JAN. 31 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Officials in western Kazakhstan ended a week-long strike by 300 workers at an engineering business in Atyrau on the Caspian Sea coast by agreeing to boost their wages by 25%. The deal avoids any risk of a repeat of the acrimonious six-month long strike in Zhanaozen, about 600km south of Atyrau, which ended in riots that killed 16 protesters.
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(News report from Issue No. 75, published on Feb. 2 2012)
JAN. 23 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh security service officers in Almaty raided the HQ of opposition group Alga! and detained several of the banned party’s leaders for inciting riots in the west of Kazakhstan last month which killed at least 16 people. Alga! has said the charges are politically motivated.
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(News report from Issue No. 74, published on Jan. 26 2012)
JAN. 10 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev overruled an earlier decision by the Constitutional Council to cancel voting in a parliamentary election in the town of Zhanaozen. Zhanaozen has been under a state-of-emergency since rioting on Dec. 16 killed at least 16 people.
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(News report from Issue No. 72, published on Jan. 13 2012)
JAN. 4 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s president, extended a state-of-emergency by 26 days in Zhanaozen, the town near the Caspian Sea at the centre of rioting last month that killed 16 people. The state-of-emergency had been set to end on Jan. 5. It now ends on Jan. 31 and falls over a parliamentary election planned for Jan. 15.
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(News report from Issue No. 71, published on Jan. 5 2012)
DEC. 26 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Looking to impose his authority after the riots, Mr Nazarbayev sacked his son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, as head of the sovereign wealth fund. Most of the rioters had been ex-oil workers and, as head of the fund, Mr Kulibayev had been in charge of the state energy company. He was seen as a potential successor to Mr Nazarbayev. Umirzak Shukeyev, a deputy PM, replaced Kulibayev as head of the fund.
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(News report from Issue No. 71, published on Jan. 5 2012)
DEC. 18 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Soccer’s governing body, FIFA, scrapped plans for Uzbekistan to host the women’s under-20 soccer world cup next year. FIFA said it had to re-schedule the competition in Japan because of technical issues. Human rights groups have been strongly critical of Uzbekistan in the past few months.
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(News report from Issue No. 70, published on Dec. 22 2011)
DEC. 13 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – An investigation by the International Boxing Association (AIBA) cleared Azerbaijan of trying to buy two gold medals at next year’s Olympic Games for $9m. The BBC made the bribery allegations during a TV news story. Another separate investigation by the International Olympics Committee (IOC) is due to report next year.
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(News report from Issue No. 70, published on Dec. 22 2011)
DEC. 14 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajikistan faces a food shortage unless food rail wagons delayed in Uzbekistan are able to complete their journey, local media quoted the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) in Dushanbe, Alzira Ferreira, as saying. Tajik-Uzbek relations have worsened over the past year. Uzbekistan says a broken bridge has delayed the wagons.
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(News report from Issue No. 70, published on Dec. 22 2011)
DEC. 10 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Underlining a trend towards the virtual deification of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s parliament declared Dec. 1 to be a new public holiday. The 1st day in December will now be known as the Day of the First President. Mr Nazarbayev has been president since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
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(News report from Issue No. 69, published on Dec. 14 2011)
DEC. 2 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – An underground metro opened in Almaty, 23 years after construction work started. Almaty hit a population of 1m people in the mid-1980s triggering the Soviet authorities to start building a metro system. This stopped in 1991 when the USSR collapsed but Kazakhstan has since spent $1.1b completing the metro.
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(News report from Issue No. 68, published on Dec. 8 2011)