Tag Archives: Tajikistan

Kazakhstan slips towards recession

FEB. 23 2016, ALMATY/DUSHANBE (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan verged on acknowledging that its economy may actually shrink this year and a Tajik Central Bank official said it was in talks with the IMF for an emergency loan, more signals that a sharp regional economic crisis was deepening further.

Normally bullish about its own GDP growth predictions, the reconfigured Kazakh government GDP growth estimate of 0.5% is an important sign of the severity of the economic downturn linked to low oil prices. Kazakhstan had earlier predicted GDP growth in 2016 at 2.1%.

“If the cost of a barrel of oil is $40, GDP growth will be 2.1%, but we’ve taken the conservative approach and have assumed that the price of oil will costs $30 per barrel and that GDP growth will hit 0.5%,” journalists quoted Yerbolat Dosayev, the economy minister as saying. Oil is currently around $35/barrel.

Importantly, this new GDP growth estimate is far closer to that of international economist who have said that Kazakhstan’s economy could shrink in 2016. The last time that Kazakhstan’s economy dipped into a recession was in 2008.

Low oil prices and a recession in Russia which has wiped out essential remittance and business investment flows have hit Central Asia hard. The scale and speed of the downturn appears to have wrong-footed leaders, including Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev and his advisers.

They have slashed government budgets and also sold off chunks of state-owned companies, but they haven’t been able to prevent the tenge from losing 50% of its value and inflation rising. Officials are now worried about anti-government protests.

On the southern fringe of Central Asia, Tajikistan, the world’s most remittance-reliant economy, has also been reeling from the impact of the downturn. It has called in the IMF to try to organise an emergency loan.

Jamoliddin Nuraliev, deputy head of Tajikistan’s Central Bank, told the FT that talks with the IMF had begun.

“It’s crisis time,” he said.

Tajikistan has depleted its currency reserves in its Central Bank trying to defend the value of it somoni currency. At the same time, data has shown that the flow of remittances from Russia have dropped by around half.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 269, published on Feb. 26 2016)

Uzbekistan finishes railway

FEB. 25 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbek officials said that work on a $1.63b railway section in the Fergana Valley had been completed, meaning that trains can now travel from Tashkent without having to pass through Tajikistan.

Although the cost of the 123km track is high, driven up by kilometres of tunnels and bridges that were needed to breach the mountainous terrain, for Uzbekistan cutting out the irritation of having to deal with Tajikistan makes it worth it.

Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have been at loggerheads since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

At its core, Uzbekistan worried about Tajik plans to build hydropower dams across rivers that feed Uzbekistan’s cotton crops. Tajikistan doesn’t like Uzbekistan’s unilateral stance.

This impacted rail traffic, which steadily dropped off.

The World Bank estimated the route will transport 600,000 people and 5 tonnes of freight every year. The project also underlines the financial might of China in the region. It paid $350m of the cost of the project, the World Bank paid $190m and the Uzbek government covered the rest.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 269, published on Feb. 26 2016)

Belarus frees Tajik opposition

FEB. 23 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The authorities in Belarus have released a Tajik woman linked to the opposition Group 24, media reported, a move that will irritate Tajikistan’s government. Police detained Shabnam Hudoidodov when she entered Belarus in June 2015. She has now been given refugee status. The Tajik authorities have made chasing opposition groups a priority.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 269, published on Feb. 26 2016)

Tajik students protest outside EU offices

FEB. 20 2016, DUSHANBE (The Conway Bulletin) — In a move reminiscent of protests organised by the authorities in Russia to hound government opponents and envoys of countries that the Kremlin had fallen out with, Tajik students demonstrated outside the Turkish and EU diplomatic missions in Dushanbe.

Around 70 students shouted slogans accusing Turkey and EU countries of allowing members of the banned Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) to hold meetings.

“Bring the traitors to the homeland” they shouted. “We came here to express our dissatisfaction with the fact that the traitors are given the opportunity to organize protest meetings (abroad).”

Reports from northern Tajikistan also said a group of students had protested outside the office of the OSCE, Europe’s democracy and human rights watchdog, in Khujand.

Students have previously demonstrated against the IRPT, although they have denied that they had been organised and paid by the government to mount the protests.

This explanation, though, didn’t sit with most analysts’ reading of the demonstrations. In Dushanbe, an analyst who asked to remain anonymous, told The Conway Bulletin’s Dushanbe correspondent that the authorities must have organised the demonstration as no protest could take place without their approval.

“Tajik authorities do not understand that Western countries and Turkey will not be affected by such protests and will not extradite the political refugees,” said the analyst.

Other observers likened the organised protests to Nashi, the youth movement organised by the Kremlin in the late 2000s to hound its enemies. Well funded and single- minded, Nashi gained notoriety for its determined and lengthy demonstrations against foreign ambassadors and democracy advocates.

Last year, the Tajik government outlawed the IRPT, the country’s only formal opposition party. Human rights groups have complained that the government aims to crack down on free speech.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 269, published on Feb. 26 2016)

Tajikistan raises interest rate

FEB. 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajikistan’s Central Bank raised its key interest rate by 1 percentage point to 9%, its first rise since December 2014. It said it needed to try to protect the value of its somoni currency which has lost around half its value over the past year. A recession in Russia has hit Tajikistan hard, as its economy relies on remittances sent back by workers living in Russia.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 269, published on Feb. 26 2016)

Editorial: Tajik students

FEB. 26 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Imitation is, they say, the most sincere form of flattery. So is flattery what Tajik officials had in mind when they organised a series of student protests against diplomatic missions of the European Union, the OSCE and Turkey in Dushanbe and Khujand? Or perhaps they were just thinking about the intimidation they wanted to inflict on diplomats?

They deny any link to the student protests, but in Tajikistan people are controlled and a protest outside a foreign embassy couldn’t have happened without the support of the authorities.

Ten years ago, the Russian state spawned a youth movement called Nashi. It was well-funded, well-organised and vicious. When it was given a target it went into attack mode. Just ask ambassadors from Western countries they targeted or the democracy advocates they harassed.

It appears as if Tajik officials now want to achieve something similar, although on a smaller scale. They want to intimidate Turkey and the European Union into giving up opposition members who have fled Tajikistan. Nashi’s own results were, in the end, mixed and the Tajik students’ won’t be any better.

ENDS

(Editorial from Issue No. 269, published on Feb. 26 2016)

Editorial: Uzbekistan’s railway

FEB. 26 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – At 19.2km, the Kamchik Pass railway tunnel may be the longest in Central Asia and might also be a great engineering achievement, but it is also a sign of Uzbekistan’s further isolation from world politics and markets.

Uzbekistan said it completed a World Bank and China-backed railway bypass in the Ferghana Valley that will allow its trains to run to the east of the country without having to transit through Tajikistan.

The World Bank support is important because it shows international endorsement for a mega project that Uzbekistan was eager to achieve despite the economic downturn rolling through Central Asia.

Chinese money and workers were key to the success of the project, as China has growing interest in building infrastructure in Central Asia to support its ambitious project to connect with Europe via rail and road.

Tajikistan is the main loser in this game. It will no longer receive the in- kind payment of $25m worth of gas shipments from Uzbekistan in exchange for the railway transit. And it also lost an important diplomatic chip in its endless row with Tashkent.

ENDS

(Editorial from Issue No. 269, published on Feb. 26 2016)

Economic woes take Tajikistan

FEB. 17 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The amount of cash flowing into the Tajik government’s coffers is slowing, media reported quoting the ministry of finance. It said, without giving specifics, that in January, it only hit 87.7% of its target inflow. Tajikistan has been heavily hit by the worsening economic conditions across the region. Remittances from Russia, a vital source of income, have fallen by 50%.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 268, published on Feb. 19 2016)

Tajik court jails 13 for IS flag

FEB. 18 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Court in Tajikistan sentenced 13 men to between 10 and 25 years in jail for allegedly hoisting an IS flag over a building in the provincial town of Nurek, media reported. The authorities in Tajikistan have sentenced similar numbers of men on similar charges previously. It has said that radical Islam is growing in the region but human rights groups have accused the Tajik government of simply wanting to clamp down on dissenters.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 268, published on Feb. 19 2016)

Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan dispute over border

FEB. 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) -The foreign ministries of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan traded angry notes after Kyrgyz soldiers appeared to raise their national flag over a disputed border area. International monitors have said that the two neighbours had been making decent progress towards thrashing out a solution to their long-running border row. The recent dispute, though, may have endangered this progress. Analysts have said that the Tajik-Kyrgyz border dispute has the potential to destabilise the region.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 267, published on Feb. 12 2016)