NOV. 22 (The Bulletin) — Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev sacked the mayor of Taraz, a town of 350,000 people in the south of the country, after a 12-year-old girl was raped in the latrine of her school. The rape sparked outrage in Taraz at the lack of care and oversight at the school. Reuters reported that 30% of schools in Kazakhstan still use outdoor latrines.
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— This story was first published in issue 430 of the weekly Bulletin.
NOV. 19 (The Bulletin) — Construction has started on a fibre-optical line running across the Caspian Sea between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan’s government-linked Astana Times reported. The project will, officials said, improve communication between Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.
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— This story was first published in issue 430 of the weekly Bulletin.
NOV. 4 (The Bulletin) — US NGO Freedom House said that free speech in Kazakhstan, alongside Sudan and Brazil, had deteriorated rapidly over the past 12 months. It said that the drop in free speech coincided with the handover of power from Nursultan Nazarbayev to Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and that the government had tried to “monopolise the mobile market and implement real-time electronic surveillance”.
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— This story was first published in issue 428 of the weekly Bulletin
NOV. 11 (The Bulletin) — Kazakhstan is losing $11m every month because of Russia’s ban on coal being sent to Ukraine across its territory, the Kazakh ministry of trade said. The Kazakh ministry said that it had approved a plan in July to send 103,500 tonnes of coal to Ukraine but that this had been downgraded by the Russian authorities to 60,200 tonnes. It said that subsequent coal supplies had also been reduced by the Russian authorities.
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— This story was first published in issue 428 of the weekly Bulletin.
NOV. 9 (The Bulletin) –The authorities in Kazakhstan monitored, but did not intercept, an unsanctioned protest in Almaty organised by the Oyan, Qazaqstan group wants the system of government to switch towards a parliamentary democracy and for political prisoners to be released. It is rare for police not to detain protesters at unsanctioned protests. This year there has been an increase in the number of protests in Kazakhstan.
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— This story was first published in issue 428 of the weekly Bulletin
NOV. 7 (The Bulletin) — Banks in Kazakhstan are still giving out risky retail loans, Moody’s the ratings agency said. Bank lending in Kazakhstan is a contentious issue as it has been highlighted as one of the biggest contributors to weakness of the Kazakh economy. Moody’s said that the ratio of retail loans to overall household income will be 2.4 times by mid-2020, the level reached in 2013 just before a recession. Kazakhstan’s Central Bank is the country’s financial supervisor and has tried to impose rules that were supposed to improve lending rules to limit exposure to bed debt.
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— This story was first published in issue 428 of the weekly Bulletin.
NOV. 6 (The Bulletin) — Kazakh energy minister Kanat Bozumbayev said that the budget for expanding the Tengiz oil field was too high, a declaration that sets Kazakhstan’s government at odds with Tengiz’s Western investors. The Tengiz project, which is led by Chevron, is Kazakhstan’s biggest producing oil field. Reports have appeared which have said that it will cost $45.2b to expand Tengiz, up from an initial cost estimate of $36.8b.
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— This story was first published in issue 428 of the weekly Bulletin.
Aug. 7 (The Bulletin) — Kazakhstan halted the roll-out of an internet programme that had been heavily criticised as a surveillance system. After several international free speech and human rights organisations had complained that Kazakh telecoms companies were forcing users to install snooping software onto their browsers, Kazakhstan’s State Security Committee said that the rollout had been a test and was never meant to be comprehensive.
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— This story was first published in issue 418 of the weekly Bulletin
> Kazakhstan and Georgia need to treat the disadvantaged with more respect to truly develop, writes James Kilner
The Human Rights Watch report on how state-run institutions treat physically and mentally disabled children in their care makes for particularly grim reading.
It cites children, the loud and less obedient ones, as saying that they are often chained to their beds and drugged into a dreamless sleep that can last 24 hours. They are beaten; made to feel like unwanted prisoners, rather than disabled children. When they reach adulthood, they transfer to an adult version of their children’s institution, thus ensuring a life sentence.
There is often no escape.
The report also pointedly says that of the 2,000 disabled children in the 19 state-run institutions, most are not orphaned. Reading between the lines, it is easier for the Kazakh government to take these children out of society than deal with them in a more humane way.
And this is the real shame in it all. A society that can’t treat the disadvantaged with respect will always be held back. This goes for the poor too.
Last week a 16-year-old boy in Tbilisi fell down a liftshaft on the construction site that he was working on. He had been working on the 14th-floor of the building.
Media said that the boy had come from a poor background and that he had spent much of his early teenage years working jobs to support his mother in his town in regional Georgia. The construction job that killed him was just an extension of this way-of-life.
According to Georgian law, the boy was legally allowed to work aged 16 but he wasn’t allowed do hard manual labour until he was 18-years-old.
The dead boy has also become a statistic, one of several construction workers to die in Tbilisi this year. The Georgian government has allowed poor migrants from the regions to risk their lives on poorly regulated construction sites in Tbilisi for too long.
Both Kazakhstan and Georgia have aspirations to be taken seriously as developed countries but it is not enough to build glitzy airports, five-star hotels and successful sports teams. The true test of a country’s development is how they treat their least advantaged. By this measure, both Kazakhstan and Georgia must try harder.
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— This story was first published in issue 417 of the weekly Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin
ALMATY/July 22 (The Bulletin) — Free speech groups accused Kazakh telecoms provider Kcell of trying to strong-arm its customers into installing a piece of spyware that will allow the authorities to snoop on their internet activity.
Kcell responded by saying that the software was not mandatory and that it was designed to protect the end user rather than spy on them.
Internet users in Kazakhstan, though, have said that when they avoided installing the software they
have been redirected to webpages telling them that the internet will be limited without the extra Kcell software.
Advocacy director at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in New York, Courtney Radsch, said: “Authorities in Kazakhstan have a long history of jailing, censoring, and harassing journalists, and this effort to protect citizens from ‘dangerous content’ should be viewed with the utmost scepticism.”
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— This story was first published in issue 417 of the weekly Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin