JULY 6 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The authorities in Uzbekistan arrested 500 police last year on various charges including corruption, torture and abuse of power, media reported quoting a source in the interior ministry. Rights groups have accused Uzbekistan of being a police state.
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(News report from Issue No. 239, published on July 9 2015)
JULY 6/7/8 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Indian PM Narendra Modi started an eight day tour of Central Asia and Russia with stops in Tashkent and Astana, an expedition he hopes will generate energy deals and shore up business links.
This is the first grand tour of Central Asia by an Indian leader, underlining just how seriously the country is now taking the region. But India is also playing catch up with China which has already established deep business and government level links in Central Asia.
The need to deepen relations was acknowledged by Mr Modi in a statement to media he released after meeting Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev.
“I spoke about my vision for India’s relations with Central Asia,” he said.
“Kazakhstan is our biggest economic partner in the region. But, our relations are modest, compared to our potential. We will work together to take economic ties to a new level.”
Despite the rhetoric and good will that Mr Nazarbayev and Uzbek President Islam Karimov before him greeted Mr Modi with, no major deals were announced.
In Tashkent, the two sides said they discussed speeding up a deal to deliver uranium from Uzbekistan to India. In Astana, the Indian and Kazakh delegations also agreed a uranium supply deal and a mechanism to broaden military cooperation.
Mr Modi headed to the Russian city of Ufa on July 9 for a two day break from Central Asia to attend a meeting of the so- called BRICS, and a group that also includes Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa, and a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). India is an observer member of the SCO, an economic/security group headed by Russia and China and focused on Central Asia.
He returns to Central Asia on July 11 with a meeting in Ashgabat with Turkmen leader Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov before travelling to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Mr Modi’s meeting with Mr Berdymukhamedov is arguably the most important.
India is the end destination for gas in an ambitious plan to build a pipeline from Turkmeni- stan across Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 239, published on July 9 2015)
JULY 6 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – To counter an increase in the number of Uzbek migrant workers returning home from Russia without work, Uzbekistan’s government has asked South Korea to increase the quota of workers it takes, RFE/RL reported. South Korea takes up to 22,500 migrant workers from Uzbekistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 239, published on July 9 2015)
JULY 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – US prosecutors have opened a case against an unnamed relative of Uzbek president Islam Karimov to regain around $300m paid out in apparent bribes by two Russian telecoms companies, media reported. The unnamed relative is widely thought to be Gulnara Karimova, Mr Karimov’s eldest daughter.
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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)
JUNE 27 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Apparently without any sense of irony, Uzbek President Islam Karimov congratulated journalists in Uzbekistan on their work.
It could be said to be ironic because media groups rate Uzbekistan as one of the worst countries in the world for media freedom.
“We are well aware that today it is impossible to imagine life without your difficult and responsible work, without the multifaceted activities of the media,” Mr Karimov wrote in a letter published on the internet.
“The fruits of your painstaking work are always received with great interest and attention.”
There are now 1,400 media outlets in Uzbekistan, he said, including 70 TV stations, 30 radio channels and 300 websites.
Uzbek journalists, at least those without links to the authorities, disagree.
Daniil Kislov, the editor of the Fergana.Ru news agency which covers Central Asia, said: “The president’s impression on the richness of the information space seriously differs from reality. Reporters Without Borders placed Uzbekistan in the 166th position among 180 countries in its World Press Freedom Index 2015.”
The Uzbek authorities have blocked access to Ferghana.com in Uzbekistan for several years.
US-funded RFE/RL, the BBC and the Voice of America are inaccessible in Uzbekistan, leaving the local information consumer limited to the government’s position on events.
And this view can be very skewed. Readers relying on government authorised journalism may not be aware of the problems facing Mr Karimov’s eldest daughter, she has been under house arrest for over a year, the arguments surrounding Uzbekistan’s use of child labour to pick its cotton, the general crackdown in civil liberties and, also, its poor media freedom ranking.
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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)
JULY 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The European Union will give Uzbekistan $168m to boost infrastructure in rural areas, the European Commission envoy Yuri Sturk said.Mr Sturk specifically said that the EU grant was earmarked to improve irrigation and to boost renewable energies.
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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)
JUNE 19 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbek officials signed a protocol with their Chinese counterparts to extend their economic cooperation, media reported. The deal was signed by Chinese and Uzbek government officials in the Chinese city of Rizhao where the two governments had been holding a third intergovernmental meeting.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbek defence ministry has ordered four C295W military transport planes manufactured by Airbus at its plant in Seville, Spain, Tashkent-based news agency uzdaily.com reported.
There has been no official confirmation from the Uzbek government but for
Uzbek media to report on a deal like this is a nod to its veracity. Plane spotters in Seville have also posted photographs online of a C295W plane carrying an Uzbek flag on its wing tail.
Airbus, which is headquar- tered in Paris and is part owned by Germany, France and Spain, has also dodged commenting on the deal although one of its representatives was quoted by Uzbek media in June at an airshow in France.
“For Airbus is a great honour to participate in the modernisation of Uzbekistan Airways,” the director for Airbus sales in Central Asia and eastern Europe, Stefan Konkoly, told the website jahonnews.uz.
Mr Konkoly, apparently, didn’t mention a deal with the Uzbek military.
Europe has only recently patched up its relationship with Uzbekistan. A few years ago, it considered Uzbekistan a pariah state. Human rights groups had accused the Uzbek government of shooting dead hundreds of protesters in 2005 in the town of Andijan in the east of the country.
More recently, though, Europe and NATO needed Uzbek support to pull its military out of Afghanistan.
Part of the deal was to sell or leave behind so-called non-lethal military equipment to fight Islamic extremism and drug trafficking.
Each Airbus C295W military transport plane can carry 70 soldiers and 10 tonnes of kit.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Iran has agreed to boost the amount of cotton and fertiliser from Uzbekistan that it transports along its railway, media reported. Transit routes through Iran, Central Asian states gain access to ports on the Persian Gulf.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
JUNE 25 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Apparently aimed at showing off their determination to crack- down on the drugs trade from Afghanistan, Uzbek security officials burnt 1.4 tonnes of drugs — including opium and heroin — at a factory outside Tashkent in front of foreign diplomats.
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(News report from Issue No. 237, published on June 25 2015)
