OCT. 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – With the price of a barrel of oil falling to a four-year low, the Kazakh government has said it will review its national budget. Kazakhstan’s economy is propped up mainly by oil revenues. With oil revenues falling and with sanctions hitting Russia, Kazakhstan’s disposable income has shrunk.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 15 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a sort of best-practise benchmark for countries heavily involved in mining or oil production, told Azerbaijan that it needs to undergo a compliance check five months earlier than planned.
EITI chief Clare Short, a former British minister, said that concerns over Azerbaijan’s recent crackdown on civil society had triggered the compliance check.
“The situation facing civil society in Azerbaijan is clearly problematic,” Ms Short wrote in a statement.
“The Board discussed the findings of the fact finding mission and expressed deep concern. The Board hopes that Azerbaijan will open up more space for civil society to make its essential contribution to the EITI as laid down in our Standard.”
International pressure has been increasing on Azerbaijan over its treatment of opposition activists and human rights defenders. The EITI’s statement will be particularly irritating to Azerbaijan, though, as it has previously touted its links to EITI as evidence of its good intentions.
Being ordered to undergo a compliance check before 2015 will be publicly humiliating.
And there is some evidence that the pressure on Azerbaijan is beginning to tell. On Oct. 17, President Ilham Aliyev released four opposition activists as part of a wider amnesty.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 15 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – A visit by Uzbek security chief Rustam Inoyatov caused a stir. Not because a senior Uzbek official visited Beijing, such trips have become fairly commonplace over the past five years or so as China extends its influence in the region, but because of a photo from the meeting.
At the meeting on Oct. 14, Mr Inoyatov is pictured shaking the hand of Meng Jianzhu, head of political and legal affairs of the Central Committee. This is effectively a ministerial position.
The photo showed a thick-set 70-year-old Mr Inoyatov with barely a fleck of grey in his hear.
It’s also the first publicly available picture of Mr Inoyatov for some years. Searches across the internet only yielded grainy or blurred shots.
The picture is symbolic. Mr Inoyatov has been accused of being behind the campaign to purge Gulnara Karimova, the eldest daughter of President Islam Karimov, of power. This picture may represent him, literally, coming out of the shadows.
Another theory about the picture is that it shows that Mr Inoyatov and Mr Karimov are putting on a show of force to Russia and a warning that it should not try to destabilise elections planned for 2015.
The photo suggests that Uzbekistan and China have grown increasingly close and that Russia risks being left behind as a bystander.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 15 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Around 3,000 Russian soldiers stationed in Armenia staged a week- long military exercise. The exercise is a reminder of Russia’s presence in the region and the fragile peace in the South Caucasus. Azerbaijan has made it clear that it still wants to re-take the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh currently run by pro-Armenia forces.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 21 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Looking to secure more foreign direct investment (FDI), Georgian president Giorgi Margvelashvili travelled to Japan on a state visit. During his five day trip Mr Margvelashvili will meet with Japanese Emperor Akihito and PM Shinzo Abe, Georgia is heavily reliant on FDI.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 19 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan’s ministry of sport said that if it was to win the right to host the Winter Olympic Games in 2022 it would expect advertisers and investors to fund around 66% of the costs. Kazakhstan is desperate to host the Winter Olympics but observers have said that it might not be able to afford it.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
URALSK/Kazakhstan, OCT. 22 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Finding a taxi in Atyrau, a city of around 200,000 people in western Kazakhstan near its Caspian Sea coast, for the 500-kilometre journey to Uralsk is easy.
During the late morning, drivers gather at the car park in front of the city’s bus station. It costs 5,500 tenge per person (around $30).
Atyrau is a dusty boomtown, relatively charmless. Good then that it is quickly left behind. North of it is the steppe, interminable and yellow-brown.
The horizon stretches in every direction and very little gets in its way.
Small villages hide down secondary roads. Entrepreneurs sell melons at a few crossroads. There are roadside burial tombs, some standing alone and others in circular formations.
For more or less the entirety of the drive there is a curved line of trees to the east. Sometimes this line of trees is directly adjacent to the road and other times it hovers far in the distance. These trees hug the banks of the Ural River, which snakes down from the Ural mountain range before emptying into the Caspian Sea.
The river is the dividing line between Europe and Asia. Just over halfway to Uralsk the landscape, though still mainly scrub, begins to liven up a bit. Previously, the only trees to be seen were grouped together in unhealthy-looking planned groves.
Very slowly, these spindly man-made groves yield to more natural looking clusters. Slopes give some shape to the terrain over the final 50km of the journey. And then, 10km, outside Uralsk there is a big hill, the first the flat horizon has been broken, after which the city makes itself known to its new arrivals.
Settled by Cossacks and full of ornate cathedrals and brightly-painted wooden houses, Uralsk is a world away from Astana’s contemporary triumphalism.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – London-based Amnesty International said it had present a petition with 200,000 signatures calling for the release of dozens of so-called prisoners of conscience in Uzbekistan. Human rights activists say Uzbekistan has one of the worst records in the world.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 20 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Iranian leader Hassan Rouhani will visit Azerbaijan later this year or the start of 2015, media reported, another sign that relations between the two neighbours are improving. Relations between Azerbaijan and Iran have improved since Mr Rouhani came to power.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan and its Canadian mining partners once again clashed over ownership of the Kumtor gold mine in the mountains on the east of the country.
Kumtor is the main economic engine of Kyrgyzstan, generating around 10% of its GDP. The problem is Kyrgyzstan wants to own more of the mine which is mainly owned by Totonto-listed Centerra Gold.
Now, Kyrgyzstan president Almazbek Atambayev has threatened to force Centerra Gold to delist from the Toronto stock exchange after a court in Canada suspended its shares.
Kyrgyzstan owns a third of the company but Stans Energy, a Canadian company, has taken out a court injunction preventing Kyrgyzstan from trading its stake. Stans Energy says it is looking for payment from the Kyrgyz government after losing its licence to develop the Kutessay II rare earth mine.
The row between Kyrgyzstan and its foreign investors has been rumbling along for years. It shows no sign of slowing.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)