DEC. 16 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Uzbek government is imposing increasingly tough rules over artists and singers, the BBC reported. It said singers will have to provide quarterly reports on their performances so that the authorities can ensure that they are hitting the required level of “spiritual and cultural values and national traditions”.
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(News report from Issue No. 261, published on Dec. 20 2015)
DEC. 10 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Afghanistan has signed an electricity supply deal with Uzbekistan which is 10% larger than last year to meet rising demand, a source at the state- owned Uzbekenergo told Russian media. Uzbekistan is an important supplier of electricity to northern Afghanistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 260, published on Dec. 11 2015)
DEC. 9 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Apogee, a Dubai-based international airport service company, opened an office in the Yuzhny Airport in Tashkent. Apogee focuses on former-Soviet countries, providing various support functions for airports.
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(News report from Issue No. 260, published on Dec. 11 2015)
DEC. 5 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Global Fund to Help Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria has given Uzbekistan a grant of nearly $14m, media reported . Uzbekistan has one of the fastest growing rates of aids in the world.
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(News report from Issue No. 260, published on Dec. 11 2015)
DEC. 7 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbek president Islam Karimov criticised Uzbekistan’s police force as shoddy, Eurasianet.org reported. Human rights groups have long criticised police in Uzbekistan for using torture on inmates but Mr Karimov has never previously criticised them. Mr Karimov said there had been complaints about the police.
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(News report from Issue No. 260, published on Dec. 11 2015)
DEC. 9 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — GM Uzbekistan posted a 47% fall in sales of cars to Russia in the first eleven months of the year. Only 18,753 cars manufactured by the General Motors-led joint venture with the Uzbek government were sold in the Russian market. In January-November last year, GM Uzbekistan sold over 35,000 cars to Russia. Russia is its most important market.
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(News report from Issue No. 260, published on Dec. 11 2015)
DEC. 10 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbekistan once again formally complained to the OSCE, Europe’s security and democracy watchdog, about plans by Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to build new dams on the upstream river system
The complaint is a reminder of Uzbekistan’s opposition to hydro- power development in Central Asia’s upstream water system.
The Tajik and Kyrgyz governments see building new dams and hydro- power systems as essential for their countries’ development, and specific to meeting new power demands from Pakistan who they will serve through the CASA-1000 project. Uzbekistan sees the hydro- power systems as a threat to its cotton industry and agriculture.
CASA-1000 is the $1b World Bank- backed project for Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to generate electricity to export to Pakistan, via Afghanistan. This project hinges on a series of new dams being built in Tajikistan, including the Rogun Dam on the Vakhsh River, part of the wider Amu Darya system.
Relations between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have become so strained in the past over the issue that at times it has threatened to destabilise the region.
With the final deal on CASA-1000 signed in Istanbul earlier this month, relations between Uzbekistan and its upstream neighbours are likely to become more strained, as this latest complaint appears to forewarn.
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(News report from Issue No. 260, published on Dec. 11 2015)
DEC. 2 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbekistan’s telecommunications ministry said it wanted to spend nearly $900m over the next five years improving broadband access across the country. Internet penetration in Uzbekistan is still low.
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(News report from Issue No. 259, published on Dec. 4 2015)
DEC. 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tajikistan and Uzbekistan plan to hold bilateral foreign ministry level talks in Dushanbe for the first time on Dec. 17/18, a step towards improving relations. Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have been locked in a row over water. Tajikistan wants to build what would be one of the world’s largest hyrdopower dams. Uzbekistan has complained that the dam will reduce water flow to its fields of cotton.
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(News report from Issue No. 259, published on Dec. 4 2015)
DEC. 4 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Kyrgyz som continued its slump against the dollar and now trades at above 75.5/$1. The Central Bank chairman Tolkunbek Abdygulov said the exchange rate had changed because of a speculative attack and promised to continue to intervene to prop up the currency. The regulator said that local bank FinanceCredit was found guilty of speculative trading of the som. In addition, the Central Bank fined several exchange points across the country for speculating on currency rates.
In Tajikistan, the somoni was stable at 6.7/$1, after a rough week. On Nov. 30, media reported that Dushanbe residents had to pay around 7.5somoni for $1. The Central Bank reacted by drafting a decree that shut down the remaining private exchange bureaus in the country. Earlier in April, it had forced the closure of over 800 out of a total of 1,500 exchange bureaus because it said they were taking advantage of the unstable currency markets.
On Dec. 1, the Central Bank also reported the arrest of six employees of exchange bureaus for currency speculation. As with the Kyrgyz incidents, the details of these so-called speculative attacks have been difficult to pin down.
But none of this is surprising in Central Asia’s currency markets.
We witnessed a similar trend in Kazakhstan in 2014, when a devaluation of the tenge was followed by speculative attacks on the currency and interventions to keep the tenge from plummeting. This was repeated this year again in Kazakhstan.
It is likely that both Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan will follow this trend and crack down on private exchange bureaus to strengthen their control over exchange rates.
In much of the rest of the region, currencies did not move. The exception was Uzbekistan. The Uzbek sum reached a new record trading low, officially, at 2,755/$1. In the last year, it lost almost 15% of its value.
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(News report from Issue No. 259, published on Dec. 4 2015)