AUG. 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The trial of Seitkazy Matayev, head of Kazakhstan’s journalist union and his son, Asset, for embezzlement began. Mr Matayev had been the first press secretary to President Nursultan Nazarbayev in 1991 and he had been presumed to be above a crackdown on the media this year.
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(News report from Issue No. 293, published on Aug. 29 2016)
AUG. 5 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Russian mobile phone operator MTS, which is listed on the New York stock exchange, said it had sold its business in Uzbekistan to the Uzbek government. The US authorities have been investigating alleged corruption at MTS’s Uzbek operations. MTS owned a 50% stake in UMS, the country’s third largest mobile operator. Various governments have launched a series of investigations into corruption by mobile operators in Uzbekistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 292, published on Aug. 12 2016)
AUG. 3 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Looking to boost the US’ regional profile, US Secretary of State John Kerry hosted a summit with all five foreign secretaries from Central Asia. Dubbed C5 +1, the meeting was a follow-up from its inaugural session in Samarkand last year. It’s important because the US has been accused of losing interest in the region since pulling its military out of Afghanistan in 2014.
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(News report from Issue No. 292, published on Aug. 12 2016)
ALMATY, AUG. 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev flew to Ankara to meet with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, making him the first head-of-state to travel to Turkey since a coup attempt in July.
The meeting highlighted Mr Nazarbayev’s savvy foreign policy and his attempts to maintain a balance between the competing pressures placed over Kazakhstan by rival powers, mainly Russia, China, and Turkey and to a lesser extent the US.
On his trip to Ankara, Mr Nazarbayev voiced his support for Mr Erdogan, seen as one of the strongest leaders in the Muslim world, and, importantly, he also went some way to appeasing Mr Erdogan’s quest to crackdown on supporters of the exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen when he said that he would send back any teachers linked to the outlawed movement.
“We do not support anyone going against Turkey. This is not in our interest. Both sides’ education ministries will control the schools by creating a working group,” media quoted Mr Nazarbayev as saying. “If there are teachers with links, we will send them back and ask the Turkish government to send other teachers.”
Mr Erdogan has blamed his former ally Mr Gulen, who now lives in the US for organising the coup attempt. He has arrested thousands of Gulenists in Turkey and put pressure on Turkey’s allies to close schools and hospitals linked to the Gulen movement.
Mr Nazarbayev, though, stopped short of agreeing to close the 30 Gulen-linked schools outright, as Kyrgyzstan has also declined to do. They are considered a key part of the Kazakh education system, offering a syllabus based on a secular scientific curriculum. News reports said that only around 8% to 9% of the teachers at Kazakhstan’s Gulenist schools were from Turkey.
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(News report from Issue No. 292, published on Aug. 12 2016)
AUG. 9 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili blocked a petition calling for a referendum that sought to enshrine an outright ban on gay marriages in Georgia’s Constitution. Supporters of the petition had argued for a referendum on the issue to be held at the same time as a parliamentary election in October.
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(News report from Issue No. 292, published on Aug. 12 2016)
AUG. 3 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — After months of increasingly bitter rows, minority shareholders at London-traded KMG EP voted against selling their stakes in the company to its parent Kazakhstan’s state owned Kazmunaigas. Kazmunaigas had been looking to boost its 58% stake in the company, one of its few assets which have been doing relatively well during an increasingly tough oil-linked economic downturn. KMG EP mainly owns downstream operations which earn US dollars. These have been more profitable than many of KMG’s upstream operations.
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(News report from Issue No. 292, published on Aug. 12 2016)
AUG. 4 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A judge in Kazakhstan ordered opposition leader Vladimir Kozlov to be released on parole, five years into a 7-1/2 sentence for trying to overthrow the government. Kozlov was the highest profile opposition figure to be imprisoned for trying to overthrow the government after clashes between oil workers and police in the west of the country in December 2011 that killed at least 16 people. The government has 15 days to act on the judge’s decision to free Kozlov.
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(News report from Issue No. 292, published on Aug. 12 2016)
AUG. 10 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Up to 50 street cleaners, mainly women, in the Uzbek city of Samarkand, protested against the local government because of unpaid wages. The Uzbek- language version of the US-funded RFE/RL news website said more protests were appearing in Uzbekistan over unpaid salaries.
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(News report from Issue No. 292, published on Aug. 12 2016)
AUG. 3 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan sacked Hrant Yepiskoposyan, first deputy director of the National Security Service, after partly blaming him for a two week stand-off with gunmen linked to an imprisoned opposition leader who had captured a police station in Yerevan.
The standoff ended after the gunmen gave themselves up but not before it had triggered street battles between supporters of Zhirayr Sefilyan, the imprisoned leader of the radical opposition group Founding Parliament and a hero veteran of the war in the 1990s with Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Dozens of people were arrested during the clashes, the worst in Yerevan for more than eight years.
Three policemen were also killed during the standoff which ended on July 31. Police have said that they were shot dead by the gunmen who captured the police station.
The authorities refused to release Mr Sefilyan, a key demand of the gunmen, but the standoff did trigger a serious constitutional crisis for Mr Sargsyan and has damaged his standing.
Analysts said that the capture of the police station and the support that the hostage-takers appeared to garner from ordinary people showed the level of frustration at Mr Sargsyan and his supporters.
“Many of them were almost certainly taking an opportunity to protest against the status quo, rather than endorsing an act of violence,” analyst Thomas de Waal wrote on the Open Democracy website.
“But even that is an indication of how desperate many mainstream Armenians feel in the face of a political system which they feel has no place for them — and which, due to recent constitutional changes, is likely to see Sargsyan and his team retain their grip on power for many years.”
Since the stand-off ended, Mr Sargsyan has sacked senior security officials. Kevork Kostanyan also resigned as the country’s prosecutor-general.
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(News report from Issue No. 292, published on Aug. 12 2016)
AUG. 1 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev said that he supported a referendum that would tweak the constitution and shift more power from the president to the PM. In the aftermath of a revolution in 2010, Kyrgyzstan voted to give parliament and the PM more power, a shift to what Western analysts have often dubbed as Central Asia’s first parliamentary democracy. Mr Atambayev said changes were needed to stop a new president taking too much power.
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(News report from Issue No. 292, published on Aug. 12 2016)