JAN. 24 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyz president Almazbek Atambayev signed into law a decree that increased fines handed out to people who swear on the street and drink in office blocks, media reported.Police officers can now hand out fines of 15,000 som ($200) for swearing in public and 10,000 som for drinking in the workplace.
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(News report from Issue No. 314, published on Jan. 27 2017)
ALMATY, JAN. 25 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — In a televised address to the nation lasting 9-1/2 minutes, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev described how he wanted to bring in a series of reforms that would shift power from the president to parliament.
The main proposals focused on how the government was formed. Currently,Mr Nazarbayev appoints all the key positions in government and the state’s main agencies. This was a task that he said he wanted to hand over to the PM. He also said that he wanted parliament to have more say over social and economic issues.
“The point of the proposed reform isina serious redistribution of powers and democratisation of the political system as a whole,” he said during this address in both Kazakh and Russian with his trademark formal and deadpan delivery.
The speech, though, was short on detail and lacked a timeframe for the proposed changes. Although the aim of the speech appears to be to burnish Mr Nazarbayev’s credentials as a democrat and to ease concerns that he doesn’t have a succession plan, the main reaction was derision.
In Almaty, Mikhail, 29, said: “This is another imitation and an attempt to shift the responsibility for worsening living conditions.”
And analysts said Mr Nazarbayev appeared eager to disengage from difficult social and employment policies but retain control of duties linked to foreign policy and security. “It’s almost like he wants to pass off responsibility for the really hard stuff,” said Bruce Pannier, a Central Asia analyst at RFE/RL.
Not everybody was downbeat.
“That sounds great, nonetheless these reforms require strengthening of mass media and freedom of speech,” said Galym, 26.
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(News report from Issue No. 314, published on Jan. 27 2017)
JAN. 24 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — In possibly the biggest mass amnesty by a former Soviet state, Uzbekistan pardoned 40,000 prisoners. The amnesty focused on inmates imprisoned for minor crimes, foreigners, women, young offenders and people over the age of 60. Human rights groups accuse Uzbekistan of locking up political prisoners. No notable political prisoners were released. Central Asian countries use amnesties to mark anniversaries and to release pressure on their prison populations.
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(News report from Issue No. 314, published on Jan. 27 2017)
JAN. 14 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Uzbek prosecutors interviewed Gulnara Karimova at her home in Tashkent, where she is under house arrest, about money laundering, media in Switzerland reported by quoting her lawyer.
This is the first news of Ms Karimova since her father, former Uzbek president Islam Karimov, died in September. In November a report surfaced on opposition news website that she had been poisoned.
The German-language business newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung published an interview with Ms Karimova’s lawyer, Gregoire Mangeat, who said that he had flown to Tashkent for the interviews held on Dec. 9/10.
He said that she was in good health but had been under pressure from the two state prosecutors to admit to various crimes.
“She was very combative and showed an amazing resistance to the arbitrary situation,” he said. “She bravely endured the confrontation with the three Uzbek prosecutors in military uniform. Twice, however, she burst into tears.”
Mr Mangeat also said that Ms Karimova’s living conditions were inhumane and designed to make her crack.
“My client is held in a small annex of her former house in the centre of Tashkent. The rest of the house has decayed,” her said. “Gulnara Karimova is completely isolated.”
Ms Karimova had been viewed as a potential successor to her father but in February 2014, as prosecutors from Europe and the United States started investigating telecoms companies who had paid her bribes worth hundreds of millions of dollars for access to the Uzbek market, she was placed under house arrest. Since then, very little has been heard of the once self-style fashion diva, pop star, roaming ambassador and business leader.
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(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)
JAN. 16 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Azerbaijan sentenced Elgiz Gahraman, a 31-year-old opposition youth activist, to 5-1/2 years in prison for drug-related offences. The New York- based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that in August 2016 Gahraman had been taken by police to a station in Baku, beaten and forced to sign a confession that he had been carrying heroin and intended to sell it. HRW has accused the Azerbaijani authorities of using bogus charges to imprison people it considers to be troublemakers.
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(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)
JAN. 20 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — >> There is a new public opinion poll out in Georgia, produced by the National Democratic Institute (NDI). Is this important?
>> In a word – yes. This is one of the rare and generally reliable snapshots of public opinion that is produced in Georgia. Most other polls are biased towards whoever has commissioned it and their political allies.
>> So what did this one tell us?
>> The data is a result of surveys done in November, shortly after a parliamentary election that the Georgian Dream won easily. These results are reflected in the poll data which showed that for the first time since August 2014, more people felt that Georgia was going in the right direction. It was a close run thing, though, with 36% of respondents saying that Georgia wasn’t changing one way or the other, 32% saying it was moving in a positive direction and 27% saying that things were getting worse. This compares well to March 2016 when 40% of the respondents said that Georgia was heading in the wrong direction and only 20% said it was heading in the right direction.
>> And how did this compare to previous poll results?
>> When the Georgian Dream, the coalition funded, by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, first won power in 2012, the poll results for Georgia moving in a positive option were sky-high at around 60% or the high 50s. Things had slipped though.
>> What else does the poll tell us about Georgia?
>> By far the two most important issues for people polled were jobs and rising inflation – 58% of respondents said that jobs were a major concern and 38% said inflation was a major concern. Territorial integrity (27%) was ranked fairly highly but joining NATO (3%) and joining EU (3%), the things that occupy most of the politicians most of the time were towards the bottom of the list.
>> Have people’s priorities changed? Were they different when Georgia’s economy was doing better?
>> Much like the rest of the region, Georgia’s economy has been under immense pressure recently with a recession in Russia and an overly strong US dollar. Over the past few months, Georgia’s lari has plummeted in value and the government has warned of tough times. But, and this is the point, in good times or bad, NDI says that Georgians top five priorities are the same. These are, in order of preference – jobs, inflation, poverty, territorial integrity and pensions. Clearly other than issues over the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, it’s all about the economy.
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(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)
TBILISI, JAN. 20 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — On the streets of Georgia’s capital city, the UNM’s split was received with scepticism. Georgians are generally weary of the political infighting.
Giorgi, a PhD candidate in Finance, said the split will make the opposition weaker.
“Instead of accepting election results, Saakashvili’s loyalists were planning to declare election results as fraud and fight back from the street,” he said.
“The breakaway section chose the pragmatic way to oppose the ruling party using their parliamentary mandates. However, this move made the opposition weaker.”
Ani, a civil servant, said she doubted the real reason behind the split. “We need to be careful, overall it is still the UNM. Not sure that this is a real split and not a political game again”, she said.
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(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)
JAN. 18 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The rebel Georgian region of South Ossetia has set its upcoming presidential election for April 9. The incumbent leader of South Ossetia, which declared independence from Georgia in the early 1990s and was recognised by Russia and a handful of other countries as a separate nation in 2008 after a Russia- Georgia war, is Leonid Tibilov. He has said he will compete in the election to try to win another, and final, five year term. The election is likely to raise tension with Georgia.
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(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)
JAN. 17 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — The trial for extortion of Bigeldy Gabdullin, editor of the Central Asia Monitor newspaper, began in Astana. Mr Gabdullin has admitted to charges that he blackmailed officials into paying him bribes not to publish negative stories. His supporters have said that the confession was extracted under duress and that the 61-year-old was hoping that by agreeing to the confession he will be given a light sentence.
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(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)
TBILISI, JAN. 13 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Two new parliamentary minority factions — European Georgia and European Georgia for a Better Future — have emerged from the group of 21 MPs who quit the UNM opposition bloc earlier this month, leaving the once all-powerful party of former president Mikheil Saakashvili barely surviving.
The party split did not take people by surprise. Disagreements among party members had become increasingly vicious and public, especially after the UNM’s crushing defeat in October’s parliamentary election. Many of the arguments focused on whether the divisive, bombastic Mr Saakashvili, who now lives in exile in Ukraine, should still play a role in the UNM.
In an email interview with The Conway Bulletin, Akaki Bobokhidze, one of the MPs who left the UNM, said that Mr Saakashvili, who was president from 2004 until 2013, was now a political hindrance.
“Saakashvili thinks that it is not possible to defeat Bidzina Ivanishvili [the patron of the ruling Georgian Dream coalition] and to change the government through elections,” he said.
“There is a difference in how those who stayed and those who left evaluate the past and the errors that the UNM made, especially in the human rights field. The two groups take considerably different views of the party’s future.”
The 56-year-old Mr Bobokhidze is one of the most experienced MPs in parliament having won his seat in 2001 as a member of the now defunct Initiative Group. Known for his fiery temper, he has been involved in brawls inside parliament.
Mr Bobokhidze’s had been a staunch ally of Mr Saakashvili and it was clearly with some reluctance that he agreed to split from the main UNM party. It was only in December that he was urging the party to unite around Mr Saakashvili.
“Saakashvili is the politician that made the corrupt post-Soviet Georgia into a successful country. Regardless of his position in the party, I hope he will remain a successful politician in Georgia’s political history,” he said in his interview.
Mr Bobokhidze said the new parties’ focus would be on winning control of local councils at municipal elections later this year and then concentrating on building alliances to win back power in parliamentary elections scheduled for 2020.
And this collaboration could still that the remaining UNM parliamen- tarians, Mr Bobokhidze’s former col- leagues, have a role to play.
“Our new party is open for collaboration with all the parties that shares our values and think that the informal governing of Ivanishvili is damaging our country,” he said.
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(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)