Kyrgyzstan's opposition politicians are outraged. Late last year hundreds of tons of coal with higher than normal levels of radioactivity found their way from a mine in Kazakhstan to the electricity and heating plant in Bishkek. When the media and public demanded the coal be removed from the city, it was reportedly transferred to the boiler rooms of 14 schools, a kindergarten and an orphanage.
The opposition politicos have seized the story, bellowing that generations of children will be contaminated. They propose theories that are impossible to verify, and offer all sorts of unsubstantiated statistics on how radioactive the coal is. According to the Emergencies Situations Ministry, the coal is emitting background radiation three to five times higher than normal.
Is the coal dangerous? Possibly. But considering Kyrgyzstan’s legacy of mismanaging radioactive waste, the arguments ring a little hollow.
In former Soviet uranium mining towns dotting mountainous Kyrgyzstan, impoverished families live with the threat of radioactive contamination every day, for their whole lives, and experience more associated illnesses than people living in other areas.
Turkmenistan may already have a reputation for the surreal, but as presidential elections approach, one of the last remaining government critics is being harassed by someone with an occultist fantasy and/or a fondness for Francis Ford Coppola.
Shortly after speaking with Radio Liberty’s Turkmen service about the February 12 elections -- which feature seven docile challengers to the certain winner, incumbent President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov -- Natalia Shabunts reportedly found a severed sheep head on the doorstep of her home in Ashgabat. Earlier in the week, someone drew a cross out of white powder on her doormat.
Activists have no doubt the bizarre measures are intended to frighten Shabunts.
“Both incidents appear aimed at intimidating Shabunts, who has not refrained from criticizing the Turkmen authorities on democracy and human rights issues in her own name, despite the risks it entails for a Turkmenistan-based activist,” said a statement emailed February 3 by the Brussels-based International Partnership for Human Rights, citing a report by the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights (TIHR).
TIHR’s news service, Chronicles of Turkmenistan, says it has no doubt the security services wish to silence Shabunts because she tarnishes the country’s image. And for the sake of this goal, joked the author, “one of them sacrificed his own head.”
Kyrgyzstan’s international donor community is buzzing with scandal: The director of the World Bank’s Kyrgyzstan office, Alexander Kramer, apparently hurled a drinking glass at Kyrgyzstan’s new deputy prime minister, Djoomart Otorbayev, on February 3.
The incident occurred during a donor meeting at government headquarters, known as the White House, in Bishkek. According to one eyewitness, Kramer had just spoken for a few minutes, praising recent government initiatives and encouraging Bishkek to ensure officials are chosen for their merits. He defended the World Bank’s sometimes slow motions in the country, noting that development is “a marathon rather than a sprint,” according to EurasiaNet's source. During the next set of remarks, by the International Monetary Fund’s country director, Kramer suddenly stood up, yelled, “This is all crap!” and threw the glass, which shattered on the floor in front of Otorbayev.
He then stormed out of the room, a video of which made the evening news.
Once again, interethnic strife in southern Kyrgyzstan is testing a new government in far-away Bishkek. This time the friction comes between ethnic Kyrgyz and minority Tajiks in remote Batken Province, whose eponymous capital has seen at least two days of street protests. The demonstrators have come out in defense of the local governor, dismissed February 1, reportedly for failing to quell the latest bout of ethnic tensions in the fragile Ferghana Valley.
The first apparent spark of the current conflict dates to a late-December brawl between Kyrgyz and Tajiks in Batken’s Andarak village. The new chief of the State Committee for National Security (GKNB) and an interior ministry official criticized Governor Arzybek Burkanov for failing to respond to the fight, recommending he be removed. These officials aren’t the first to worry the next ethnic flashpoint in Kyrgyzstan will be between Kyrgyz and Tajiks in Batken Province, where the former have long charged the latter with illegally occupying land along the undefined frontier with Tajikistan.
Then, on January 26, a young Tajik man allegedly murdered a female Kyrgyz bank teller. Though the suspect was arrested, residents of his village, Aydarken, reportedly chased his extended family from their homes.
Human rights ombudsman Tursunbek Akun has warned this situation could further escalate and said what should be obvious: Only the criminal, not his relatives nor his entire ethnic group, must be punished.
Two new studies say that Kumtor, Kyrgyzstan’s largest gold mine, as well as a major government revenue source, routinely ignores national environmental legislation and restricts access to independent auditors. The mine’s operations could have a far-reaching, detrimental effect on Central Asia’s water supply, one of the reports suggests.
Central Asia is chock full of beautiful places, pristine prairies and mountain valleys that look as if they’ve never been touched by mankind. But many spots are well-documented environmental wastelands. How does the damage measure up to the rest of the world?
Radio Free Europe has flagged an interesting new ranking of global environmental performance, which shows Central Asian countries crowding the bottom of the list.
Researchers at Yale and Columbia universities have ranked 132 countries for environmental performance based on 10 categories, such as the effects of water and air pollution on human and environmental health, a country’s approach to managing natural resources, and climate change policy. The sixth annual Environmental Performance Index (EPI) ranked Kazakhstan 129th, Uzbekistan 130th and Turkmenistan 131st. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, with the most lackluster economies in the region, fared slightly better at 121 and 101, respectively.
RFE/RL spoke with Angel Hsu, EPI project director at Yale, who said Kazakhstan’s poor performance is explained in part by its emissions record:
"For Kazakhstan, they performed the lowest on climate change and air [quality], and this is due to the fact that they have heavy dependence on coal." According to Hsu, "forty five percent of their carbon dioxide emissions come from the country's coal-fired power plants, and what I found interesting is that they have very little active government policies to expand renewable energy in the electricity sector."
Diversion of rivers and other water management problems – politically-charged issues that plague the region as a whole – also dragged down Kazakhstan's score.
Uzbekistan’s apparatchik-in-chief could still give a Sovietologist pause. Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, President Islam Karimov – an economist by training – continues to stuff his people full of fabulous statistics, records even. But like the excerpts from a Central Committee meeting, something doesn’t quite add up.
No one in Uzbekistan misses the old Soviet Union, Karimov told his nation recently, because life since independence has become even more equitable (his own multi-millionaire daughters aside): “If you recall, back in 1990 from the rostrum I addressed our people, specifically the youth, my children, to say that in the future Uzbekistan, there would be a just state where there would be neither very rich nor very poor people.” How did independent Uzbekistan, rising out of the ashes of that failed utopia, meet these ideals? The answers are in the statistics, which Karimov skims over with alacrity.
From his January 19 speech to the Cabinet of Ministers, marked by a two-hour program on state television the next day (transcription and translation by BBC Monitoring):
Now there are some people nostalgic for the old times. I am sure that there are no such people in Uzbekistan at all. […] One can hear views on TV and through the media that after the collapse of the USSR all went bankrupt. If a person wants to have a personal, independent opinion on this, let him see the figures. Let him comprehend the figures. After this, no propaganda is needed. And there is no need to persuade him or tell lies to him. Everything will be clear to him by comparing the two things.
Compare or not, despite promises the USSR is dead and buried, Karimov moves on to sound eerily like a commissar:
Parked outside Kyrgyzstan’s parliament, the fleet of Lexus SUVs is an impressive sight for such a poor country.
Now, a new online number-crunching project has estimated that each of these luxury cars driven by MPs would cost its owner six to seven years’ pay, barring any other living expenses, like food, rent or utilities. For an average Bishkek resident living under the same ascetic conditions, one of the higher-end models, sold locally for as much as $87,000, would cost 33 years’ earnings. Other makes of car in the lot would require an average Bishkekchanin to work between 12 and 20 years, depending on the model’s year and accessories.
Many Kyrgyzstanis have theories about why their lawmakers are so much wealthier than the rest of their countrymen—and it’s no wonder, considering the country was ranked 164 out of 183 in Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index. But the local news organization behind the project, Kloop.kg, has set aside the “whys” and “hows” and is simply compiling some numbers, pairing publicly available information about parliament deputies’ state-issued license plates with estimates of their cars’ cost on the local market. The website is crowdsourcing photos of the deputies’ cars, identified by their special plates; as of January 24, its list had grown to 21 deputies (of a total 120).
Kloop’s calculations could have been more stringent—for example, identical models sometimes differ significantly in cost estimates -- but they give observers of politics in Kyrgyzstan some numbers to play with. Keep in mind, lawmakers reportedly have a state salary of about $1000 per month -- well above the national average.
When characterizing Turkmenistan’s human rights record, international watchdogs often resort to descriptions that could come straight out of dystopian literature or memoirs of the Stalinist Terror. Turkmenistan continues to have one of the most brutal regimes on earth, a grim place marked by “enforced disappearances,” “draconian restrictions,” an all-powerful leader, and the dumping of nonconformists into “psychiatric facilities.” Then there are the mundane attempts to control access to information, such as when “Internet cafes require visitors to present their passports.”
Like the section on Uzbekistan, the Turkmenistan summary in Human Rights Watch’s new annual report offers EurasiaNet.org readers few surprises. But for the record, here are some of the grisly highlights:
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov’s authoritarian rule remains entrenched, highlighting Turkmenistan’s status as one of the world’s most repressive countries.
The country remains closed to independent scrutiny, media and religious freedoms are subject to draconian restrictions, and human rights defenders face constant threat of government reprisal. The United Nations Human Rights Committee expressed concern about allegations of widespread torture and ill-treatment, and of enforced disappearances in custody.
On “the Protector”:
President Berdymukhamedov, his relatives, and associates enjoy unlimited power and total control over all aspects of public life in Turkmenistan. In 2010 and 2011 newspapers and other publications began to bestow on Berdymukhamedov the honorific title arkadag (patron), symbolizing the strengthening of his cult of personality.
The government of Uzbekistan continues to deny basic human rights to its citizens, torturing detainees, persecuting the faithful, and forcing children to labor in the cotton fields, Human Rights Watch says in its World Report 2012. In essence, the New York-based watchdog says, nothing has changed and Uzbekistan’s record “remains appalling.”
The charges are nothing new to readers of this blog, but for the record:
Uzbek authorities regularly threaten, imprison, ill-treat, and torture human rights defenders and other peaceful civil society activists. In 2011 the Uzbek government continued to harass activists and interfere with independent civil society.
The Uzbek government holds at least 13 human rights defenders in prison, and has brought charges against others, because of their human rights work. They are: Solijon Abdurakhmanov, Azam Formonov, Nosim Isakov, Gaibullo Jalilov, Alisher Karamatov, Jamshid Karimov, Norboi Kholjigitov, Abdurasul Khudainasarov, Ganihon Mamatkhanov, Habibulla Okpulatov, Yuldash Rasulov, Dilmurod Saidov, and Akzam Turgunov.
Several are in very poor health and at least seven have been ill-treated or tortured in custody. For example, relatives of imprisoned rights defender Gaibullo Jalilov reported after a January 2011 visit that he had been repeatedly tortured, including being beaten with a stick that left him nearly deaf in both ears.
On the 2005 Andijan massacre:
The Uzbek government also continued to intimidate families of Andijan survivors who have sought refuge abroad. Police subject them to constant surveillance, call them for questioning, and threaten them with criminal charges or home confiscation.
