published on Oct. 1 2014)
SEPT. 29 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajik president Emomalii Rakhmon will visit the city of Khorog in the east of the country for the first time since fighting between local forces and government soldiers in 2012, officials said.
The visit is, officially, part of countrywide tour by Mr Rakhmon but his trip to Khorog will also be seen as a show of strength in the troublesome area. Few would have been surprised if Mr Rakhmon had chalked the city off his tour. It remains a bastion of anti-government opposition where armed groups opposed to the regime in Dushanbe enjoy support from the local population, mostly ethnic Pamiris that have felt shortchanged ever since Mr Rakhmon’s political faction claimed victory in a five year civil war.
For much of the country’s first two decades of independence, Khorog was relatively stable. But a military operation launched by the government against local powerbrokers in July 2012 shattered the calm in the city. Both government and opposition forces suffered heavy losses.
In May this year, another smaller scale operation saw government agents kill three Khorog residents suspected of drug-smuggling, triggering two days of rioting.
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(News report from Issue No. 202, published on Oct. 1 2014)
ALMATY/Kazakhstan, OCT. 1 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan is enjoying something of a renaissance in film-making but it’s not easy, as one young script-writer explained over tea.
Erlan Suluhan, 25, is one of many Kazakh students who received a scholarship from the US government to pursue their studies in the United States. Last year he returned from studying at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. One of his projects was a short movie depicting the adventures of an older woman who gets lost inside her own building.
“I was trying to find the turning point between the formation of one’s identity and the crisis that inevitably emerges,” he said in an interview in a cafe in Almaty.
He poured himself another cup of tea from a porcelain pot.
“Looking at Kazakhstan through the prism of the development of single identities could spark questions that are silenced nowadays within the society,” Suluhan said.
His film, 18’21, was acclaimed at the Cannes Festival this year. In Kazakhstan it was shunned.
KazakhFilm, the state-owned agency refused to support him, because he carried out his project independently. The message the film carried, about individualism, may have rankled too.
Still, KazakhFilm has been enjoying some success over the past couple of years. Last year another film by a Kazakh writer won the second prize at the Berlin Film Festival.
Looking ahead to his next film, Suluhan was sanguine about the complexities of writing films about personal choice in a Kazakhstan where the government places more emphasis on conformity.
“I don’t want to get explicitly political, because I don’t want to tell the audience what to think,” he said. “Instead, I’m interested in poking, rousing, inducing people to reflect on themselves by showing the significance of minor everyday chores and their impact on the creation of the self.
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(News report from Issue No. 202, published on Oct. 1 2014)
SEPT. 18 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyz PM Djoomart Otorbayev sacked two cabinet ministers, minister of culture Kamila Taliyeva and interior minister Abdyldy Suranchiyev, his first major reshuffle since taking over the job in March.
The sackings are a nod to public dissatisfaction with the government, with reports growing that many ministers are hanging on to their jobs by a thread.
But they may be less about improving the efficiency of government and more about preparations for next year’s parliamentary elections. With a winter energy crisis expected to put pressure on both President Almazbek Atambayev, affiliated to the Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan, and Mr Otorbayev, loosely associated with the socialist Ata-Meken party, dropping a few unpopular officials makes political sense.
Kyrgyz media reported that both the sacked ministers where disliked, making them easy scapegoats for failings across government but personnel changes are unlikely to spare the government public frustration if the winters are as cold as expected, especially with Kyrgyzstan’s power production struggling.
Ulugbek Erkeshev, a Kyrgyz political journalist, said he has seen it all before.
“At a time when they need to be working together as a government around the clock they are passing portfolios around,” he said.
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(News report from Issue No. 201, published on Sept. 24 2014)
LONDON/United Kingdom, SEPT. 24 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — A natural adventurer, story-teller and Central Asia historian, the British author Peter Hopkirk died aged on Aug. 22 aged 83.
Hopkirk was a foreign correspondent for various British newspaper who developed a niche specialisation in later life writing about the so-called Great Gamers of Central Asia.
The first of these books was the seminal ‘Foreign devils on the Silk Road: The search for the lost cities and treasures of Chinese Central Asia’, published in 1980.
Widely acclaimed this book was followed by five more on Central Asia, including Hopkirk’s most well-known book ‘The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia’, published in 1990.
These books first brought to the public’s attention the high stakes game played out in the late 19th century between mainly British and Russian agents in Central Asia. This important part of imperial history had been largely overlooked by modern historians until Hopkirk’s books.
His stories were made more remarkable because most were written and researched while Central Asia was still part of the Soviet Union. He once described how he had to play games of his own with various minders to grab interviews or delve into an archive for information.
It’s hard to over-state Hopkirk’s contribution to our understanding of Central Asia and its importance in the world, as the publisher noted in a brief blurb to his fifth book ‘On Secret service east of Constitnople’ published in 1994.
“Pieced together from the secret intelligence reports of the day and the long-forgotten memoirs of the participants, Peter Hopkirk’s latest narrative is an enthralling sequel to his best-selling ‘The Great Game’ and three earlier works’,” it said.
“It is also highly topical in view of recent events in the region where the Great Game has never really ceased.”
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(News report from Issue No. 201, published on Sept. 24 2014)
SEPT. 18 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbekistan’s government announced new electricity power price rises, the second of the year, from Oct. 1.
Like other Central Asian economies, sanctions on Russia have hit Uzbekistan too. Uzbek infrastructure is also groaning under increased demand, triggering energy shortages. Petrol shortages have also been reported for the past year.
Now Uzneftgaz, the state energy company, has said that prices for gas will rise by 10%. Water and heating prices will also rise by 7%.
These increases follow a 9% rise in April and analysts will be monitoring closely people’s reaction.
Rising utility prices can trigger widespread social unrest and with Uzbekistan in a state of flux it is vulnerable. The apparent arrest of Uzbek president Islam Karimov’s eldest daughter, Gulnara Karimova, on various economic charges has unsettled politics and petrol shortages coupled with utility price increases have hit its economy.
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Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 201, published on Sept. 24 2014)
