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Azerbaijan jails opposition activist

JUNE 16 2017 (The Bulletin) — A court in Baku sentenced opposition activist Fuad Ahmadli to 16 years in prison for stealing people’s personal data when he worked at mobile phone operator Azerfon.

Ahmadli’s supporters have said that the allegations are fraudulent and part of a government crackdown against dissenters. Ahmadli was a activist for the main opposition group, the Popular Front Party.

European politicians have accused the Azerbaijan government of cracking down on opposition members and journalists. The Azerbaijani government has said that the EU is being naive and that it is rooting out people who are in favour of regime change.

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(News report from Issue No. 333, published on June 19 2017)

Uzbek President sacks power company head

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JUNE 15 2017 (The Bulletin) — Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev sacked Fazliddin Salomov as the head of Uzenergo, the state-owned electricity producer, for failing to generate more revenue from power sales. Electricity is a thorny issue in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. Countries need to increase prices but risk upsetting ordinary people. In Armenia, street protests in 2015 reversed a drive to scarp power subsidies. Mr Salomov had only been in the job since Sept. 2016. He was replaced by Ulugbek Mustafaev, formerly the deputy head of the Jizzakh region.

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(News report from Issue No. 333, published on June 19 2017)

Uzbek President sacks head of power company

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(News report from Issue No. 333, published on June 19 2017)

Comment: Don’t ignore Kazakh rights abuse

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JUNE 19 2017 (The Bulletin) — Kazakhstan sees EXPO-2017 in Astana as a “showcase to the international community”.

The country has come a long way economically since 1991 but with President Nursultan Nazarbayev in power for 25 years, it has not had an election that could be considered free and fair by independent monitors. The government restricts fundamental freedoms and has become increasingly intolerant of any sort of display of discontent.

In recent years, Kazakh authorities have increased their heavy-handed response to peaceful protest, imprisoned activists and journalists on politically motivated charges, and shut down critical media outlets.

Foreign investors – many of whom recognise the importance of upholding international labour standards – should note that while the government claims it promotes social partnership, it has decimated Kazakhstan’s independent trade union movement and drawn repeated criticism from the International Labour Organisation.

Kazakhstan aspires to be one of the top 30 most developed countries by 2050 and to join the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD). No one can fault Astana for seeking out opportunities like EXPO 2017, but the government’s rights-violating policies are an impediment to such aspirations.

By Mihra Rittmann, Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch

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(News report from Issue No. 333, published on June 19 2017)

Tajikistan cancels licences for international courier agencies

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DUSHANBE, JUNE 19 2017 (The Bulletin) — International courier companies DHL, TNT, UPS and Pony Express are still waiting to be granted operating licences, nearly two weeks after the government suddenly ordered them to stop work.

The authorities told four of the world’s biggest courier companies that they needed to apply for a new licence to continue operations on June 7, but despite consultations and attempts to talk to the authorities none of the companies have yet been able to re-start work.

“We have no idea why this happened so suddenly. We have been working in the country since 1995, and never faced such an issue,” said an employee of UPS in Dushanbe. “We still have not heard anything from the communication services. Most probably the government is trying to popularise Pochtai Tojik [the Tajik Post Office], and remove competition.”

The row is a reminder of the fragile nature of doing business in Tajikistan. At the beginning of the year the government slapped a back-tax fine on mobile operator Tcell just as Sweden’s Telia was trying to sell its 60% stake in the company. Telia accused it of trying to interfere and profit from the sales process.

On the courier companies, the state-run news agency Khovar said that the companies would be able to apply for a new licence if they wanted to return to work.

“The law must be respected. If the above-named companies appeal to the Liaison Service for registration of their license, after a positive decision they will be reopened,” Khovar quoted an unnamed government source as saying.

But an employee of TNT said that getting a new licence wasn’t quite as simple as the Tajik authorities appeared to make out.

“Work in our office has stopped since June 7 and no comments are even made at these days,” she said.

“We applied for the license but there has been no result on that.”

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(News report from Issue No. 333, published on June 19 2017)

UN chief’s visit disappoints human rights activists

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ALMATY, JUNE 15 2017 (The Bulletin) — UN Security general Antonio Guterres completed a tour of all five Central Asian states, his first since taking the job six months ago, although human rights activists complained that he had taken too soft a line on a regional crackdown of journalists and dissenters.

Mr Guterres’ main message was that the governments of the region need to remain engaged with international organisations to reach their full potential.

“Kazakhstan has been a symbol of dialogue, a symbol of peace, a symbol of the promotion of contacts between cultures, religions and civilizations; and with its presence in the (UN) Security Council, an extremely important dimension in mediation, in relation to conflict,” he said in Astana.

In Ashgabat, a few days later, after attending a counter-terrorism conference Mr Guterres, a former Portuguese PM and UN high commissioner for refugees, took a tougher line on rights.

“Upholding the rights of freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly in this region are fundamental to countering the threat that violent extremism poses,” he said.

Even so, with media freedoms and human rights on the retreat in the region, after a series of arrests of journalists and a crackdown on workers’ unions, activists accused Mr Guterres of going soft on the issue in favour of developing nodes of engagement.

Hugh Williamson, director of the Central Asia division at New York- based Human Rights Watch, said Mr Guterres had failed to meet members of local civil rights movements on his tour of the region and that describing Kazakhstan as a “pillar of stability” and Kyrgyzstan as a “pioneer of democracy” was sending out the wrong message.

“Central Asian leaders also pay close attention to what high-level visitors like Guterres focus on, also in public,” he said in a statement.

“Not only did Guterres fail to set clear expectations on human rights improvements across Central Asia, his praise for his largely authoritarian audience risks sending the message that trampling over human rights is fine.”

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(News report from Issue No. 333, published on June 19 2017)

Kazakh Parliament approves aid deal

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JUNE 14 2017 (The Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s parliament ratified a deal to give Kyrgyzstan $100m of aid to help adapt to Eurasian Economic Union regulations for animal sanitary and customs procedures, media reported. Kyrgyzstan has previously complained that Kazakhstan was deliberately causing problems on its shared border.

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(News report from Issue No. 333, published on June 19 2017)

China’s AIIB lends to Tajikistan

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JUNE 17 2017 (The Bulletin) — The Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Bank (AIIB) approved a $60m loan to Tajikistan to part finance the refurbishment of the Nurek Hydropower station and a $114m loan to part-finance a road bypass around Batumi. The AIIB is a new institutional bank that its critics have said is designed to spread Chinese influence. The United States has declined to become a member.

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(News report from Issue No. 333, published on June 19 2017)

Uzbekistan’s Pres. Mirziyoyev reaches out to Muslims

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TASHKENT, JUNE 15 2017 (The Bulletin) — Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev hosted an iftar, a religious dinner eaten after sunset during the Islamic festival of Ramadan, for the first time in Uzbekistan, possibly a sign that he is trying to woo pious Muslims.

The dinner featured 1,200 people and was televised, a medium widely used by the Uzbek authorities when they want to get a message out to the population.

One Uzbek man in his 20s said that this was a clear signal that Mr Mirziyoyev was trying to make a clean break with the policies of former president Islam Karimov who distrusted and marginalised Islam.

“It seems that our president began taming imams with soft power,” he said.

Another young Uzbek was more direct and said that Mirziyoyev may have other priorities.

“Putin was also a Communist and a KGB agent and now he manipulates the masses via the Russian Orthodox Church,” he said of Russian President Vladimir Putin who promoted the Orthodox church and rebuilt cathedrals once he took power, in direct contrast to the Soviet Union’s treatment of religion.

“So does Mirziyoyev, I think.”

Although there has been a gradual increase in some civil liberties in the past nine months or so, people in Uzbekistan are still wary of discussing politics and both men declined to be named.

Uzbekistan is officially a secular republic, although its population is predominantly Muslim. After independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Karimov argued with leaders of a popular Islamist movement. He ended up banning them, leading to the creation of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) which launched a series of bomb attacks in the 1990s.

Karimov also blacklisted hundreds of pious ordinary Muslims and tried to ban some practices, such as the iftar.

On a trip to Bukhara in the south of the country earlier on June 15, before his iftar, Mr Mirziyoyev also suggested that he was going to roll back some of the Karimov-era restrictions on Muslims.

He said that he wanted to rebuild the 15th century madrasah Mir Arab and also that it might be time to move some people off an official blacklist of Muslims.

“All the blacklisted can’t be radicals. You should speak to them, recheck their views and learn if there are any innocent who were blacklisted inequitably,” he told an audience of thousands on a conference call that lasted several hours with religious and secular leaders across the country.

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(News report from Issue No. 333, published on June 19 2017)

Georgia starts processing law to ban foreigners from owning land

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TBILISI, JUNE 14 2017 (The Bulletin) — Georgia’s parliament started processing a law that will forbid foreigners from owning farmland, despite warnings from experts that the ban will stunt the growth of the agriculture sector.

The Georgian Dream government dominates parliament and has said that it is bringing in the law because of the pressure on farmland, although opponents have said that its main aim is to roll back another key policy of former president Mikheil Saakashvili.

Levan Davitashvili, the minister of agriculture, said that under the new legislation foreigners would only be allowed to own land if they inherited it, if they married into it or if they already had a permanent residence or an investment permit.

“Land is a particularly limited resource and, with the population growth, land resources are becoming more significant and valuable,” media quoted him as saying. “It is crucial that agricultural land has to be for Georgian citizens and they have to have the property rights.”

When he was in power between 2003 and 2013, Mr Saakahvili had courted Afrikaans to move to Georgia from South Africa, promising them access to good farmland. He followed this up with campaigns to persuade Indian farmers to also move to Georgia too. Essentially he wanted the expertise and investment potential the foreign farmers would bring.

But alongside the expertise, the farmers from South Africa and India generated resentment and frustration from locals, something that the Georgian Dream picked up on and campaigned to change.

After winning a majority of MPs in Parliament in 2012, the Georgian Dream brought in a moratorium to suspend the sale of farmland to foreigners. This moratorium was declared unconstitutional in Dec. 2014 and revoked.

Earlier this month, with the Georgian Dream now dominating Parliament, constitutional amendments were passed banning land sales to foreigners. The new law being discussed, though, will come into play before constitutional amendments.

Phatima Mamardashvili, head of the Agricultural Policy Research Centre, said the ban was negative.

“Our agriculture is so unproductive. We should welcome any investment,” she told The Bulletin. “Foreign investor bring knowledge, capital, new technology. These new limitations are negative. foreign investment flow will be reduced. Georgia will be a less attractive market.”

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(News report from Issue No. 333, published on June 19 2017)