“I’ll be the first corpse,” says Sveta Filatova when asked about initiatives to terminate Kyrgyzstan’s methadone programs. A heroin addict for 10 years, Filatova has been taking the opioid substitute for three and says it’s changed her life, enabled her to reconnect with family, and hold a job.
Newlyweds in post-Soviet Central Asia hold some traditions especially dear. Before gathering with friends and family for the big feast, a wedding party will likely hit their city’s hot spots, stopping at scenic parks and important monuments (often including a WWII memorial) for a toast, a photo session, and maybe a quick dance. Their procession of cars, festooned with ribbons and often led by a hired limo, will race around town, usually getting no more than a wink from the sympathetic traffic police.
Saturdays are popular wedding days in Osh, with several parties descending on the same park, enjoying music piped in from a nearby café. Here, a few Saturdays ago, a bride celebrates in a park named for Alimbek Datka, a local 19th-century feudal lord.
David Trilling is EurasiaNet's Central Asia editor.
Think Skype is a secure way to make a call? Think again. That smartphone in your pocket? It could be a portable bug. And the camera on your laptop screen? You might consider covering it with duct tape.
Ask an ethnic Kyrgyz in the cramped village of Tash-Tumshuk what country he lives in and he will reply confidently, “Kyrgyzstan.” Shout over the mud-brick fence to the ethnic Tajik next door and he will, with equal conviction, say he lives in Tajikistan, in a village called Hojа Alo.
For over 20 years now, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, the two poorest republics to emerge from the Soviet Union, have failed to agree on the location of their border in the most densely populated parts of the Ferghana Valley.
Comrade Lenin was happy where he stood for 35 years. Then city authorities built a stadium directly in his line of site. Within a year, so disappointed by the local football team’s losses, Vladimir Ilyich couldn’t take it anymore, and got up and moved downriver.
So go the jokes in Khujand, formerly Leninabad, to explain why officials moved Central Asia’s tallest statue of the Bolshevik revolutionary in May 2011 from a central square to a patch of weeds where cows graze by the Syr Darya River. He was replaced by a statue of Ismail Somoni, a proto-Tajik 10th-century king.
He’s still the tallest Lenin in Central Asia, however, at 12.5 meters with a new 12.5-meter pedestal, just like the old one. (Except without the marble facing and nameplate.)
To placate some locals upset by the move, a new story is making the rounds: The cow fields and industrial wasteland surrounding Lenin’s new spot will be turned into a large park.
**UPDATE (July 26): The Ministry of Social Development has stopped all international adoption agencies from working in Kyrgyzstan, for now. According to a July 26 Vecherny Bishkek report, which includes a list of the agencies, four have been banned due to "grave violations." Six others have been suspended for two months.
Kids in Kyrgyzstan’s state childcare institutions are again at the center of the country’s lackluster war on corruption. Though a long-standing moratorium on international adoption in Kyrgyzstan was lifted last year, authorities seem bent on bringing it back after the high-profile arrest of a minister involved in the process.
The moratorium was originally instituted in February 2009 because of corruption in the adoption system and reasonable fears children were not being protected. (The campaign later drew sensationalist coverage in press reports, which played on fears of "Americans harvesting our children's organs”). Despite repeated promises to prospective parents to lift the ban, it dragged on because of chaos in government. For at least 65 American families who had already started the adoption process, the freeze left dozens of children in limbo for years. A fair number had congenital illnesses and needed treatment in the West. Some died waiting.
Thousands of men filled every nook and cranny of the Haji Yacoub Mosque in Dushanbe, Tajikistan's capital, for the first day of Ramadan on July 20. This year, the holy month began on a Friday, Muslims' main day of prayer.
David Trilling is EurasiaNet's Central Asia editor.
Tajikistan is sitting on “super-giant” oil and gas reserves, says the head of a Canadian firm prospecting in the country’s southwest since 2008.
Tethys Petroleum says Tajikistan may have more hydrocarbons than what remains in the British segments of the North Sea. The company’s stock surged in London on the July 19 announcement. Such a reserve, if extracted (and shared with the people), could radically alter the economy of Central Asia’s poorest state.
The announcement came after Gustavson Associates, an American mining consultancy, estimated that seismic data shows Tethys’s Bokhtar Production Sharing Contract (PSC) area contains 27.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent, including 114 trillion cubic feet of gas and 8.5 billion barrels of oil and condensate. The 25,000-square kilometer Bokhtar PSC is a “highly prospective region which has existing oil and gas discoveries but which has seen limited exploration to date,” according to Tethys’s website.
“Tethys is operating in a world class basin with enormous and untapped potential,” said CEO David Robson in a press release. “The deep prospects being pursued in Tajikistan have 'super-giant' potential and any exploration success will be transformational for the company.”
The press release cautioned, however, that the reserves are not definite and a variety of factors (including “government regulation” and “political issues” – realistic concerns in a country as corrupt as Tajikistan) could prevent Tethys from extracting the oil and gas.
Didn’t know NATO was in the personal-protection business? Neither did NATO.
Istanbul vendors selling watches, knives and batteries from folding tables are offering a product bound to surprise the NATO officials who regularly visit the city: pressurized canisters of “American Style NATO Super-Paralisant.”
Also known as pepper spray, the 40-milliliter bottles of “CS-Gas Silliarde” claim to be made in Germany. But the G.I. Joe-look is 100-percent American.
It’s unclear how much demand there is for the spray in a city where the crime rate is relatively low.
One merchant in an underpass in the Eminönü neighborhood said he first saw the product – which he sells at the competitive price of 6 Turkish lira (roughly $3.50) – about two years ago. He laughed when told the slogan on the carton, which reads “Body Protect Aerosol Type,” could be misunderstood as a different type of defense: We were thinking deodorant.
But don’t be alarmed: NATO isn't arming the Turkish population. A spokesman in Brussels confirmed to EurasiaNet.org that the spray is “not a NATO product.”
