When he first arrived in what was, back then, British-controlled Palestine, no one was especially interested in hearing David Stoliar’s astonishing story, even though he was the sole survivor of the sinking of the SS Struma, a rusting steamer with almost 800 Jewish refugees aboard when it was torpedoed off the Turkish coast.
Authorities in Bishkek have blocked the independent Russian-language news site Fergananews.com, eight months after a controversial parliament resolution saying the site should not be accessible to readers in Kyrgyzstan. It is unclear why the decision took so long to implement.
Kyrgyzstan’s legislature voted unanimously to block the Moscow-based website for perceived bias last June, around the one-year anniversary of interethnic bloodshed between Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities in the country’s south. The decision came at a time when many ethnic Kyrgyz felt unfairly demonized by the international community, while politicians parlayed the sentiment into nationalist chest thumping. According to the parliamentary resolution, Fergananews (previously Ferghana.ru), which covered the 2010 ethnic violence and its aftermath in exhaustive and critical detail, “ignites ethnic hatred.”
Press-freedom activists have condemned the move, with Reporters Without Borders calling it “absurd and outrageous.”
“Blocking a news website that is as professional and impartial as Fergana’s is a major step backwards for a country that aspires to be ‘Central Asia’s first parliamentary democracy,’” the Paris-based watchdog said in a statement on February 21.
According to Fergananews, Kyrgyz Telecom, Kyrgyzstan’s largest Internet service provider, blocked the site after a request from the State Agency for Communications earlier this month. Other ISPs have not yet followed, so the site is still available for some users.
Delivering the usual grim assessment on press freedom in Central Asia, the Committee to Protect Journalists says the region’s media continue to be shaken by “tactics to intimidate, harass and imprison journalists.” CPJ released its annual Attacks on the Press report on February 21.
Even in Kyrgyzstan, celebrated for its shift from authoritarian leadership to parliamentary rule, attacks on journalists continue to rise. In 2011, eight media workers were assaulted, CPJ counted, while ethnic Uzbeks working in the field were forced to flee or, in the case of Azimjan Askarov, remain languishing in prison.
“Rising violence, censorship, and politically motivated prosecutions against the media marred the year in Kyrgyzstan. Parliament decriminalized libel, but moved to censor foreign press coverage. Ethnic Uzbek journalists were targeted for legal reprisals” in the wake of ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan in 2010. The report adds:
After the June 2010 conflict, ethnic Uzbek media owners Khalil Khudaiberdiyev and Dzhavlon Mirzakhodzhayev faced attacks, harassment, and retaliatory prosecution. Authorities forced Khudaiberdiyev to sell his company, Osh TV. Mirzakhodzhayev suspended operation of Mezon TV and the newspapers Portfeland Itogi Nedeli. The outlets had produced news in Uzbek, as well as in Russian and Kyrgyz. As both owners fled the country, the country's largest ethnic minority was left without access to news in its native language.
Uzbek-language articles on Wikipedia – the popular, crowd-sourced online encyclopedia – have suddenly become inaccessible inside Uzbekistan, regional news outlets are reporting.
Almost 8,000 entries in the Uzbek language appear to be blocked, reports Ferghana.ru. Visitors trying to access the site are redirected to MSN.com, a news aggregator operated by Microsoft. Wikipedia pages in other languages appear to be unaffected. RIA Novosti reports Tashkent has blocked the page in the past.
The sudden change is unlikely to surprise Internet users in Uzbekistan, where authorities have blocked hundreds of websites, including EurasiaNet.org, for years.
According to statistics cited by Ferghana.ru, Wikipedia is the tenth most visited site in Uzbekistan. The agency reports that over 8,000 people are registered to contribute Uzbek-language content.
Uzbekistan has some of the most draconian Internet restrictions on the planet. Paris-based press-freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders calls the country an “Internet enemy.”
Nevertheless, Internet usage is booming. In August 2011, according to official statistics, 7.7 million of Uzbekistan’s 28 million people were online, up from only 137,000 ten years earlier. What’s more, connection speeds almost doubled in the preceding year.
Authorities around Central Asia seem to have it in for Valentine’s Day.
Uzbekistan has cancelled concerts marking the holiday and instructed young people instead to celebrate the birthday of a local hero—Moghul emperor Babur, who was born in Andijan in 1483 and conquered much of South Asia. The Associated Press recently cited an Uzbek newspaper article calling Valentine's Day the work of “forces with evil goals bent on putting an end to national values.”
Students in western Kazakhstan say their university wouldn’t let them celebrate the holiday, which has become popular in the generation since independence. And in Kyrgyzstan, a parliamentary deputy says Valentine’s promotes an “alien ideology,” which drives people to suicide (when they don’t get enough cards).
In Turkmenistan, officials are apparently too busy still celebrating President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov’s dazzling 97 percent victory in Sunday’s election to discuss much else. Never mind, it’s clear whom everyone loves there.
So what’s with the assault on Valentine’s Day? Yes, it’s nominally a Christian holiday in a predominantly Muslim region, but the elites who call the shots are secular. Could it be that menace of the heart, jealousy, gripping Central Asia’s leaders?
A week-old strike at Kyrgyzstan’s largest gold mine is costing Bishkek approximately $380,000 per day, according to the Vechernii Bishkek newspaper. Judging by a brief slowdown last year, the walkout could sharply affect growth forecasts.
Workers at the Kumtor Gold Mine, which accounts for nearly 12 percent of the impoverished nation’s GDP and 54 percent of industrial output, laid down their tools on February 7, demanding parent company Centerra Gold pay the state’s recently introduced social security deductions, rather than see them withheld from their salaries.
Centerra, which is one-third controlled by the government and listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, believes the strike is illegal because it violates a collective agreement with workers, Reuters reported on February 7. Centerra’s Kumtor Operating Company said that no other company in Kyrgyzstan was paying the mandatory contribution on behalf of its employees.
Bishkek’s KyrTAG news agency reports that six-hour talks between union representatives and Centerra on February 10 failed to reach any consensus.
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.
