APRIL 18 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev opened two new metro stations in Almaty, marking the westward extension of the service which opened in 2011. Almaty now has nine metro stations.
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(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)
APRIL 21 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – US President Barak Obama will not describe the killing of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 as a genocide, White House officials said. This will disappoint Armenia’s top officials.
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(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)
APRIL 16 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Dozens of local contractors working at the Russian military base in south Tajikistan have gone on strike over unpaid wages, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported (RFE/RL). RFE/RL quoted an official at the base blaming a local contracting company.
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(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)
APRIL 19 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbekistan followed Russia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan and banned the new Hollywood movie Child 44 because of the apparent negative way that it portrays the Soviet Union.
Child 44 was based on a book about the hunt for a serial killer in 1950s Soviet Union. It was produced by Ridley Scott, famed for several blockbuster films including Aliens, Blade Runner and Gladiator.
Last week, the Russian culture ministry said: “The distortion of historical facts and original interpretations of events before, during and after the Great Patriotic War is why we decided to ban this movie on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Victory.”
Victory refers to the annual May 9 celebrations of the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
In the past few years, Central Asian countries have been at the centre of controversies around celebrations for the end of World War II.
Preferring to favour their own national building efforts above Soviet symbolism, Central Asian leaders have striven to tear down Soviet symbols, statues of the founder of the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin being a particularly favoured target.
The movie Child 44, though, appears to have had the opposite impact and former Soviet states have been quick to spring to the defence of the USSR.
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(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)
ASURETI/Georgia, APRIL 5 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Manfred Tikhonov moved from Berlin to Georgia in the early 2000s and for the last 11 years he’s been making wine in Asureti, a former German village 40km south east of Tbilisi. (April 22).
Tikhonov, 67, spends his days slowly restoring his German-style timber Fachwerk house, built in the 1870s, and making wine the Georgian way, in clay vessels (kvevri) buried in the ground.
He has learnt everything about wine from his neighbours and produces up to 2,000 litres of wine a year. “It’s not enough to make profit,” he said. “But I get a pension from Germany.”
Asureti has long winemaking traditions. Formerly known as Elisabethal, it was founded in the early 19th century, when Russian Tsar Alexander I invited Germans from Swabia, a region in the southwest of Germnay, to settle. Tikhonov said Asureti Swabians were producing red wine for the high rank officials in Tsarist Russia and then the Soviet Union, until they were deported to Kazakhstan in 1941 when Soviet leader Josef Stalin worried that they may side with the advancing Nazi armies in World War II.
Barely any of them returned. The only reminders of the past are shabby Fachwerk houses, ruins of an Evangelical Church and overgrown gravestones engraved with old Swabian.
“Maybe one day I will also be buried here,” said Tikhonov, closing the graveyard gates.
Later, at home, Tikhonov poured a glass of his 2013 red. He apologised as this was not his best wine. There had been no running water and he had not been able to clean the clay vessels for the new grapes that year.
It has been hard to adapt to the local way of living. “Everything goes slower than I want,” he said. But he is not sorry to have exchanged buzzing Berlin to a quiet life in Asureti. “Free- range cows, chicken and dogs remind me of my childhood in the East Germany sixty years ago. Time stands still, and I love it.”
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(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)
APRIL 16 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) -Tajik president Imomali Rakhmon plans to build Central Asia’s largest theatre for $100m, media reported. Mr Rakhmon is partial to grandiose projects. Earlier this year he ordered work to begin on a new city in the desert. Dushanbe boasts one of the world’s tallest flagpoles.
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(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)
APRIL 10 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – In a rare anti-government protest in Kazakhstan, dozens of homeowners demonstrated in Astana about the extra pressure they are under to meet US dollar denominated mortgage repayments, media reported. The Central Bank cut the value of the tenge by about 20% this year and is under pressure to do so again as the rouble remains low.
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(News report from Issue No. 227, published on April 15 2015)
APRIL 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan is planning to relax its visa regime for the inaugural European Games in Baku on June 12, the US Chamber of Commerce in Azerbaijan said. Ten days ahead of the Games, people with tickets will be able to apply for a visa on arrival at Baku airport.
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(News report from Issue No. 226, published on April 8 2015)
APRIL 5 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Around 1,000 people gathered on the outskirts of Baku to demonstrate against a stalling economy and a crackdown on civil rights. The authorities sanctioned the rally. Some opposition said the real aim was to nullify genuine anti-government protests.
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(News report from Issue No. 226, published on April 8 2015)
APRIL 7 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Community leaders in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge have asked the government for more help to stop teenagers heading to Syria to join the militant group IS, media reported. The Pankisi Gorge is an Islamic stronghold in Georgia and has strong ethnic and cultural ties to Chechnya in Russia.
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(News report from Issue No. 226, published on April 8 2015)