Tag Archives: protest

2nd Mortgage protest takes place in Kazakhstan

JAN. 20 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Around 100 women covered in grey sheets marched in protest to Kazkommertsbank and Bank Center Credit to complain about how they treat mortgage holders, their second protest this month. The protesters said that they have struggled to pay their debts since the the tenge lost 50% of its value during a devaluation in August. The authorities in Kazakhstan fear economic problems will trigger social discontent.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 264, published on Jan. 22 2016)

Editorial: Protests grow in Azerbaijan

JAN. 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Protests in Azerbaijan’s peripheral regions could be soothed only with a resolute measure, the government thinks. President Ilham Aliyev decided to strike out VAT from flour and wheat products, one of the chief demands of the dozens of protesters that took the streets on Jan. 12-13 in several towns around the country.

The question, however, remains — will this one-off measure placate emotions?

Azerbaijan always had a fiery population, ready to manifest their discontent. The recent crackdown on freedom of expression and the virtual – and factual – suppression of any opposition led many to think that Azerbaijan would not allow the public to have a voice any longer.

Azerbaijanis have instead showed their, very real, anger. Video footage from opposition sources shows protesters and police clashing.

The economic downturn is threatening stability across the South Caucasus and Central Asia and poses a challenge to the authorities. How they, and how the protesters respond, is critical.

ENDS

(Editorial from Issue No. 263, published on Jan. 15 2016)

Kazakh mortgage holders protest

JAN. 12 2016, ALMATY (The Conway Bulletin) — Around 100 people demonstrated in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s financial capital, over the rising cost of servicing US dollar mortgages, an indicator of growing discontent over the worsening state of the Kazakh economy.

The protesters targeted two banks — ATF and Forte Bank — which they said were refusing to help homeowners with US dollar mortgages despite a 50% drop in the value of the Kazakh tenge. They carried a symbolic coffin filled with underwear and ripped up mortgage statements.

Sulubike Zhaksylykova was on the march. She is head of an NGO which is lobbying for banks to help mortgage owners.

“One of the main goals of the protest is to refinance mortgages in dollars according to people’s ability to pay,” she told The Conway Bulletin.

“There are many disabled people of first and second category who receive 26,000 tenge per ($71) month [of government benefits] and these banks require them to pay 100,000 tenge a month [in mortgage repayments].”

The Kazakh government last year released a 130b tenge ($355m) cash-pot which it handed to commercial banks to help them refinance homeowners’ mortgages. Ms Zhaksylykova, though, accused the banks of not doing enough to help people.

After the protest both ATF Bank and Forte Bank said they would work to improve individual mortgage repayments.

Public protests in Almaty are rare but as the economy worsens, emotions are running high.

The Kazakh economy has always had relatively high levels of household debt and after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/9, Kazakhstan had one of the highest proportions of non-performing loans.

Analysts have now warned that bad mortgages may be the source of another debt crisis.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 263, published on Jan. 15 2016)

Protesters clash with police in Azerbaijan

JAN. 13 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Protests against rising prices broke out in at least five regional towns in Azerbaijan, the most serious and widespread civil unrest linked to an economic downturn that has shaken Central Asia and the South Caucasus over the past 18 months.

In Siyazan, about an hour’s drive north of Baku, heavily armed riot police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at crowds of young men who pelted them with stones. Later, reports said that at least 50 people had been detained by the police.

Footage shot on mobile phones and released on the opposition Meydan website showed police in full body armour carrying shields backed up by armoured vehicles marching towards groups of young men.

In other protests in regional towns, groups of men argued with officials and complained about losing jobs and a drop in living standards.

The following day, the Azerbaijani authorities released a statement that blamed various opposition parties for organising the protests. Azerbaijan’s opposition, which has seen its ranks thinned by a series of arrests and imprisonments over the past couple of years, said that the protests had been spontaneous.

Hours later the government appeared to back down over one of the protesters’ main demands — to stop prices from rising — by ordering a VAT exemption on flour and wheat.

A sharp fall in oil prices has hit Azerbaijan hard. It devalued its manat currency twice last year, halving its value. The government has also cut welfare and infrastructure projects.

There have been small-scale protests in Azerbaijan and in Georgia and Armenia, but these were the most violent and widespread.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 263, published on Jan. 15 2016)

Immolation outside Nur Otan office stirs anger in Kazakhstan

OCT. 24 2015, ALMATY (The Conway Bulletin) — A 20-year-old man set fire to himself in the city of Taraz, south Kazakhstan, outside the headquarters of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s political party, a rare suicide by immolation that would have worried the authorities.

A video uploaded onto Youtube showed Yerlan Bektibayev talking to the camera in a central square in Taraz, before pouring lighter fuel over his head, setting himself on fire and then running into the Nur Otan building.

Bektibayev spoke in Kazakh before he set himself alight, explaining that he wanted to kill himself because he couldn’t find a job and that the authorities had bullied him by planting drugs on him and locking him up in prison for a murder that he didn’t commit.

“I cannot find any other way but to die. I do not want to live,” he said on the video.

Kazakhstan has a high rate of youth suicide. The United Nations has said that it is in the top ten countries for suicides of people between the ages of 14 and 29, but, even so, Bektibayev’s choice of setting himself on fire outside the Nur Otan regional headquarters will have alarmed the authorities.

It was an overtly political back- drop to the suicide, with overtones of the immolation in Tunisia in 2010 that sparked the Arab Spring uprisings.

Official media largely avoided reporting on the suicide, one TV journalist who works for a state linked channel said he was told not to report on it, and police detained the man who filmed Bektibayev’s immolation.

Social media, though, was full of conflicting opinion. Some said that Bektibayev was to blame for taking his own life, others that society had failed him.

There was no official comment either from Nur Otan or the Taraz regional government.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)

Tajik students want opposition extradited

OCT. 26 2015, DUSHANBE (The Conway Bulletin) — A group of students at the Tajik National University appealed to the US, the EU and Germany to extradite opposition members, raising immediate concerns that the authorities may be coercing sectors of the population to pursue its agenda.

Civic activism is stunted in Tajikistan and this apparent support for the government worried analysts.

A Dushanbe-based analyst who spoke to a Bulletin correspondent said: “The government knows that the Western states will not extradite opposition leaders to Tajikistan. Thus, they control the students and organise similar appeals and demonstrations to show the world that Tajik youth are politically active and there is democracy in Tajikistan.”

The government has stepped up its persecution of opposition groups this year, banning them and arresting activists. It wants opposition leaders extradited from Europe.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)

Georgians protest against Gazprom

OCT. 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Hundreds of people demonstrated in central Tbilisi against a potential deal with Gazprom to supply gas to Georgia. The demonstration was a response to a meeting last month between the Georgian government and Gazprom. Georgia and Russia fought a war in 2008 and relations are still strained.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct. 23 2015)

Azerbaijani sets fire to himself as protest

SEPT. 21 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A taxi driver from Sumqayit, in western Azerbaijan, has died after setting himself on fire, media reported, an apparent final desperate protest against bully by officials and corruption.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said this was the seventh immolation in Azerbaijan since 2014.

Immolations in the region are a particularly sensitive issue because of the political connotations. The so-called Arab Spring erupted after an immolation by a frustrated and brow- beaten market seller set himself alight in front of a local government building in a provincial town in Tunisia in 2010.

The Arab Spring spread across North Africa, fuelling popular protests which eventually toppled governments in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

It also worried Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev and some analysts have said that he started cracking down on opposition figures and media outlets after the Arab Spring undermined some of his allies.

The dead taxi driver was named as 27-year-old Maqsad Suleymanov. The authorities in Sumqayit did not specify how he died but a mass of social media comments and eyewitness reports said he had set himself on fire.

Georgian winegrowers protest against falling prices

SEPT. 11 2015, TBILISI (The Conway Bulletin) — Several hundred farmers protested in the ancient winemaking region of Kakheti in eastern Georgia, demanding that the government increase subsidies for harvested grapes.

Eyewitnesses said that the demonstrations were passionate and angry but peaceful, although some protesters brawled with police after tension boiled over. There were no reports of any injuries and only three people were detained but the unrest does show how the former Soviet Union’s economic malaise is deepening.

A grape farmer attending the protests told broadcaster Rustavi2 that they will not back down, but that people are afraid.

“I demand a rise of prices. People are afraid of this government, they do everything to keep us quiet. What should we do?” grape farmer Murtaz Gorkhelashvili said.

The price for a bunch of grapes has fallen by 40-55% this year because of a fall in wine export to Russia and Ukraine.

Western-imposed sanctions on Russia and a sharp fall in oil prices have tipped its economy into recession. A civil war has heavily dented Ukraine’s economy.

In 2014 wine production accounted for 2.5% of Georgia’s GDP, a higher proportion than France, even, where wine makes up around 0.9% of GDP.

Independent consultant and freelance wine writer Caroline Gilby described how important wine is to Georgia’s economy and also to its national identity.

“Wine is economically critical to this small country with its limited natural resources,” she said.

The government subsidy, an election promise by the Georgian Dream coalition in 2012, of an extra 0.35 lari per kilo of white grapes and 0.15 lari per red grapes for farmers is considered insufficient by the protestors.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)

Armenians protest electricity price rise

SEPT. 12 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Police in Armenia detained 50 people during a protest against electricity price rises for businesses. The government backed down after a series of protests in July and said it would subsidise a 17% price rise for residential property but that businesses would have to pay it.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 248, published on Sept. 18 2015)