JUNE 7 2021 (The Bulletin) — Robert Kocharyan, Armenia’s former president and now the head of an opposition party that is trying to unseat PM Nikol Pashinyan, promised to secure the country’s borders if he won a parliamentary election on June 20. Armenia’s election will shape the country for the next few years.
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— This story was published in issue 487 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on June 9 2021
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021
JUNE 6 2021 (The Bulletin) — Orhan Inandi, the Turkish educator and opposition figure, is being held captive at the Turkish embassy in Bishkek, his wife, Reyhan, said in a Twitter video. Mr Inandi disappeared on May 31 in an apparent abduction. His supporters have said that Turkish security forces kidnapped him. Turkish Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames supporters of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen for a failed coup attempt in 2016 and has vowed to track them down. Mr Inandi, who holds Turkish and Kyrgyz citizenship, is head of the Gulenist network of schools and universities in Kyrgyzstan.
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— This story was published in issue 487 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on June 9 2021
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021
JUNE 6 2021 (The Bulletin) — Spain’s Sergio Perez, driving a Red Bull-Racing Honda, won the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Baku after championship leaders Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen both crashed out. The Baku circuit has earned a reputation as one of the most exciting Grand Prixs with drivers racing through the city’s streets.
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— This story was published in issue 487 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on June 9 2021
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021
JUNE 5 2021 (The Bulletin) — Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov ordered his government to increase ice cream exports to China. Turkmen state-owned media reported Mr Berdymukhamedov as saying that Turkmenistan had exported 400 tonnes of ice cream to China in 2020.
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— This story was published in issue 487 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on June 9 2021
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021
TBILISI/JUNE 5 2021 (The Bulletin) — A court in Georgia accused a bishop of presiding over a sadist regime at a school for disabled orphans that beat and sexually abused children, rare criticism of the Orthodox Church in Georgia where it is held in high esteem.
The court order to remove disabled children from the church-run school will also embarrass the ruling Georgian Dream government which has been criticised for its close ties with the Orthodox Church and for being reluctant to carry out a full investigation at the Ninotsminda Orphanage despite evidence of abuse.
Four investigations since the orphanage was opened in 2015 have fallen through.
Anna Arganashvili, head of the Partnership for Human Rights NGO which had pushed for the court’s intervention, said: “The court decreed that if children are in danger today, it must be stopped immediately. This is crucial.”
The Georgian Orthodox Church, and Bishop Spiridon Abuladze whose jurisdiction the orphanage falls under, have denied any wrongdoing and appealed the court’s decision to effectively close the school where 57 children had lived.
Media reported that the Ninotsminda Orphanage, 160km southwest of Tbilisi, is one of three orphanages that the Georgian Orthodox Church runs. Online reports quoted children from the school as saying that they had been placed in stress positions, beaten and abused.
In Georgia, with its instinctively traditional culture, the Orthodox Church is one of the most powerful institutions in the country. Analysts have said that an unofficial alliance with the Orthodox Church has been vital to the Georgian Dream’s election successes since 2012.
Last month the Georgian Dream was one of the only political parties in Georgia not to sign a pledge to protect gay rights, which the Georgian Orthodox Church opposes.
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— This story was published in issue 487 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on June 9 2021
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021
JUNE 5 2021 (The Bulletin) — Eurowings, the low-cost airline owned by Germany’s Lufthansa, will start weekly flights from Dusseldorf to Tbilisi from July. There has been a boom in flights to Georgia over the past few years, driven mainly by tourism, led by Hungary’s Wizz Air which set up a base in Kutaisi in 2016. Seasonal workers have also pushed up demand for flights to Europe from Georgia. This year Germany has invited thousands of Georgians to pick fruit at its farms.
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— This story was published in issue 487 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on June 9 2021
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021
JUNE 4 2021 (The Bulletin) — Prices for cement in Kazakhstan have risen because of a boom in house construction, media reported. Industry minister Beibut Atamkulov said that the price of cement was up by 30-40%. The Kazakh government has driven a house building boom, in part to help its economy recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Cement use has soared across the region. Uzbekistan doubled its cement use in the first four months of the year compared to the same period in 2020.
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— This story was published in issue 487 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on June 9 2021
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021
JUNE 4 2021 (The Bulletin) — The Asian Development Bank (ADB) signed a deal with Uzbekistan’s Hamkorbank to lend it $20m to improve access to finance for small and medium-sized businesses. Christine Engstrom, the ADB’s Private Sector Financial Institutions Division Director, said that small businesses employ 74% of Uzbekistan’s workforce but were struggling to access capital because of the pandemic, especially those in outlying areas.
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— This story was published in issue 487 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on June 9 2021
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021
JUNE 4 2021 (The Bulletin) — A landmine blew up and killed two Azerbaijani journalists and a local official in Nagorno-Karabakh. The men were travelling in a truck when it hit the mine. Four other people were injured. Azerbaijan has blamed Armenia for the deaths because it said that it had not handed over maps showing areas that it had mined during a war for control of Nagorno-Karabakh last year.
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— This story was published in issue 487 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on June 9 2021
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021
ALMATY/JUNE 4 2021 (The Bulletin) — Uzbekistan has applied to join the Almaty-based intergovernmental Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) which is closely linked to the Kremlin-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).
Media quoted Grigory Marchenko, a former Kazakh Central Bank chief and now an adviser to the EDB, as saying that the Uzbek government had now made a formal membership application. Mr Marchenko has previously said that the EDB would welcome an application by Uzbekistan.
Applying to join the EDB pushes along Uzbekistan’s potential membership of the EAEU and, with it, potentially deeper regional economic integration. Uzbek Pres. Shavkat Mirziyoyev has said that Uzbekistan should join the EAEU, which includes Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus as its members.
The EDB was set up in 2006, nine years before the EAEU. With the addition of Tajikistan, the EDB’s members mirror the EAEU.
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— This story was published in issue 487 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin, on June 9 2021
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2021