Tag Archives: Tajikistan

Tajik and Kyrgyz military fire shots

NOV. 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Shots have been fired by Tajik and Kyrgyz border guards on their shared border, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. The border is one of the most tense in Central Asia. RFE/RL said that nobody had been injured in the fighting and that it wasn’t clear if the shots had been fired into the air as warnings or had been aimed at security personnel.

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(News report from Issue No. 307, published on Dec. 2 2016)

Flights resume between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan

NOV. 30 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Commercial aeroplanes will fly between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan from January 2017, for the first time in 25 years, media reported quoting civil aviation officials from both countries. Relations between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have been poor for years as the countries have rowed, mainly about water supplies. Under acting- president Shavkat Mirziyoyev, though, Uzbekistan has worked to improve relations with its neighbours.

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(News report from Issue No. 307, published on Dec. 2 2016)

Tajikistan strips 6 RFE/RL reporters of accreditation

NOV. 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said that the Tajik authorities had stripped six of its reporters of their accreditation after the news agency published a story criticising the promotion of President Emomali Rakhmon’s daughter to a senior foreign ministry position.

Mr Rakhmon has a reputation for promoting his friends and family to high positions in the Tajik government and some analysts have said that he is setting up his son, Rustam Emomali, to take over the presidency from him. Mr Rakhmon has changed the constitution to scrap minimum age limits for presidential candidates.

Earlier this year Rukhshona Rahmonova, his daughter, was made an MP and now she has been appointed the deputy head of a department within the foreign ministry.

RFE/RL said that the stripping of its journalists’ accreditation was an attack on the whole agency.

“We are outraged by this action by the Tajik government, which is a blatant attack on our ability to do our jobs as journalists,” it said in a statement on its website.

The media scene for journalists in Tajikistan has been worsening over the past few years. The government has jailed both dissenting journalists and opposition activists.

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(News report from Issue No. 307, published on Dec. 2 2016)

Fire kills seven Tajik workers in Russia

NOV. 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Seven migrant workers from Tajikistan died in a fire in the metal container they were using as their living quarters on a construction site in Siberia, media reported.

Investigators said that the cause was likely to be a short-circuit in the electric heater which was warming the container. The container had been lined with wood and felt to keep out the severe cold.

This is the third major accident involving migrant workers this year. In January a roof collapsed onto a sewing workshop in Moscow, killing at least 12 migrant workers and in September a fire in a printing workshop killed at least 16 women workers from Kyrgyzstan.

Remittances from Russia is a vital source of income for countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, especially for Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

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(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)

Turkey arrests Uzbek and Tajik extremists

NOV. 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Turkish security services arrested three dozen men from Central Asia and the South Caucasus who, they said, were working for the extremist IS group and had been planning a series of suicide attacks in Turkey’s biggest city. They said that the ringleaders were an Uzbek man and a Tajik man. Governments from Central Asia and the South Caucasus are increasingly concerned about their citizens heading to Syria to fight for IS.

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(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)

EDB to support Tajik Nurek

NOV. 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Russo-Kazakh Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) said it is ready to consider supporting the modernisation of the Nurek hydropower plant, the largest in Tajikistan. In an interview with Avesta, EDB chairman Dmitri Pankin said that, if the government asked for help, the EDB would help fund reconstruction work at the dam together with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. The Tajik government had previously said the modernisation will cost $700m.

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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)

Tajikistan’s debt to GDP ratio rises

NOV. 16 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — In a speech to parliament to present the government’s budget plans for 2017, Tajikistan’s finance minister Abdusalom Kurboniyon said that the government’s debt measured 36.3% of its GDP, slightly higher than last year. Tajikistan’s debt ratio has been rising over the past couple of years because of an economic downturn triggered by a fall in oil prices and a recession in Russia. In 2014, Tajikistan’s debt to GDP ratio had been around 28%.

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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)

Stock market: Tethys Petroleum,Olisol

NOV. 18 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — After hovering at around 1.5p for several months, Tethys Petroleum’s share price reached rock bottom at around 0.9p in early November, following increasingly worse news coming from its operations in Kazakhstan.

Its prospective local partner, Olisol, first missed a payment of 9.8m Canadian dollars ($7.3m) and later cancelled Tethys’ gas sales contract in Kazakhstan. It then pulled out completely from its initial offer to become a major shareholder in Tethys.

In addition, Tethys’ local subsidiaries were raided by the Kazakh police and their asset frozen.

The stock price picked up again this week after new potential investors came forward and a Kazakh court dropped the charges against the local subsidiaries. But with much work still to be done before a financing agreement is reached and with a pending legal dispute in Tajikistan, Tethys is far from having found a safe harbour.

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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)

Tajikistan holds first President’s Day

NOV. 16 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Tajikistan celebrated its first President’s Day, the latest in a series of awards designed to virtually deify President Emomali Rakhmon.

According to press reports, school children read poems they had written about Mr Rakhmon, libraries displayed various books that Mr Rakhmon has written and military units paraded under the slogan “Our president, our leader”.

Officially, the new holiday was designed to celebrate 25 years of independence but critics of Mr Rakhmon have said that this is just the latest step in an increasingly aggressive move to create a dominating personality cult. They say that this is a knee-jerk reaction to worsening economic conditions, the growing threat of the Taliban in Afghanistan and, simply, old age and an accelerating sense of his own mortality.

Mr Rakhmon has accrued a number of titles over the years including Leader of the Nation, and Founder of the Peace and Accord.

Earlier this year, too, he introduced a national flag day and the Eurasianet website reported that Tajikistan had introduced a Diplomat Day on Sept. 29, the 23rd anniversary of his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly.

Over the past few years, Mr Rakhmon has rounded on his opponents – tracking down and imprisoning alleged Islamists, outlawing his nearest rivals, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan – and promoted his son and daughter into increasingly powerful positions.

In power since the mid-1990s, Mr Rakhmon, who is 64-years-old, has also changed the constitution to, seemingly, allow his son to take over as president from him.

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(News report from Issue No. 305, published on Nov. 18 2016)

Uzbeks and Tajiks face Taliban threat

NOV. 9 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A senior Afghan army commander in the north of Afghanistan said that the Taliban was encouraging Uzbek and Tajik radical militants to infiltrate Central Asia. The Pajhwork reported that Lt. Gen. Sher Aziz Kamawal had said that the Taliban was using instability in Kunduz region, on the border with Uzbekistan, as a launchpad for militants to move into Central Asia. Governments in Central Asia have been increasingly concerned about Taliban encroachment north.

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(News report from Issue No. 304, published on Nov. 11 2016)