Tag Archives: society

Civil rights fall across the region

EDINBURGH/NEW YORK, FEB. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Civil freedoms in Central Asia and the South Caucasus took a turn for the worse in 2014 as governments moved closer to Russia and worried that street demonstrations in Ukraine may spread, Freedom House said in an interview.

The sharpest deterioration in civil rights in 2014, according to the US-based lobby group, came in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan.

“Governments restricted freedom of assembly and speech to prevent ‘maidans’ and Russian encouragement of separatism,” Nate Schenkkan, a Eurasia Programme Officer at Freedom House, said in an interview with The Bulletin. Schenkkan’s reference to so-called maidans was to Ukrainian street demonstrations which morphed into a full scale revolution.
The interview was conducted over twitter with questions also taken from viewers.

At the end of last year Azerbaijani police raided the office of the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In the interview with The Bulletin, Schenkkan said the police raid was the culmination of a tough year for media and government critics in Azerbaijan.

“There was a full-scale crackdown. Now (there are) 90 plus political prisoners, all independent media shuttered in Azerbaijan,” he said. “Sanctions for Azerbaijani officials should be on the table and EU leaders should skip the European Games.” Azerbaijan is hosting the inaugural European Games later this year.

As for Kyrgyzstan, Schenkkan said new legislation had dented Kyrgyzstan’s image.

“Kyrgyzstan is the most disappointing because it is a reversal after relative gains recently,” he said. “Copycat attempts at Russian legislation against LGBTI and NGOs nearly passed.”
ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 218, published on Feb. 11 2015)

Tajikistan needs to improve labour

>>World Bank says Tajikistan needs to adapt>>

FEB. 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — In a report on Tajikistan, the World Bank said a third of Tajik men leave the country to find work and that the informal market employs about 60% of the population.

Adapting local labour training to a market that needs analytical skills and not just manual work is key to developing Tajikistan’s workforce, the World Bank wrote.

The migration numbers and the large informal economy mean the Tajik economy is fragile, especially when its main driver — the Russian economy is also under stress.

The Tajik Central Bank has raised interest rates and depleted its currency reserves in an attempt to defend its currency from a sharp devaluation. It has warned that it can’t sustain a long, second defence of its economy.

In its report, entitled “The Skills Road: Skills for Employability in Tajikistan”, the World Bank argued that the Tajik economy is undergoing significant changes that need a new approach from the government to develop more and better analytical skills to boost the formal sector of the economy and also reduce migration trends.

“New economy skills are strong analytical and organizational skills, including non-routine cognitive analytical and interpersonal skills,” the World Bank wrote.

“The report’s conclusion is that the government could shift the focus from providing access to educational institutions and instead focus on providing the skills (cognitive, non-cognitive, and technical) to students who need to succeed as adults.”
ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 218, published on Feb. 11 2015)

Berdy wants white cars only

JAN. 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Turkmenistan has banned the import of any car that isn’t white, the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported quoting a customs official. RFE/RL said new rules may also force all car owners to repaint their cars white. The new rules highlight the often bizarre nature of Turkmenistan.
ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)

Azerbaijan cancels social projects

>>Fall in oil price has hit Azerbaijan hard

JAN. 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan’s government has cancelled a $100m project to provide rural communities with vastly improved and faster internet, media reported.

The fall in the price of oil prices has hit Azerbaijan hard. It is very much a petro-dollar economy and has had to adjust its budget to account for falling revenues.

The project was supposed to be funded by the state budget but it was, instead, one of the first to be cut when the budget was re-organised earlier this year.

And the project was supposed to be a major stepping stone to build a more integrated, connected society. Research in 2013 showed that only 500 of Azerbaijan’s 4,000 villages had access to the internet, a figure the government’s programme was supposed to improve.

Another project that the government has apparently reduced funding for is the Star refinery that it was building in Turkey. Instead, media reported, the Star oil refinery will be funded by foreign-backed debt.

Oil prices are critical to Azerbaijan. Last week BP, the biggest foreign investor in Azerbaijan, said that it was making 8% of its local workforce redundant.

The next few months are going to be important. While prices remain low, there could be more project cancellations to come.
ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)

Kazakhstan’s brain drain

>>Net emigration is the first for a decade>>

FEB. 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Almost 27,000 people emigrated from Kazakhstan in 2014. That’s 10% more than those who decided to move into Kazakhstan, creating a negative population flow for the first time in a decade, according to official data.

More worrying for the Kazakh authorities is that behind the migration flux was a clear brain drain.

In the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, millions of non-ethnic Kazakhs left for their familial or cultural homeland. Since then, the population in Kazakhstan has steadily increased.

But a report on migration released by the national statistics agency showed that more people left Kazakhstan in 2014 then moved in. Shynasyl Yernazar, of the Kazakhstan Centre for Public-Private Partnerships said the most worrying sign was the number of young people leaving.

“A brain drain among young professionals is happening, as demonstrated by last year’s survey, by which more than one-third of Kazakhstanis between 18 and 28 said they’d like to leave, ” he told the Tengrinews website (Jan. 29).

Better job prospects and access to more meritocratic systems are the main drivers of this trend. Most of the incoming migrants are from poorer countries.

Daniyar Kosnazarov, a researcher at the Presidential Library in Astana and a co-author of a book on youth issues, said it was important the government finds better and more effective ways of engaging with young Kazakhs.

“With the Eurasian Union, the common labour market will make competition tougher as Russians and Belarusians are better skilled,” Mr Kosnazarov told the Bulletin in a telephone interview from Astana.
ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)

UN criticises Kazakh clampdown

JAN. 28. 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Wrapping up a mission to Kazakhstan, the UN’s special rapporteur Maina Kiai said he was disturbed to hear from Kazakh officials that they had decided to clamp down on protests because they worried about a Ukraine style rebellion.
ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015

Corruption scars Kazakh HIV project

JAN. 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Global Fund, a Switzerland-based health organisation, said corrupt suppliers had swindled $5m from an HIV/AIDS awareness project in Kazakhstan. The corruption highlights the extent of the problems facing foreign companies and organisations in Kazakhstan.
ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015

Chinese hunt for shrimps in the Aral Sea

MO’YNOQ/Uzbekistan, FEB. 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Sagynbai Murzayev is a strong and gentle Soviet-made man in his 70s. He used to be a fisherman in windswept Mo’ynoq, a town in Karakalpakstan which lies on the remote western fringe of Uzbekistan. Now he works several jobs and witnesses the Chinese influx.

Mo’ynoq once lay on the shores of the Aral Sea. This sea, though, shrunk rapidly because a Soviet irrigation system siphoned off its tributaries’ waters to feed giant cotton fields.

Left behind is a lunar desert of white dunes that locals call Aralkum (Aral’s Sands).

Murzayev works at the local museum of natural history and has witnessed the retreat from the beginning. His father was also a fisherman, his mother worked in a fishery. He now gathers most of his earnings by driving foreign guests to the sea shores. Most of the visitors are Chinese.

Since 2006 an energy consortium led by China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) has been exploring oil and gas deposits below the former seabed.

Although national Uzbek publications boast about Karakalpakstan’s growth as an energy-rich region, operations in the Ustyurt Plateau seem, to Murzayev at least, to proceed at a slow pace. The few Chinese workers camping on the shoreline are mainly after a rather different and rather unusual resource for Central Asia — shrimps.

Unexcited, Murzayev looked at a Chinese trawler coming ashore.

“The indiscriminate pillage of natural resources has already been proved to be detrimental for us,” he said. “We need to bring the sea back to life and not to scavenge its dead body.”

In the distance, the town’s crumbling homes are a symbol of the small economic advantages that this uncertain oil and gas bonanza can bring to the region. And all the while the fading memories of the local fisherman who used to work on the lake grow thinner and thinner.
>>By Gianluca Pardelli
ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)

11 policemen arrested in Georgia

FEB. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — News reports from Georgia said 11 former and serving police men have been arrested for their alleged involvement in the 2006 murder of a man. A bomb killed the man’s father last month. The police are accused of a cover up and the case may rock the establishment. Georgia’s interior minister resigned last month.
ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)

Kyrgyz president appoints female prosecutor

JAN. 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyz president Almazbek Atambayev approved the selection of Indira Dzholdubayeva as prosecutor-general. One of Ms Dzholdubayeva’s main tasks is to clamp down on corruption. Her selection as Kyrgyzstan’s prosecutor-general is eye-catching because Kyrgyzstan is still a male dominated society and she is only 35-years-old.
ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 217, published on Feb. 4 2015)