NATO reached an agreement with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to ship military equipment out of Afghanistan through Central Asia, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen reported today:
We also reached agreement on reverse transit from Afghanistan with three Central Asian partners: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. These agreements will give us a range of new options and the robust and flexible transport network we need....
With Russia we have a transit arrangement, a reverse transit arrangement already, and the fact that we have now concluded a transit arrangement, three concrete transit arrangements with Central Asian countries at the Chicago Summit, will make the use of the Russian transit arrangement even more effective.
In response to a question on payment for the reverse transit, he implied that there was some, but wouldn't specify: "I do not comment on details in the transit arrangements, but it goes without saying that we have concluded agreements that are of mutual satisfaction of the involved partners."
Meanwhile, he said negotiations with Pakistan on reopening those lines of communication continue: "I'm not going to comment on details in negotiations with Pakistan. I'll just reiterate that I still hope that a solution can be found in the very near future."
These NATO deals are not related to separate deals the U.S. has reached. Obviously the U.S. is a member of NATO, and it's not clear if this new NATO deal now covers all NATO member countries besides the U.S., or what.
The most interesting subplot here is what this means for Pakistan. The AP story on Rasmussen's comments had an intriguing bit of analysis:
The Kremlin has not taken kindly to the U.S. ambassador's suggestion that Russia "bribed" Kyrgyzstan in 2009 to kick the U.S. out of the Manas air base. The controversy began Friday, when Ambassador Michael McFaul addressed a group of Russian students and reportedly told them that:
Russia had “bribed” Kyrgyzstan four years ago to prompt the country to shut down the U.S. military airbase in Manas airport near Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek. In his speech, he admitted that the United States had also offered a bribe to Kyrgyzstan, but ten times less.
The website of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, which posts texts of most of McFaul's public speeches, for some reason has only a slide presentation (pdf) of this particular address, which contains no reference to Kyrgyzstan or bribery, so it's not clear what his exact words were. But obviously he was referring to the episode when former Kyrgyzstan president Kurmanbek Bakiyev announced -- in Moscow -- that Kyrgyzstan was booting the U.S. out of the base. And at the same time, Russia announced a $2.15 billion aid package for Kyrgyzstan.
It took a few days, but on Monday Russia's Foreign Ministry reacted strongly, issuing a harsh statement:
The Russian Foreign Ministry was extremely bewildered by the U.S. ambassador’s statements… His estimates of Russian-U.S. cooperation go far beyond diplomatic etiquette and represent a deliberate distortion of a number of aspects of Russian-American dialogue...
German troops in Afghanistan may soon have to go without mustard for their weisswurst. According to Russian media reports, a resupply truck convoy carrying food for German soldiers is experiencing a major delay at the Kyrgyz-Tajik border.
According to Zakir Tilenov, chief of the Kyrgyz Border Guard Service, the resupply trucks bound for the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif cannot pass through the Karamyk crossing into Tajikistan due to an existing bilateral treaty provision that allows only Kyrgyz and Tajik carriers to use that particular route. The trucks have been stuck for more than a week now.
The Interfax News Agency reports that the German Embassy in Bishkek sent an official letter to the Kyrgyz Parliament asking for help in resolving the issue. Tokon Mamytov, the chairman of parliament’s Committee on Defense and Security, has expressed support for amending the treaty to enable freight carriers involved in the Afghan War resupply effort to use the crossing. In the meantime, Mamytov and other members of the Defense Committee want the government to take action.
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan participate in the Northern Distribution Network, a web of air, road and rail links in Central Asia and have emerged as the primary resupply line for US and NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan. Using the Karamyk checkpoint could cut up to 200 miles off a transit route for NDN-related, Afghan-bound haulers that passes through Tajikistan, according to a report in the Russian newspaper Vzglyad.
A new report by the United Nations drug agency sheds light on the nuts and bolts of narcotics transit from Afghanistan through Central Asia, highlighting the former Soviet republics’ lackluster efforts at interdiction.
The 106-page report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), released this month, describes how smugglers traffic heroin and opium from Afghanistan, the world’s largest producer, to Russia, the world’s largest consumer. Ninety tons of highly pure heroin, roughly a quarter of the substance exiting Afghanistan, passes through Central Asia annually. Yet in 2010 authorities in the region seized less than 3 percent of it. And despite international efforts to help, that number keeps falling.
Central Asia’s entrenched corruption makes the region a perfect smuggling route, says the report. Senior officials are complicit in the trade, or at least take bribes to look the other way, especially in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. A lack of cooperation among neighbors also offers a boon to traffickers.
The stakes are huge.
“UNODC estimates that in 2010 drug traffickers in Central Asia made a net profit of $1.4 billion from heroin sales. Much of this profit was likely incurred by Tajik traffickers, given that Tajikistan is estimated to handle most of the flow,” said the report. They profit by marking up the heroin by as much as 600 percent once it gets to Russia. Between 70 and 75 percent of the drugs travel by road, leaving a trail of new addicts across Central Asia.
In Kyrgyzstan, and throughout much of the former Soviet Union, a child with cerebral palsy, impaired hearing or autism is segregated in a so-called special school, cut off from “normal” children. Under this system, a recent study found, almost half of all children with special needs – nearly 10,000 kids – simply don’t go to school at all, robbing both the children, and society at large, of opportunities to learn and integrate.
About 150 people carrying banners reading “Education for All Children in Kyrgyzstan” and “We are All Different but Equal” rallied in front of the Education Ministry in Bishkek on May 17 to challenge the segregation and ask the ministry to ensure equal education for all. Educating children together is best both for the children, all of them, and society at large, the activists said. Several officials from the ministry mingled with the peaceful crowd.
The rally is part of a series of events to push for the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Kyrgyzstan signed last autumn, but has not ratified. Azat Israilov, one of the event’s organizers, said that the event is meant to call attention to specific education provisions in the Convention and raise awareness about the difficulties that children with special needs face accessing education in Kyrgyzstan.
“We want all children to be able to study together like the Convention requires,” said Israilov.
Article 24 of the Convention obligates governments to “ensure an inclusive education system at all levels … enabling persons with disabilities to participate effectively in a free society.” Signing the Convention was an important step, Israilov said, but only ratification by parliament would give it legal weight.
The Economist has questioned the plausibility of a study conducted by leading UK charity Save the Children, which lauded a trio of Central Asian states for winning the war on child malnutrition.
The annual State of the World’s Mothers report is backed by “spurious statistics,” The Economist says.
The study finds that Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan have made huge strides in reducing child malnutrition. It singles out Uzbekistan (alongside Angola) as one of “two priority countries that have made the fastest progress in reducing child malnutrition – both cut stunting rates in half in about 10 years.”
Uzbekistan topped the list of states that have made the greatest strides. Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan came fifth and sixth respectively.
As The Economist pointed out, half of the top six success stories identified by Save the Children are in Central Asia (while number six is North Korea). “This finding is – how can one put it politely? – counter-intuitive,” The Economist commented.
“Number one on the list is Uzbekistan, a vicious dictatorship which imprisons political opponents and has been the site of mass killings,” it continued, while Turkmenistan “had for many years one of the world’s stranger dictators [Saparmurat Niyazov] who renamed the days of the week after himself and his family.” (Turkmenistan is still run by a dictator who is fostering his own personality cult.)
Over the past year, human rights activists in Kyrgyzstan have directed increasing attention at bride kidnapping. Though illegal, and notoriously difficult to quantify, the practice is thought to be widespread, especially in rural areas.
Ombudsman Tursunbek Akun, who says legislators are little interested in the issue, announced today that up to 8,000 Kyrgyz girls are kidnapped and forced into marriage annually.
Few statistics on bride kidnapping are available, and it’s unclear how Akun did his research, but one study last year found that 45 percent of women married in the eastern town of Karakol in 2010 and 2011 had been non-consensually kidnapped.
As Azita Ranjbar reported last week, many of the girls are pressured into marriage and have little recourse to justice.
Although bride kidnapping is illegal under Article 155 of Kyrgyzstan’s Criminal Code, prosecutions are almost unheard of. The state can intervene only if a complaint is filed directly by the victim. But, in many bride-kidnapping cases, the woman is isolated within the home of the abductor, and must overcome daunting obstacles to contact her relatives or the police. Even if her family is aware that she has been kidnapped, they are usually powerless to press charges against the abductor on behalf of the woman. In conservative villages, opposing a bride kidnapping can also bring the family shame.
Moreover, many victims have few legal rights because local religious leaders, rather than the state, certify their marriage ceremonies. Without a government-issued marriage certificate, the courts can do little to protect a woman and her children should she try to leave her husband.
Interethnic tensions between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan have slipped out of the headlines, but analysts say the threat of renewed violence is still a real concern. And if there’s one Kyrgyz politician who loves to stoke the tensions, it’s Jyldyz Joldosheva, a parliamentary deputy from the ultranationalist Ata-Jurt party.
Since the June 2010 ethnic violence, when approximately 450 people died, Joldosheva has regularly traded on anti-Uzbek sentiment. She has often claimed to have proof that members of the Uzbek “diaspora” are plotting against their hosts, the Kyrgyz. Her language relegates Uzbeks to outsider status, although they have lived in the area that is now southern Kyrgyzstan for hundreds of years.
Now she’s getting her supporters riled up with the newsflash that Uzbek high school students are taking their state exams in their native language. This displeases people, AKIpress cited Joldosheva as saying on April 18. She’s demanding an explanation from Education Minister Kanat Sadykov, while other deputies, perhaps bowing to the xenophobic climate, are falling in line behind her. One warns that his constituents are rallying at parliament’s gates, demanding the exams be stopped. The Education Ministry says the tests have been carried out in Kyrgyz, Russian and Uzbek since 2001; of approximately 40,000 students who took the exam last year, about 1,000 took it in Uzbek.
Joldosheva’s rhetoric is divisive in and of itself, but in a post-conflict situation it could be explosive.
A top U.S. military official has finished a trip around Central Asia, and while most of the official news about his visits with the region's leaders was prettyvague, there were a couple of interesting items from Kyrgyzstan.
After meeting with the U.S. official, CENTCOM commander General James Mattis, the chair of Kyrgyzstan's national security council Busurmankul Tabaldiyev suggested that Kyrgyzstan is open to keeping the Manas air base open after 2014. That would be a shift from recent public rhetoric from Bishkek, which has stressed the need to close the base as soon as the current agreement expires in 2014. From 24.kg, quoting Tabaldiyev:
Kyrgyzstan is interested in ensuring security and stability in the country and is ready to participate fully in the efforts of the international community to assist Afghanistan. The Kyrgyz side expressed its readiness to assist the U.S. government to continue after 2014, but in the interests of the country, the views of the people and the security of Kyrgyzstan.
In his meeting with Mattis, Tabaldiyev also apparently broached the topic of getting drone aircraft from the U.S., reports RFE/RL:
Tabaldiev told RFE/RL the request was for U.S. drones to be left for Kyrgyzstan during the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan due by the end of 2014.
...Mattis, leader of the U.S. delegation, reportedly replied that Washington is ready to consider the request.
A decrease in output at Kyrgyzstan’s largest gold mine may do serious harm to the country’s economy, which depends on Kumtor for roughly 12 percent of its GDP and significant tax revenues, say officials.
This week, Toronto-listed Centerra Gold downgraded its production forecast for 2012 by about a third thanks to ice and waste formations that grew in the high-altitude open-pit mine during a workers’ dispute last month, Reuters reports.
Centerra, which is one-third owned by the Kyrgyz government, had expected to produce 575,000 to 625,000 ounces of gold at Kumtor this year. It now hopes for approximately 400,000 ounces.
Ice began to form during the 10-day strike, the company said in a March 27 statement, warning that any further disruptions – either another walkout or roadblocks, which nearby communities commonly employ to demand concessions – “could have a significant impact on Kumtor achieving its revised forecast production.”
On March 29, Temir Sariev, minister of economy and antimonopoly policy, said he was “alarmed” by the new forecast, adding that the national budget depended on output similar to 2011, when the mine produced 583,156 ounces of gold. The deputy head of the National Bank said falling production would hurt overall GDP in 2012.
