OCT. 11 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The main opposition candidate in the Tajik presidential election next month, rights activist Oynihol Bobonazarova, said she had been barred from standing. She blamed the Tajik Central Election Committee for disqualifying her because she had failed to collect enough signatures to support her candidature.
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(News report from Issue No. 156, published on Oct. 16 2013)
OCT. 14 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Igor Larra, a reporter for the independent Svoboda Slova newspaper in the city of Aktobe in northern Kazakhstan, has died of injuries he sustained when a group of unidentified men attacked him in August, media reported. News websites said that the attack may have been linked to his work.
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(News report from Issue No. 156, published on Oct. 16 2013)
OCT. 8 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — International human rights groups have been lining up to criticise the run up to Azerbaijan’s presidential election on Oct. 9. In a new report, London-based Amnesty International described the situation for media and human rights workers as a “downward spiral of oppression”.
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(News report from Issue No. 155, published on Oct. 9 2013)
OCT. 4 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Doubts are emerging over whether observer from the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) will be able to investigate effectively whether Uzbekistan still uses children to harvest its cotton.
Eight teams of monitors from the ILO have been in Uzbekistan since Sept. 23. Their job is to travel around the regions and detail any incidences of child labour.
Bowing to worldwide pressure, Uzbekistan last year pledged to give up using children to pick cotton. This year it invited the ILO to send teams to watch the harvest.
But reports are now leaking out that Uzbek officials may be working hard to give the UN monitors the run-around. Media and Uzbek opposition groups have said that because the ILO monitors are cooperating with the Uzbek authorities, their movements are tracked.
This means that officials can warn teachers when the ILO monitors are approaching, giving them time to usher their pupils from the fields back into the classroom.
Picking cotton is a labour intensive task, so if Uzbekistan has really stopped using children, who is harvesting it instead?
Not medical staff, the podrobno.uz website quoted Abdulkhakimov Hodzhibayev, a senior doctor, as saying. He was responding to reports that doctors and nurses were picking cotton instead of carrying out medical duties.
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(News report from Issue No. 155, published on Oct. 9 2013)
OCT. 5 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Uzbek authorities moved, Dilmurod Sayyid, a well-known journalist and critic of the government, from a prison in western Uzbekistan to a hospital in Tashkent, media reported, triggering concern that his health may be failing. A court sentence Sayyid to 12 years in prison in 2009 for extortion.
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(News report from Issue No. 155, published on Oct. 9 2013)
SEPT. 25 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Human Rights Watch, the New York-based lobby group, accused the Uzbek authorities of fabricating charges against activist Bobomurod Razzakov. A court in Bukhara found Razzakov guilty of human trafficking on Sept. 24 and sentenced him to four years in prison. Rights groups say Uzbekistan has one of the worst records in the world.
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(News report from Issue No. 154, published on Oct. 2 2013)
SEPT. 27 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Azerbaijan handed a five year prison sentence for possessing drugs, inciting hatred and treason to Hilal Mamedov, editor of the Talyshi Sado newspaper, a Talysh-language newspaper in the south of the country.
International human rights and media lobbyists said Azerbaijani authorities were using the courts to lock up the editors of newspaper that didn’t suit their agenda.
“I am saddened to see that the hostile environment for free media in Azerbaijan has not improved but is rather growing, as yet another journalist has received a lengthy prison sentence today,” said Dunja Mijatovic, the media representative for the OSCE, Europe’s governance lobby group.
The authorities have said that Hilal Mamedov was trying to destabilise the country. They have long been suspicious of the Talysh minority, a group of roughly 100,000 people who live along the border with Iran. The interior ministry has released a statement accusing Mamedov of undermining Azerbaijan’s security with inflammatory articles in the newspaper. It also accused him of spying for Iran.
Five years ago the then-editor of Talyshi Sado, Novruzali Mamedov (no relation to Hilal Mamedov) was also imprisoned on similar charges. He died in prison. Media groups said that he had been denied adequate medical treatment.
Azerbaijan has a poor media rights record and in her statement, the OSCE’s Ms Mijatovic said this was worsening in the run up to the Oct. 9 presidential election.
Ms Mijatovic may be right. Opposition journalists in Baku have been harassed and imprisoned while pro-government journalists have received new apartments.
Hilal Mamedov’s imprisonment is different, though, and it should be viewed as part of the dispute between the Talysh and the Azerbaijani state rather than through central politics.
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(News report from Issue No. 154, published on Oct. 2 2013)
SEPT. 27 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Uzbekistan has tripled cotton fibre exports to China to 300,000 tonnes, about half its total production, media reported.
The move is a snub to European and US buyers which have been lobbying to force Uzbekistan to drop its use of children to pick the cotton. It’s also another indicator of the deepening reach of China in Central Asia.
Cotton is important to Uzbekistan. It harvests around 3.3m tonnes of raw cotton a year and is the world’s second largest exporter.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s tour of Central Asia last month had focused on energy supplies and security issues. This deal, though, was apparently secured when he was in Tashkent.
After China, Bangladesh and South Korea are the biggest buyers, underlining how little leverage the West has with Uzbekistan over its cotton harvest.
The West’s push to stop Uzbekistan using children to pick cotton does, though, appear to have had some impact. Reports from Uzbekistan at the start of the cotton picking season said that the state-run plantations had now stopped employing school children to pick the cotton.
In September Uzbek authorities also allowed a team of monitors from the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the country to observe the cotton harvest, although human rights groups said they were still worried that the observers would only be allowed a blinkered view.
Their official report is widely anticipated.
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(News report from Issue No. 154, published on Oct. 2 2013)
SEPT. 25 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Police in the city of Urgench, northwest Uzbekistan, have detained Sergei Naumov, a prominent independent-minded journalist, without explanation since Sept. 21, rights groups said. Uzbekistan has one of the worst human rights records in the world and rights groups said they worried about Mr Naumov’s safety.
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(News report from Issue No. 153, published on Sept. 25 2013)
SEPT. 20 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Police in Baku arrested opposition journalist Perviz Hashimli for smuggling weapons into Azerbaijan from neighbouring Iran. Mr Hashimli denied the charges. Human rights activists have accused the Azerbaijani government of cracking down on opposition ahead of an Oct. 9 presidential election.
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(News report from Issue No. 153, published on Sept. 25 2013)