Tag Archives: Azerbaijan

COMMENT: Governments will be judged on how they deal with the coronavirus

MARCH 26 (The Bulletin) — With the global impact and disruption of Covid-19 becoming apparent, it is time to see what the governments of Central Asia and the South Caucasus are made of. Their responses now will forge their reputations. They will be judged.

And, so far, reactions have been wildly different.

Turkmenistan and Tajikistan appear to be pretending that the Covid-19 pandemic is not happening. Neither country has reported cases and in Tajikistan people are being encouraged to continue with their lives as normal. Last weekend thousands of people gathered to celebrate the Persian New Year and President Emomali Rakhmon has barely broken with his official engagements. In Ashgabat, President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has talked up herbal remedies to the pandemic.

Berdymukhamedov and Rakhmon may be the Central Asian versions of Nero. While Rome burnt for a week in 64AD, Emperor Nero fiddled, or at least that is the popular perception.

Elsewhere the reaction of governments to the Covid-19 pandemic has been more mainstream. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia and Armenia have all ordered lockdowns over their main cities and announced economic packages that will support business. Kyrgyzstan has applied to the IMF to help dampen its own Covid-19 epidemic which appears linked to people in the more religious and conservative south of the country returning home from the Hajj in Saudi Arabia.

In Azerbaijan, the approach has veered away from the orthodoxy, as it often does. Instead of offering the government grants and loans favoured by other countries to keep business running and to buy extra supplies and resources for its health service, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev set up a special fund that would accept donations from companies, government agencies and the wealthy.

Never one to miss an opportunity to self-promote, top billing on the website currently goes to Aliyev and his wife, Mehriban, who is also the vice-president, for donating their salaries for 2020 to the fund. The website doesn’t say how large these donations were.

Covid-19 will shrink growth rates and possibly even economies across the region. The people of Central Asia and the South Caucasus are used to big, interventionist and, some would say, authoritarian government. Now these leaders have the opportunity to show their people that this power can be used to good effect in a national emergency.

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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020

Azerbaijan reports 81 cases of the coronavirus

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MARCH 26 (The Bulletin) — The authorities in Azerbaijan have reported 81 cases of the coronavirus, including two deaths. The Formula 1 Grand Prix, scheduled for June and the highlight of the sporting calendar in Azerbaijan, has also been cancelled. Baku was also meant to be hosting matches for the UEFA European Football Championship this summer. It has also been postponed by a year.

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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020

Azerbaijan’s Socar confirms major Caspian Sea oil field find

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BAKU/March 19 (The Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s state oil company Socar confirmed that it had found a major oil field in the Caspian Sea.

Announcing the find, Socar chairman Rovnag Abdullayev said that this was the first significant oil discovery in Azerbaijan’s territory since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

“Its oil reserves estimated more than 60m tonnes,” he said. “Development of the Karabagh field will significantly contribute to Azerbaijan’s oil incomes.”

Roughly, 60m tonnes of oil equals 440m barrels, although Mr Abdullayev did not say how much of this was recoverable. This is important as recoverable barrels of oil can be a small proportion of the actual reserves. The Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil field, the bedrock of Azerbaijan’s economy, by comparison has around 4b barrels of recoverable reserves and the Kashagan field in the Kazakh sector of the Caspian Sea, which Kazakhstan started operating in 2016, has an estimated 9-13b barrels of recoverable oil reserves.

Azerbaijan is still reliant on oil and gas to power its economy. This year it is turning on gas supplies to central Europe pumped from the BP-led Shah Deniz 2 project via a series pipelines known as the South Gas Corridor.

Socar’s partner in the exploration of the Karabagh field is Equinor, the majority state-owned Norwegian energy company that was formerly called Statoil. Equinor owns a 7.27% stake in the ACG project and an 8.71% stake in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that pumps gas from the Caspian Sea to Turkey. It has not commented on exploration of the Karabagh field.

The Karabagh field, which lies 120km east of Baku, was first discovered by Soviet geologists in the 1950 but was never developed. In the mid-1990s.

Nick Coleman, senior editor at S&P Global Platts, told The Bulletin that although not the biggest oil find, the Karabagh field will still be useful for Azerbaijan.

“You have all the infrastructure there already so it should be relatively low-cost to develop,” he said. “And it is still a pretty decent size. If you’d found that in the North Sea you’d have done very well.”

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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020

Coronavirus spreads through Central Asia and South Caucasus

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YEREVAN/March 26 (The Bulletin) — The Covid-19 virus started to take a grip of the Central Asia and South Caucasus region with only Tajikistan and Turkmenistan not reporting any outbreaks.

Worst hit, by some margin, has been Armenia with 290 cases reported by March 26. Officials said that the source of the outbreak was a sewing factory in Yerevan and people arriving from Iran, which has had one of the worst outbreaks in the world.

From sounding blase about the impact of the coronavirus only two weeks ago, Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan has now ordered a lockdown along the same lines as European countries, which is hitting businesses.

“Let’s look at the upcoming week as a unique opportunity to read, self-reflect and plan the future of the Armenian nation,” he said.

Neighbouring Georgia and Azerbaijan have also reported cases of the coronavirus, 77 cases and 80 cases each, but have taken different approaches to dealing with it. The Georgian government has imposed a lockdown in Tbilisi but in Azerbaijan the rules are more relaxed.

In Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have imposed lockdowns over their largest cities to try to contain the spread of the coronavirus, although Turkmen and Tajik officials have insisted, much to the amazement of many analysts, that they haven’t had any cases.

On March 21, Tajik towns hosted the traditional celebrations to mark the Persian new year Nowruz festival and Turkmen leader Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has talked up the medicinal benefits of various herbs against the coronavirus.

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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020

Azerbaijan sets up fund to deal with coronavirus

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MARCH 26 (The Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s government has said it will set up a fund to help businesses recover from the impact of the coronavirus and has asked the country’s wealthy to contribute. The ministry of defence, and the Central Bank have said they will make a contribution and President Ilham Aliyev and his wife, Mehriban, who is also the vice-president, have donated their salary for the year.

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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020

Socar opens more petrol stations in Azerbaijan

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MARCH 19 (The Bulletin) — Socar, the Azerbaijani state oil and gas company, said that it had opened its 31st petrol station in Azerbaijan. Trading under the Socar Petroleum brand, the petrol station will offer Euro-95 and A-92 quality fuels. Socar has been building up its network of petrol stations for some time. Socar Petroleum started operations in 2008.

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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020

Azerbaijan releases journalist abducted in Tbilisi

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MARCH 17 (The Bulletin) — Afqan Muxtarli, an Azerbaijani investigative journalist who was kidnapped from Tbilisi in 2017 where he had been living in exile and handed over to police in Azerbaijan, was unexpectedly freed from prison in Baku (March 17). Mr Muxtarli, who was convicted of smuggling and illegally crossing the Azerbaijani-Georgian border and sent to prison for six years, always maintained that he was targeted because of his journalism. He had fled Azerbaijan in 2014 because he said that he was warned that he would be arrested. Human rights activists accused the Georgian authorities of colluding in the abduction of Mr Muxtarli.

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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020

Berdymukhamedov travels to Baku to discuss east-west corridor

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MARCH 12 (The Bulletin) — On a trip to Baku, Turkmen leader Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev discussed expanding the neighbours’ bilateral trade ties. Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan see themselves as key to the East-West trade corridor that has attracted billions of dollars of investment over the past few years and media reported that this issue was also among the issues that they discussed. The trip to Baku was a relatively rare overseas trip for Mr Berdymukhamedov, although he has shown more interest in developing foreign ties to expand Turkmenistan’s gas trade routes.

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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020

Azerbaijan buys London taxi cabs

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MARCH 11 (The Bulletin) — Azerbaijan agreed to buy 100 more London-style taxis from British electric vehicle manufacturer LEVC for an undisclosed amount. A government press release said that President Ilham Aliyev had personally decided that the new fleet will be painted ‘Tupelo Red’. In 2012, Azerbaijan bought 1,000 taxis from LEVC. These were painted purple.

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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020

Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia report coronavirus infections

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TBILISI/March 2 2020 (The Bulletin) — Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia all declared their first cases of the coronavirus Covid-19 and closed their borders with Iran, a hotbed of the disease.

In Central Asia, governments blocked entry to countries that they considered high-risk and cut flights to China in a desperate attempt to keep out the coronavirus that has spread around the world from its origin in the city of Wuhan.

All the confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the South Caucasus appear to have been linked with Iran. Borders between Iran and Armenia and Azerbaijan have become increasingly porous over the past few years as trade and relations improved.

Governments in the South Caucasus appealed to the public not to panic. In an Instagram message, Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili stood on a commuter bus wearing a facemask. She appeared to be the only person wearing a mask.

“Let’s spread #SafetynotFear!” she wrote. “We need to show people that safety means remaining calm and being responsible.”

In Armenia, PM Nikol Pashinyan was more dismissive of the threat from the virus, saying that flu was a bigger killer. He also said that the health services were on top of the situation in Armenia, although there was a “shortage of masks”.

Central Asian countries have not reported any cases of the coronavirus, although analysts said that this may be because officials were not keen on reporting them or that health officials had failed to spot them.

And governments continued to try to incubate against the disease. Kazakhstan cut the number of flights to China and South Korea and stopped issuing visas to Chinese.

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— This story was first published in issue 438 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin