As a second round of talks on Iran’s nuclear program opens in Almaty on April 5 analysts are not expecting major breakthroughs, but international negotiators will be pushing a proposal advanced when they met in the same venue in February.
Although there was no breakthrough, those talks in Kazakhstan – regarded as a fitting host due to its own non-proliferation efforts – unlocked an eight-month negotiations deadlock.
The six-nation P5+1 group (the five UN Security Council permanent members – the United States, China, Russia, Britain and France – plus Germany) had been pressing Iran to end medium-level uranium enrichment, close its Fordow underground enrichment facility, and hand over stockpiles of medium-enriched uranium – production of which marks a critical stage in bomb making – for international safe-keeping.
Tehran insists it is not pursuing nuclear weapons and that its program is for peaceful purposes. It has pushed for crippling international sanctions to be lifted without preconditions.
Negotiators have been tight-lipped about the February proposal. Reuters reported on April 3, citing unidentified Western officials, that the six-nation group has offered to ease gold sanctions and relax a petrochemicals embargo in return for Iran suspending medium-level uranium enrichment.
Kazakhstan has extended its smoking ban by prohibiting the use of the shisha pipe in enclosed public spaces including bars, nightclubs and restaurants.
The ban came into force on March 14, sparking an outcry among entrepreneurs warning of widespread job losses.
According to the calculations of the Association of Shisha Pipe Industry Entrepreneurs of Kazakhstan, reported by Bnews.kz on April 1, up to 20,000 jobs stand to be lost since each of the 5,000 premises where the shisha is smoked employs three or four people to clean and light the pipes.
The pipes are hugely popular in bars and restaurants in Astana, Almaty and other cities. One pipe, which is shared by groups of friends out socializing, costs around $30-$50. Establishments breaking the new rules face fines of just over $1,100.
Shisha – also known as kalyan or hooka – pipes had been exempt from a smoking ban in enclosed spaces introduced in 2009, when officials said some 30,000 people per year were dying from tobacco-related diseases. Implementation is patchy, with most establishments respecting the ban but some openly flouting it.
According to a World Bank report published in 2010, 40 percent of male adults in Kazakhstan smoke – fewer than Russia’s 59 percent, but almost double the 22 percent smoking in neighboring Uzbekistan.
An elderly woman has died in western Kazakhstan after being attacked by a camel she had raised from infancy, local media report.
The fatal clash took place on April 2 in the village of Umirzak outside the oil city of Aktau in western Kazakhstan, the Lada newspaper said.
Shocked neighbors put the attack down to it being camel mating season, when males are especially aggressive. “I remember this camel as a calf,” one unidentified villager told Lada. “Our neighbor was always looking after it, checking on it, feeding it.”
When she went out to feed the cattle on April 2 “no one paid any attention,” the villager said, until the woman’s husband “noticed that she was lying all in blood and not moving.”
An ambulance came but doctors pronounced her dead from “multiple open wounds.” So fierce was the attack that “her scalp was almost totally torn off,” the newspaper said.
Many people raise camels in the western desert regions of Kazakhstan, where they are prized as a mark of wealth – a single ungulate can be worth upward of $3,000. Camel meat is popular, as is shubat, fermented camel milk.
This is not the first fatal clash between a human and a ship of the desert in recent years: In 2011 the driver of a speeding Opel Vectra was killed after he collided with a herd of camels in the western Aktobe Region. A camel also died in the crash.
The fate of the camel that turned on its owner has not yet been decided, Lada reported, but the “camel murderer is being kept in a separate pen, far from other animals. And people.”
Kazakhstan's new foreign minister did some traveling in the region last week, visiting Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in an apparent effort to get the two sides to talk about their dispute over the massive, controversial Rogun dam project. The United Nations has been trying to get Kazakhstan to play a leading role in resolving the issue between its neighbors to the south and when the foreign minister, Erlan Idrissov, spoke to the press in Dushanbe, he highlighted the Rogun issue:
"It's no secret that the construction of the Rogun hydroelectric power plant is one of the important issues on the agenda. The Tajik president spoke during the meeting about his vision and approach to the construction of this facility. He suggested the importance of working together with the World Bank to conduct an independent examination of the construction of the power station," Idrisov said....
"The states in the upper waters should not violate the rights and economic interests of the states located in the lower waters and vice versa. There are international conventions according to which the two sides should sit at the negotiating table and work out a mutually acceptable scheme for the usage of water resources," Idrisov said.
Eurocopter-Kazakhstan Engineering's factory in Astana
Just a week after proudly announcing the expansion of the Kazakh-European joint venture producing military helicopters, it seems that relations between Kazakhstan's government and its European partner, defense giant Eurocopter, may be getting rocky. The company, Eurocopter-Kazakhstan Engineering, has been accused of violating labor laws and discriminating against citizens of Kazakhstan, reports Tengrinews.kz. From a press release of the Aviation Prosecution Office of Astana:
The Astana Aviation Transport Prosecutor's Office together with the government labor inspector for Astana conducted an inspection of the Eurocopter-Kazakhstan Engineering's compliance with the labor legislation of Kazakhstan. Many violations of Kazakhstan's legislative requirements on labor and insurance in the activity of the partnership were uncovered.
Among the violations: the company allegedly failed to provide proper safety instructions to its employees and engaged in "discrimination against the rights of citizens of Kazakhstan with regard to pay in comparison with foreign citizens for equivalent work." As a result, the company was fined 934,740 tenge, or just a little over $6,000. So, chances are this won't break Eurocopter's bank.
A Bible bonfire is unlikely to boost Kazakhstan’s religious freedom credentials. After all, the country likes to tout itself as a bastion of religious tolerance. Yet as Astana enters new territory in its zealous attempts to control religion, it looks like officials are about to strike the match.
A court in northern Kazakhstan has ordered Christian literature including Bibles to be destroyed, Oslo-based religious freedom watchdog Forum 18 reports. One official has said the Holy Scriptures are likely to be burned.
The order to destroy religious books may be a first for Kazakhstan, Forum 18 said. A legal order last April to destroy religious works, including a Bible, was annulled.
The latest order concerns 121 Bibles and other religious books and leaflets belonging to Vyacheslav Cherkasov, a Baptist from the town of Shchuchinsk. He was slapped with a fine of around $575 after being arrested for distributing religious literature for free.
In his defense, Cherkasov cited his constitutional rights, but the court ruled that only two bookshops in Shchuchinsk are licensed to distribute religious literature. Last year local authorities throughout Kazakhstan issued decrees authorizing only named, licensed bookshops to sell religious literature, Forum 18 said.
Cherkasov is appealing, but if he fails the Bibles are likely to be “burnt,” Justice Ministry official Kulzhiyan Nurbayeva told Forum 18.
“[T]his is terrible, terrible,” the watchdog quoted prominent human rights campaigner Yevgeniy Zhovtis as saying.
Kazakhstan is set to expand its production of military helicopters, with the ambition of becoming "one of the world flagships in the production of light attack helicopters," the state defense company Kazakhstan Engineering has announced. The Kazakhs signed a memorandum of cooperation with European defense giant Eurocopter (a division of EADS) to build the EC 645 T2, an armed version of the EC 145 that is already being built in Kazakhstan. From a press release from Kazakhstan Engineering, the state defense company:
According to the document [signed by Kazakhstan Engineering President Bolat Smagulov and Eurocopter Senior Vice President Olivier Lambert] the Joint Stock Company Eurocopter Kazakhstan Engineering, the only manufacturer of the EC 145 in the CIS, will assemble and service military helicopters EC 645 T2.
The agreements ... will allow the joint enterprise to move to a new step of its development, to establish assembly (with the production of some components) of a higher level of technology. The EC 645 T2 helicopter is one of the newest designs available on the world market. At the moment, serial production has not started in any country in the world. In the case of the successful realization of the signed document Kazakhstan will become one of the world flagships in the production of light attack helicopters.
The EC 645 T2 isn't currently in use with any military in the world, but it's a candidate for the U.S. Army's new Armed Aerial Scout helicopter. It boasts advanced laser targeting technology and the ability to be armed with a variety of rockets and guns.
International Women’s Day on March 8 is seen in much of the world as an opportunity to raise awareness about gender equality – but, as in most other former Soviet states, in Kazakhstan the holiday is more about giving flowers and chocolates and making saccharine speeches extolling the virtues of the fairer sex.
While women’s rights activists in other parts of the former Soviet Union – including neighboring Kyrgyzstan – have stepped forward to try to reclaim Women’s Day, in Kazakhstan the image of the female as either beauty idol or perfect wife remains central to the festivities.
To celebrate the rising role of women in the military – and there are over 8,500 of them, including 750 officers, according to the Defense Ministry – why not vote for Miss Military Kazakhstan? Vox Populi, a magazine, is running an online contest featuring uniformed women striking sexy poses, with readers voting for their favorite military sex bomb.
Not to be outdone, Kazakhstan’s rail industry has its own beauty queen: This year's proud Miss Railways is HR specialist Minuar Sarkynshakova, who won the beauty pageant after a stiff competition in the pages of trade magazine Kazakhstan Railroader.
Muslim communities practicing outside the strict boundaries permitted in Kazakhstan are coming under increased pressure, an international watchdog says, as zealous officials present bizarre interpretations of a controversial new religion law.
One mosque in northern Kazakhstan said it had been told to conduct sermons only in the Kazakh language, Oslo-based Forum 18 reports, although the law contains no such provision.
The mosque facing the stringent linguistic demands is the Din-Muhammad Tatar-Bashkir Mosque in the city of Petropavl (known as Petropavlovsk in Russian), which has just lost one appeal against a liquidation ruling. The Din-Muhammad Tatar-Bashkir congregation is among many religious communities facing closure under a re-registration process that ended last October.
A 2011 religion law required all religious communities in Kazakhstan to re-register under stringent criteria within a year or face closure. The results were stark: approximately one-third of religious organizations did not receive re-registration, leaving 3,088 operating against the previous total of 4,551.
Petropavl’s 19th-century Din-Muhammad Tatar-Bashkir Mosque, whose congregation includes members of the city’s Tatar minority, is among those appealing. It now faces an unusual demand from officials monitoring its sermons, currently held in three languages: Kazakh, Russian and Tatar. (Prayers are held in Arabic.)
“The authorities insist we have sermons only in Kazakh,” Forum 18 quoted an anonymous community member as saying. “But we hold sermons in the language of the people who attend the mosque so that they can understand what is said.”
Kazakhstan is testing some new unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, aka drones) from Russia, a military official has said. Kazakhstan had tried out UAVs from France and Israel but they didn't do well in the cold weather, said General-Major Almaz Dzhumakeev, commander of Kazakhstan's 36th Air Assault Brigade:
"It's necessary to strengthen the reconnaissance units. There will be a competition, a selection, we will see which is acceptable for us and our climate, taking into account the wind and the cold. There have been UAVs which took off, flew 20 meters and crashed because it was so cold..."
According to the general-major, in 2014 after the selection of the supplier country the UAVs will enter service in the armed reconnaissance units of the armed forces of Kazakhstan. "Most likely, next year they will enter service. Where there is reconnaissance, there will be UAVs," he noted.
Kazakhstan has plans to produce its own drones, and also apparently has plans to buy some small reconnaissance drones from the Russian Irkut Corporation.It's also been looking at Chinese UAVs. It's not clear from the recent news stories, but it seems likely that the Irkuts are what Maj-Gen Dzhumakeev was talking about. From the website Russian Aviation, last October:
The Kazakh Ministry of Defense (MoD) will purchase 10 Irkut-10 unmanned reconnaissance aircraft systems (UAS) from Irkut Corporation, Lenta.ru reports.
