NOV. 6 (The Bulletin) — A Turkmen doctor who came out as gay on a video broadcast by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has recanted the information and said that it was falsised. Three days after coming out as gay, Kasymberdy Garayev, was summoned to a police station in Ashgabat. He left the following day and immediately distance himself from his earlier comments. Homosexuality is illegal in Turkmenistan.
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— This story was first published in issue 428 of the weekly Bulletin
NOV. 8 (The Bulletin) — Turkmen leader Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov visited Rome for a meeting with Italian PM Giuseppe Conte, a rare trip for Turkmenistan’s often-derided leader to visit an EU government. Italian companies, including energy company ENI, are working on a handful of major construction and oil and gas projects in Turkmenistan.
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— This story was first published in issue 428 of the weekly Bulletin
BAKU/NOV. 4 (The Bulletin) — Chevron finalised a deal to sell out of major stakes it owned in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas sector, a reflection of the reduced US corporate interest in the region.
In the deal, Chevron sold its 9.57% stake in the Caspian Sea oil field Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (ACG), Azerbaijan’s biggest oil producing project, and its 8.9% stake in the Baku-Tbilisi Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline for a total of $1.57b to Hungary’s MOL.
The California-based Chevron said in December it wanted to sell its assets in Azerbaijan. ExxonMobil has also said that it wants to sell off its smaller stakes in ACG and BTC.
For MOL, the deal gives it a bigger tie-in with Azerbaijan’s oil and gas sector, less than 12 months before Azerbaijan is due to start pumping gas to central Europe along a network of pipelines stretching from the Caspian Sea via the South Caucasus, Turkey and the Balkans.
“This transaction is an excellent fit to MOL’s current portfolio and the transaction contributes to the further transformation of MOL’s upstream segment into an international business by developing the company’s footprint in its core CIS region,” MOL said in a statement.
The deal is one of the biggest in MOL’s history and will add 20,000 barrels of oil per day to its production ACG has been producing oil since 1997, when the so-called ‘Deal of the century’ was signed between a consortium of Western partners led by BP and the Azerbaijani government.
Over the last eight years or so, its production has been declining, though, frustrating Azerbaijan’s government which has demanded increased investment by the partners.
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— This story was first published in issue 428 of the weekly Bulletin.
NOV. 4 (The Bulletin) — Inflation in Georgia hit 6.9% in October, up from 6.4% in September, the national statistics office said, confirming Central Bank warnings that prices were rising at an unsustainable rate. Georgia’s economy has been booming but inflation has undermined growth and has forced the Central Bank to raise interest rates three times since the start of September.
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— This story was first published in issue 428 of the weekly Bulletin
BISHKEK/Aug. 8 (The Bulletin) — Kyrgyz special forces arrested former president Almazbek Atambayev after a 24-hour siege at his fortified compound outside Bishkek in which at least one soldier died and dozens more were injured.
Shortly after his arrest, Mr Atambayev, president in 2011-17, was charged with corruption and his police mugshot was published.
Mr Atambayev and his supporters have called the charges politically motivated. Atambayev has fallen out with his handpicked successor Sooronbai Jeenbekov. Earlier, before his capture, Mr Jeenbekov called Mr Atambayev a criminal at an emergency session of Parliament.
“By putting up fierce armed resistance to the investigative measures undertaken within the framework of the law, Almazbek Atambayev heavily trampled upon the constitution and laws of Kyrgyzstan,” he said.
The two men fell out because Mr Atambayev had wanted to retain some backseat power after retirement, a move that Mr Jeenbekov rejected.
Police flooded central Bishkek on Thursday night, hours after Mr Atambayev’s arrest, expecting angry crowds, but although it was tense, it was also quiet.
Analysts though said that the arrest and the violence around the arrest, with an estimated 200 supporters of Mr Atamayev holding off the special forces soldiers, had pushed Kyrgyzstan, considered the most fragile country in Central Asia, into a period of instability.
Much depends on how Russia reacts. Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin invited Mr Atambayev to the Kremlin. Afterwards, he told the two men to make their peace as he didn’t want to see more instability.
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— This story was first published in issue 418 of the weekly Bulletin
July 30 (The Bulletin) — A court in Bishkek upheld a life prison sentence handed down to human rights activist Azimjan Askarov. Askarov, a 68-year-old ethnic Uzbek, was arrested after ethnic violence in 2010 in Osh killed several hundred people. He was blamed for stoking the violence. His supporters have said that ethnic Uzbeks were the target of the violence and that Askarov has been made a scapegoat.
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— This story was first published in issue 418 of the weekly Bulletin
July 26 (The Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s coastguard service rescued nine crewmen from an Iranian cargo ship just before it sank in the Caspian Sea. Reports said that the ship, which was carrying tiles to the Russian port of Makhachkala, had sprung a leak near the Azeri port of Lenkoran.
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— This story was first published in issue 418 of the weekly Bulletin
YEREVAN/Aug. 5 (The Bulletin) — Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan called for Armenia’s unification with the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, hardline language that immediately drew condemnation from neighbour Azerbaijan.
He made the comments during a visit to the Armenian controlled section of the region which is called Artsakh. During his speech, Mr Pashynian said: “Artsakh is Armenia and that’s it.”
He also led the crowd in chants of “miatsum” which means unification, used as a slogan during the 1990s when the region broke away from Azerbaijan.
A shaky UN ceasefire has held since then, although there are sporadic outbreaks of violence.
Azerbaijan, which has accused Mr Pashinyan of blocking peace negotiations since he took power in a revolution in 2018, issued an immediate rebuke, calling his statements a provocation.
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— This story was first published in issue 418 of the weekly Bulletin
Aug. 5 (The Bulletin) — Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev ordered the closure of a notorious prison in an isolated part of the Karakalpakstan region which had become synonymous with torture under his predecessor, Islam Karimov. The jail, which was freezing in winter and boiling in summer, had earned the nickname ‘The House of Horror’. Pres. Mirziyoyev has been trying to improve Uzbekistan’s reputation since he took over from Karimov in 2016.
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— This story was first published in issue 418 of the weekly Bulletin
Aug. 7 (The Bulletin) — Kazakhstan halted the roll-out of an internet programme that had been heavily criticised as a surveillance system. After several international free speech and human rights organisations had complained that Kazakh telecoms companies were forcing users to install snooping software onto their browsers, Kazakhstan’s State Security Committee said that the rollout had been a test and was never meant to be comprehensive.
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— This story was first published in issue 418 of the weekly Bulletin