MAY 26 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The de-facto government of the Nagorno-Karabakh breakaway region said one soldier of the Armenia-backed NKR Defence Army was killed by Azerbaijani fire. This is the first death in the disputed region since Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Armenia’s President Serzh Sargsyan met in Vienna in mid-May to strengthen the ceasefire.
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(News report from Issue No. 282, published on May 27 2016)
MAY 17 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Armenia’s Central Bank cut its key interest rate by half a percentage point to 7.75%, its lowest rate since November 2014, as it tried to counter sharply falling prices. Annualised inflation at the end of April measured minus 1.9%, the Central Bank said last week. It has steadily lowered interest rates from a high of 10.5% in July 2015.
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(News report from Issue No. 281, published on May 20 2016)
MAY 14 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Russian real estate holding Tashir Group opened a new $14m mall in Yerevan. Tashir Group, owned by Moscow-based Armenian businessman Samvel Karapetyan, has poured cash into several real estate projects in Armenia in the past few years. Last year, it bought the electricity distributor Electric Networks of Armenia from Russian state-owned Inter RAO.
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(News report from Issue No. 281, published on May 20 2016)
MAY 16 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Armenian ministry of agriculture sent a delegation to China to discuss a trade agreement aimed at opening the potentially lucrative Chinese market to alcoholic drinks from Armenia. Armenian wine exports tripled in volume between 2008 and 2014 and Armenian brandy is revered in the FSU. Last year, in a reflection of the current economic downturn, volumes fell by 31.5%.
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(News report from Issue No. 281, published on May 20 2016)
MAY 16 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – An IMF paper on the state of money markets across the South Caucasus and Central Asia said that most currencies are still overvalued against the US dollar, despite depreciations that have taken place over the past 18 months. The IMF highlighted that in January the Uzbek sum was 30% above its market value, and the Georgian lari was around 15% overvalued. The Armenian dram was the only currency that, according to the IMF, traded below its value.
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(News report from Issue No. 281, published on May 20 2016)
MAY 20 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s president, and Serzh Sargsyan, Armenia’s president, agreed to maintain a ceasefire over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region where violent clashes erupted at the beginning of April (May 16).
This was the first time the two presidents had met since four days of clashes killed dozens of people and alarmed international policymakers.
Diplomats from the US, Russia and France, including US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, also participated in the meeting in Vienna.
“The Presidents reiterated their commitment to the ceasefire and the peaceful settlement of the conflict,” the mediators said in a joint statement.
Mr Aliyev and Mr Sargsyan agreed to meet again in June to track the process of the settlement of the conflict.
The importance of the meeting was not the bland statement but the fact that the two presidents were already meeting and talking. The violence had threatened to destabilise the South Caucasus region, which hosts vital pipelines pumping gas to Europe and borders both Russia and Iran, worrying international leaders and policymakers.
Nagorno-Karabakh is officially part of Azerbaijan, but also home to a large Armenian population. An estimated 30,000 people died in fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s. Only a shaky 1994 UN-brokered ceasefire held the peace.
An Armenia-backed army now controls Nagorno-Karabakh, although Azerbaijan has also said it will retake the region.
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(News report from Issue No. 281, published on May 20 2016)
MAY 17 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – German lawmakers scheduled for June a vote on whether to label the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 as a “genocide”, a move that will score a major victory for Armenian lobby groups. In a 2005 resolution, the German parliament fell short of calling the deaths a genocide. France, Italy and a handful of other European countries recognise the 1915 events as a genocide, which irritates Turkey.
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(News report from Issue No. 281, published on May 20 2016)
MAY 18 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Russian miner Polymetal increased its production guidance for the next three years to reflect the gold deposits it has bought in Armenia and Kazakhstan this year. By the year 2020, the Kapan and Komarovskoye mines will add 12.5% to Polymetal’s total production. Polymetal bought Kapan, located in southern Armenia, in March and Komarovskoye, in north-east Kazakhstan, in April.
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(News report from Issue No. 281, published on May 20 2016)
ALMATY, MAY 12 2016, (The Conway Bulletin) – Revenues at Russian mobile operator VimpelCom’s Central Asia and the South Caucasus operations were sharply down in the first quarter of 2016 compared to the same period in 2015, a sign of the continuing economic malaise that has undermined consumer confidence in the region.
In Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, VimpelCom operates under the Beeline brand. Its customer base in the region shrank by 6% to just above 24m, roughly in line with figures released last month by its rival TeliaSonera.
In Kazakhstan, VimpelCom said that revenue from its mobile operations was just under 24b tenge in Q1, 10% lower than 2015, and that its subscriber base had fallen 4% to 9.2m.
The Kazakh mobile market has become increasingly competitive. Sweden’s Tele2 merged with Kazakhstan’s Altel earlier this year and has been undercutting its bigger rivals.
In its quarterly report, VimpelCom said that prices would stay low.
“Competition remains intense, however, although the company continues to maintain its commercially rational pricing strategy,” it said. “Beeline expects the competitive environment to remain challenging throughout 2016.”
And, other than in Uzbekistan were a new pricing strategy had sustained revenues, it was a similar story in other subsidiaries. In Georgia revenues were down 30% in US dollar terms and in Tajikistan down 27%.
VimpelCom said of the drop in revenue in Tajikistan that this was “mainly due to lower incoming international traffic as a result of fewer migrants living abroad due to the macro-economic slowdown in the region and a weakening local currency.”
A recession in Russia has heavily reduced job opportunities for migrant workers from Tajikistan, hitting remittances and economies in Central Asia.
Earlier this year, VimpelCom paid a fine of $795m after it admitted paying bribes in 2007/8 to access the Uzbek mobile market.
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(News report from Issue No. 280, published on May 13 2016)
MAY 13 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – A report by the lobby group IGLA-Europe makes for discouraging reading. Propping up the league table on gay, lesbian and transgender rights in 49 countries across Europe and its near abroad are Azerbaijan and Armenia, split by Russia.
They scored 5% and 7%. Above them, halfway up the table, was Georgia with 30%. The fine-print said that the report was primarily concerned with the legal framework established in each country to allow gays, lesbians and transgender people the same rights and protections as everybody else.
The IGLA’s assessment, in Armenia and Azerbaijan at least, was that this appears to be near zero.
And this is reflected in news reports of attacks on homosexuals and other minorities in Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Importantly, though, it is not just people with different sexual orienta- tions who are potential targets in these countries. The same group-think extends towards opposition activists, overly pious Muslims and journalists. They are all marginalised. This whole mentality needs changing.
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(Editorial from Issue No. 280, published on May 13 2016)