APRIL 5 (The Bulletin) — Tajikistan has not reported any cases of the coronavirus and has not placed any of its cities under a lockdown but economists have said that it will still be one of the worst affected economically.
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— This story was first published in issue 441 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020
MARCH 26 (The Bulletin) — With the global impact and disruption of Covid-19 becoming apparent, it is time to see what the governments of Central Asia and the South Caucasus are made of. Their responses now will forge their reputations. They will be judged.
And, so far, reactions have been wildly different.
Turkmenistan and Tajikistan appear to be pretending that the Covid-19 pandemic is not happening. Neither country has reported cases and in Tajikistan people are being encouraged to continue with their lives as normal. Last weekend thousands of people gathered to celebrate the Persian New Year and President Emomali Rakhmon has barely broken with his official engagements. In Ashgabat, President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has talked up herbal remedies to the pandemic.
Berdymukhamedov and Rakhmon may be the Central Asian versions of Nero. While Rome burnt for a week in 64AD, Emperor Nero fiddled, or at least that is the popular perception.
Elsewhere the reaction of governments to the Covid-19 pandemic has been more mainstream. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia and Armenia have all ordered lockdowns over their main cities and announced economic packages that will support business. Kyrgyzstan has applied to the IMF to help dampen its own Covid-19 epidemic which appears linked to people in the more religious and conservative south of the country returning home from the Hajj in Saudi Arabia.
In Azerbaijan, the approach has veered away from the orthodoxy, as it often does. Instead of offering the government grants and loans favoured by other countries to keep business running and to buy extra supplies and resources for its health service, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev set up a special fund that would accept donations from companies, government agencies and the wealthy.
Never one to miss an opportunity to self-promote, top billing on the website currently goes to Aliyev and his wife, Mehriban, who is also the vice-president, for donating their salaries for 2020 to the fund. The website doesn’t say how large these donations were.
Covid-19 will shrink growth rates and possibly even economies across the region. The people of Central Asia and the South Caucasus are used to big, interventionist and, some would say, authoritarian government. Now these leaders have the opportunity to show their people that this power can be used to good effect in a national emergency.
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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020
YEREVAN/March 26 (The Bulletin) — The Covid-19 virus started to take a grip of the Central Asia and South Caucasus region with only Tajikistan and Turkmenistan not reporting any outbreaks.
Worst hit, by some margin, has been Armenia with 290 cases reported by March 26. Officials said that the source of the outbreak was a sewing factory in Yerevan and people arriving from Iran, which has had one of the worst outbreaks in the world.
From sounding blase about the impact of the coronavirus only two weeks ago, Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan has now ordered a lockdown along the same lines as European countries, which is hitting businesses.
“Let’s look at the upcoming week as a unique opportunity to read, self-reflect and plan the future of the Armenian nation,” he said.
Neighbouring Georgia and Azerbaijan have also reported cases of the coronavirus, 77 cases and 80 cases each, but have taken different approaches to dealing with it. The Georgian government has imposed a lockdown in Tbilisi but in Azerbaijan the rules are more relaxed.
In Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have imposed lockdowns over their largest cities to try to contain the spread of the coronavirus, although Turkmen and Tajik officials have insisted, much to the amazement of many analysts, that they haven’t had any cases.
On March 21, Tajik towns hosted the traditional celebrations to mark the Persian new year Nowruz festival and Turkmen leader Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has talked up the medicinal benefits of various herbs against the coronavirus.
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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020
MARCH 26 (The Bulletin) — Tajikistan has still not recorded any cases of the coronavirus but analysts have said that concerns about health safety have still triggered panic buying and food price spikes. Reports from Tajikistan said that staple goods, such as potatoes and meat have increased by around 60% in price.
Thousands of migrant Tajik workers in Russia have also been stranded in Moscow airports after airlines cancelled flights to Tajikistan. An impending recession in Russia, linked to the collapse in oil prices and the coronavirus, will have a knock-on effect on the Tajik economy. It is heavily reliant on remittances sent back from Russia by its migrant workers.
Rather like President Emomali Rakhmon apparently ignoring the spread of the coronavirus, the Tajik Central Bank has not issued any statement on it and on March 20 instead congratulated Tajiks on the Nowruz festival.
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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020
MARCH 26 (The Bulletin) — Tajikistan is one of only a handful of countries in the world, Turkmenistan being another, that has not reported any cases of the coronavirus. It has not imposed any social-distancing rules and has not placed any of its cities under a lockdown. Instead, towns across the country celebrated the traditional Persian New Year festival of Nowruz as usual.
The health authorities, though, have been imposing a two-week quarantine scheme on people arriving back into the country. They have said that they are running out of beds and places to put people into.
Reports from Moscow said that hundreds of migrant workers were trapped at airports after the cancellation of dozens of flights.
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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020
MARCH 19 (The Bulletin) — The New York-based Human Rights Watch said that two men beat up an opposition Tajik activist living in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania in what it said was a politically motivated attack. HRW said that the attack on March 16 was part of a wider campaign by Tajikistan’s government to track down and intimidate former members of the now-banned Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan.
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— This story was first published in issue 440 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020
MARCH 1 2020 (The Bulletin) — Tajikistan held a parliamentary election that generated, as expected, a clear win for the party of President Imomali Rakhmon. Tajik police had arrested hundreds of opposition supporters, mainly pious Muslims, in the run-up to the election. This, opponents of Mr Rakhmon said, was a state-sponsored effort to sideline opposition.
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— This story was first published in issue 438 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020
FEB. 26 2020 (The Bulletin) — In 2019, constructors in Tajikistan built 24% more buildings than they did in 2018, Tajik media reported. Tajikistan, and especially Dushanbe, is going through something of a construction boom, fueled by cheap loans from China.
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— This story was first published in issue 438 of the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin
— Copyright the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin 2020
JAN. 8 2020 (The Bulletin) — Officials from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan met in Tashkent to approve technical documents that they said should lay the basis for the demarcation of their shared border, a dispute that has at times over the past 30 years has triggered violence. A series of meetings between officials to decide on the border issues are scheduled for this year.
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— This story was first published in issue 433 of the weekly Bulletin on Jan. 13 2020
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JAN. 6 2020 (The Bulletin) — The security forces in Tajikistan arrested dozens of people over the New Year period who they said are linked to the banned Muslim Brotherhood group, media reported. Tajikistan banned the Muslim Brotherhood in 2006. It has carried out a number of purges since of Muslim Brotherhood members, although rights activists have said that the real targets may just be opposition supporters.
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— This story was first published in issue 433 of the weekly Bulletin on Jan. 13 2020
— Copyright owned by the Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin