SEPT. 9 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – On a trip to Delhi by Kyrgyz defence minister Major-General Abidilla Kudaberdiev, Indian defence minister A.K. Antony offered training and technical aid to Kyrgyzstan’s military, local media reported. India wants to boost its presence in Central Asia and earlier this year also offered military assistance.
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(News report from Issue No. 56, published on Sept. 12 2011)
SEPT. 8 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia accused Russia of violating its air space, an accusation Russia denied. In potentially one of the most serious standoffs between the countries since a war in 2008, Georgia said that on Sept. 7, three Russian helicopters had flown into its territory for 15 minutes circling a border guard post.
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(News report from Issue No. 56, published on Sept. 12 2011)
AUG. 31 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh police arrested 22 people in Atyrau on the Caspian Sea for plotting terrorist acts, officials said. The arrests marked an escalation in Kazakhstan’s clampdown on militant Islamists. The next day, President Nursultan Nazarbayev said extremists were a threat to the country.
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(News report from Issue No. 55, published on Sept. 6 2011)
SEPT. 6 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – After months of negotiations, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon announced on Sept. 2 that Russia would indeed extend the lease on its military bases in Tajikistan by 49 years.
Reuters also reported, without giving details, that Russian forces would once again patrol the Tajik-Afghan border — a deal Russia has been pushing for all year. The details still need to be thrashed out, including just how much Russia will pay for the bases, but the announcement was a significant milestone.
The deals secure Russia’s military might on the fringe of Central Asia where control has become increasingly important. NATO plans to withdraw from Afghanistan over the next couple of years and the Central Asian states have been worried about Taliban forces moving northwards.
Russia quit patrolling the Tajik-Afghan border in 2005 but has said throughout the year it wants to regain control to stem the drugs flowing from Afghanistan.
The Kremlin has also been thinking strategically about its military bases and has extended leases on large bases in Armenia and Ukraine. Its deployment in Tajikistan is one of its biggest with roughly 7,000 soldiers and hundreds of tanks and planes stationed there.
Both China and India have bolstered their economic, diplomatic and military reach in Central Asia over the last few years, so for Russia to secure its long-term hold on its military bases in Tajikistan represents a significant achievement.
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(News report from Issue No. 55, published on Sept. 6 2011)
AUG. 27 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – It may have been a formality but it was a symbolically significant one. On Aug. 22 2011, Turkey’s new parliament nullified 898 draft laws the previous parliament had failed to ratify. Among these were two on improving relations with Armenia.
Both these draft laws had languished in Turkey’s parliament since Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and Turkish President Abdullah Gul shook hands in Zurich in Oct. 2009 and pledged that after years of animosity the neighbours would finally make up.
Officially scrapped now, the draft laws have little chance in the short term of making their way back on to the Turkish Parliament’s agenda. In Armenia, the laws hadn’t even made it that far. So much for the Armenia-Turkey rapprochement, then.
And there had been such high hopes. But, though the countries’ leaders had shaken hands, spoken in public about the need for improved relations and watched football matches together, in reality rapprochement drifted off after only a few months.
The issues are so entrenched. At its heart is an argument over whether the Turkish Ottoman Empire at the end of the World War I committed genocide against Armenians. The Turks say thousands died on both sides of the fighting. The Armenians say Turks killed Armenians systematically.
Turkey is also a natural ally of Azerbaijan which is still officially at war with Armenia over the breakaway enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Always complex, the Armenia-Turkey rapprochement is now also officially off.
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(News report from Issue No. 54, published on Aug. 30 2011)
AUG. 27 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – The pro-Russian rebel Georgian region of Abkhazia elected 59-year-old Alexander Ankvab as its new president. Mr Ankvab won 55% of the vote, easily defeating his rivals including PM Sergei Shamba who some analysts said had been the Kremlin’s favoured choice. Russia hailed the election’s transparency. Georgia dismissed it as illegal.
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(News report from Issue No. 54, published on Aug. 30 2011)
AUG. 15 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan could allow militant Islam to spread into Central Asia, Russian media quoted Nikolai Bordyuzha, secretary-general of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) as saying at a meeting in Astana. The CSTO is a loose security group of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan
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(News report from Issue No. 53, published on Aug. 17 2011)
AUG. 4 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – In a move aimed at stopping the spread of radical Islam, Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon banned youths from mosques, news agencies reported. A batch of new laws entitled “parental responsibility” also banned people under the age of 20 from going to nightclubs or getting a tattoo.
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(News report from Issue No. 52, published on Aug. 10 2011)
AUG. 9 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – The authorities in Uzbekistan have deported eight suspected Christian missionaries, AFP news agency quoted a state website as saying. According to the report, the missionaries were all US citizens but spoke fluent Uzbek and posed as businessmen with Uzbek names. The US embassy in Tashkent declined to comment.
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(News report from Issue No. 52, published on Aug. 10 2011)
AUG 1 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – The abrupt end of a spy row involving four Georgian photojournalists left many wondering if a Russian plot had been foiled, or whether the Georgian Interior Ministry was just plain paranoid.
On July 22, 15 days after being arrested and charged with spying for Russia, the Georgian photojournalists, including President Mikheil Saakashvili’s personal photographer, signed plea deals and were released on conditional sentences.
The plea deal means evidence against the photographers will never be heard and if the photographers talk about the case they will be sent to prison. Georgian authorities said the deal was struck in return for information about other Russian agents but conditional sentences are almost unheard of in Georgia where spies usually get the maximum sentence.
Many observers put the deal down to the embarrassment the case caused. Local journalists have held daily rallies, Western diplomats have been perplexed and the international media has extensively covered the case.
Some journalists in Tbilisi believe the photojournalists were released so that the case did not overshadow the visit on July 26 of Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the EU.
After being released, Giorgi Abdaladze, one of the arrested photographers, gave a guarded, tantalising interview to the New York Times. “I saw things I have never seen before. Something I couldn’t imagine,” he said. An obscure insight, perhaps, into an obscure case.
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(News report from Issue No. 51, published on Aug. 2 2011)