JAN. 25 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Turkmen authorities sentenced a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses to four years in jail at a secret trial for distributing pornography, Forum 18, the Norway-based religion news agency, reported. The group said that the allegations against Vladimir Nuryllayev, the jailed member, were fabricated.
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(News report from Issue No. 75, published on Feb. 2 2012)
JAN. 18 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmen president Kurbanguly Burdymukhamedov will face seven token opponents in the country’s Feb. 12 presidential election, the Central Election Commission confirmed when it published the official candidate list. Mr Berdymukhamedov’s opponents are drawn from government ministries and state companies.
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(News report from Issue No. 73, published on Jan. 19 2012)
JAN. 18 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – In its annual growth forecasts, the World Bank said weakening markets in the West would hit the developing world in 2012. For 2012 growth forecasts for Central Asia and the South Caucasus were: Tajikistan 6%, Kyrgyzstan 5.5%, Kazakhstan 5.5%, Uzbekistan 8%, Turkmenistan N/A, Azerbaijan 3.1%, Georgia 5%, Armenia 4.3%.
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(News report from Issue No. 73, published on Jan. 19 2012)
JAN. 13 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Elections observers from the former Soviet Union will monitor Turkmenistan’s presidential election on Feb. 12 2012. However, Europe’s main election monitoring group, the OSCE, has said that political freedom is so restricted in Turkmenistan that there is no point in sending a vote monitoring team.
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(News report from Issue No. 72, published on Jan. 13 2012)
JAN. 7 2012 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmen president Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov fired Aman Khanaliyev, the head of the state energy company Turkmengaz. Mr Khanaliyev had been in the post for a year. This is the third time Mr Berdymukhamedov has sacked the head of Turkmengaz since he became president in 2007.
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(News report from Issue No. 72, published on Jan. 13 2012)
DEC. 23 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the Turkmen president, travelled to Moscow to meet Russia’s President, Dmitri Medvedev, and PM, Vladimir Putin. The trip is important because economic ties between the countries have worsened over rows about gas prices and mobile phone licenses in the past three years.
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(News report from Issue No. 71, published on Jan. 5 2012)
DEC. 5 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – A disputed parliamentary election in Russia on Dec. 4 triggered unprecedented anti-government street demonstrations in Russian cities, protests which will have worried leaders in Central Asia and the South Caucasus.
The people of Central Asia and the South Caucasus have strong historical, business, family and political ties with Russia and what happens there matters.
Politics in Kazakhstan is similarly aligned to Russia and the country is confronting growing pains. President Nursultan Nazarbayev also has to deal with a parliamentary election on Jan. 15.
Although Mr Nazarbayev’s position is far more secure than his Russian counterparts’ he faces lingering issues over his succession policy and commitment to genuine democracy. The compliant Kazakh media has steered away from covering the Russia protests in detail but Mr Nazarbayev certainly wouldn’t want them to linger.
In Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan the media is even more tightly controlled and the impact of the anti-government protests in Moscow will be softer but, again, if they are prolonged they will start to worry their leaders.
In the South Caucasus, Azerbaijan is most prone to an impact from street demonstrations in Russia. Its police force stamped out anti-government protests during the first half of the year and demonstrations in Russia could embolden protesters again.
It is premature to talk of a Slavic Spring in Russia but there is an air of change and this attitude could start to drip into other former Soviet states.
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(News report from Issue No. 68, published on Dec. 8 2011)
NOV. 30 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Rafiq Tagi, a 61-year-old widely respected Azerbaijani journalist, died of stab wounds in a Baku hospital on Nov. 23, four days after an unknown assailant attacked him.
He wrote articles critical of both the state and hard line Islam. Muslim extremists, though, are suspected of organising Tagi’s murder.
Whether or not the authorities or Muslim extremists are the main threat, for local journalists the former Soviet South Caucasus and Central Asia states are often both difficult and dangerous to report on.
In Turkmenistan police this year tracked down and imprisoned journalists who reported on an explosion at an arms depot. In Uzbekistan most local correspondents from international news agencies have been chased out and in Tajikistan the BBC’s reporter was jailed.
Southern Kyrgyzstan remains dangerous for ethnic Uzbek journalists and in Kazakhstan in October attackers armed with baseball bats and a gun beat a camera crew covering protests in the west of the country against the state oil company.
A 2010 press freedom index compiled by the US-based NGO Reporters Without Borders scored the countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia poorly. Armenia, Georgia and Tajikistan ranked slightly better but Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were in the bottom quarter of the index.
The report card for 2011 may well be even worse.
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(News report from Issue No. 67, published on Dec. 1 2011)
NOV. 23 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – In Beijing, Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao agreed to increases gas supplies to China from Turkmenistan by 60%. If all goes to plan, Turkmenistan will pump 65b cubic metres per year to China — around half its total annual gas needs.
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(News report from Issue No. 67, published on Dec. 1 2011)
NOV. 21 2011 (The Conway Bulletin) – Russia’s Gazprom accused Turkmenistan of overstating its gas reserves, triggering an angry response from Turkmen officials. Relations between the two countries have soured in the last couple of years due to rows over gas prices and Turkmenistan’s plans to diversify its gas export routes away from Russia.
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(News report from Issue No. 66, published on Nov. 23 2011)