JUNE 30 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyz officials denied entry to the country to Uzbek human rights activist Vasila Inoyatova, media reported. Human rights groups have complained that Kyrgyzstan discriminates against Uzbeks. Ms Inoyatova has been a critic of the Kyrgyz authorities’ attitude towards Uzbeks.
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(News report from Issue No. 190, published on July 2 2014)
JUNE 30 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – It looks as if Kazakhstan has gently reformed its state pension plan without creating too much of a fuss.
Reform of the generous Soviet-era pension scheme is a particularly thorny issue across the former Soviet Union. Armenia’s government resigned in April because of protests against its proposed changes to the pension scheme and last year in Kazakhstan, a minister resigned after suggesting that women should work for as long as men.
Now though, it looks as if the Kazakh government has gently pushed through the changes it needs to make.
State media reported that President Nursultan Nazarbayev had signed into law a plan to modernise pensions.
The basic premise of the new pension plan, which won’t come into effect until 2016, is that employers will pay the equivalent of 5% of their employees’ salaries to the government. This, media said, will be used by the government to cover a current shortfall in the pension scheme.
So, in total, Kazakh workers will from 2016 effectively contribute the equivalent of 15% of their salary to the government’s pension pot. Employees will pay 10% and companies another 5%.
As the increased pension contribution comes from companies, rather than from workers, it’s unlikely to trigger public protests. Analysts, though, have said that the pension hole has become so big that the Kazakh government may also decide to increase direct employee contributions. That may cause trouble.
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(News report from Issue No. 190, published on July 2 2014)
JUNE 24 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijani opposition activists protested outside the European Parliament in Strasbourg during a speech by Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev. The protesters wore red T-shirts with pictures of different people in Azerbaijani jails who they say have been jailed for political reasons.
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(News report from Issue No. 190, published on June 25 2014)
JUNE 19 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s parliament has, apparently, rejected the option of bringing in juries for some trials, media reported.
The authorities has been mulling over the idea but in the end decided against the notion because juries couldn’t be expected to understand the complexities of the law.
“Jurors are mainly people who do not have a law education and, therefore, often they cannot make legal judgments,” the eurasianet.orf website quoted Ali Huseynli, an MP for the ruling Yeni Azerbaijan Party, as saying.
Opponents of the government said that it simply didn’t want to relax its iron grip on the law courts.
They said, with thinly disguised sarcasm, that the courts have served them so well recently. Many opposition activists accuse Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev of using the courts to lock up his enemies.
The former Soviet states are, generally, not keen on juries. The big regional exception is Georgia. They introduced jury service in 2011 but only on some murder cases and only when both the prosecution and the defence agreed to it.
Instead a judge decides on cases, opening the system up to corruption, campaigners have said. This may change but clearly not for some time to come.
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(News report from Issue No. 190, published on June 25 2014)
JUNE 18 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Georgian rebel region of South Ossetia said that it now recognised the Luhansk People’s Republic as an independent state, media reported. Luhansk is a region in east Ukraine were pro-Russia separatists are fighting central government forces. South Ossetia declared independence in 2008 after a war between Russia and Georgia.
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(News report from Issue No. 190, published on June 25 2014)
JUNE 24 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s Constitutional Court appears to have ruled against a controversial law introduced two years ago that banned foreigners from buying land in the country.
The trigger for the reversal of the 2012 law was a case brought to the court by Mathias Huter, am Austrian citizen working for the anti-corruption lobby group Transparency International.
The Constitutional Court ruled in his favour, effectively lifting a moratorium imposed on land purchases by foreigners in 2012. For Georgia’s image as a place to invest, this is good news.
The original ban had been a piece of gimmickry by the United National Movement party (UNM), the ruling party of President Mikheil Saakashvili. There had been a backlash against moves introduced to encourage South Africans and Punjabis to move to Georgia to farm. The idea had been that the immigrants would bring new technology and raise production. Instead the incomers generated resentment.
Displaying an unashamedly populist touch and with a parliamentary election on the horizon, the UNM introduced laws to ban foreigners from buying land.
Although the moratorium has not yet officially been lifted, commentators said that the ruling effectively dismantled it. This is another success for the ruling Georgian Dream coalition which defeated the UNM in a 2012 parliamentary election, a 2013 presidential election and a 2014 local election.
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(News report from Issue No. 190, published on June 25 2014)
JUNE 16 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajik officials arrested Alexander Sodiqov, a 31-year old Tajik academic affiliated to the University of Toronto in Canada, and accused him of spying.
Mr Sodiqov was carrying out research in the Tajikistan’s restive Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO) when Tajik security agents detained him.
Tajik officials are traditionally jittery about anyone asking awkward questions in GBAO, where Dushanbe’s authority is weak. Badakhshanis fought against government forces during a five-year civil war in the mid-1990s that President Emomali Rakhmon, eventually won.
Ever since, though, peace has been fragile. In July 2012, around 50 people died in fighting when the authorities tried to arrest a local chief who they accused of drug trafficking. Earlier this year more violence killed three people in Khorog, the regional capital and the scene of Mr Sodiqov.
Human rights groups and the British and Canadian governments have all said they are concerned about Mr Sodiqov’s well-being.
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(News report from Issue No. 190, published on June 25 2014)
JUNE 12 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The US-based lobby group Freedom House rated Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan as having the worst democratic framework in its ranking of 29 countries in eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union. Human rights group often complain about a lack of democracy and entrenched corruption in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 189, published on June 18 2014)
JUNE 9 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The authorities in Tajikistan have blocked access to both YouTube and Facebook, betraying their fear of the web.
With Tajikistan’s major internet providers offering inconsistent explanations for the connection breakdown, many people reached the conclusion that the state’s communications service is behind the block.
It’s a tactic they have used previously.
Tajikistan blocked YouTube when violence broke out in the eastern province of Gorno-Badakshan in 2012, and again last year when a clip of President Emomali Rakhmon singing drunk at his son’s wedding went viral.
Umrana, 23, a Tajik blogger now living in Bishkek said that despite internet penetration of less than 10% in Tajikistan, its appeal to the aspirational middle class is what worries the government most.
“There is a legend that an Austria-Hungarian Emperor wouldn’t allow construction of railroads because he thought it would transport the French revolution. Our emperors are the same,” he said. “When they think of YouTube, they think of movement, unrest, threats.”
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(News report from Issue No. 189, published on June 18 2014)
JUNE 12 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – A supporter of Armenia’s nationalist party Tsegakron opened fire at police with an air pistol outside a courthouse in Yerevan where the party’s leader was standing trial, media reported. The leader of Tsegakron, Shant Harutiunian, was arrested in November after clashes with police.
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(News report from Issue No. 189, published on June 18 2014)