In 2001, the U.S. made a deal with Tajikistan to set up an air base near the Afghanistan border, but backed out at the last minute in favor of the Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan, said the man who was U.S. ambassador to Dushanbe at the time. The diplomat, Franklin Huddle, said that Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense who made the decision to use Manas instead of the Tajikistan base, agreed to fund a bridge to Afghanistan as a sort of consolation prize.
While it was reported at the time that the U.S. was looking at bases in Tajikistan, it hadn't been known until now that a deal had been reached. Huddle said that the government of Tajikistan had agreed to allow the use of the base at Kulyab, even going so far as to kick out the Russian troops who were then occupying it. It also hadn't been reported until now that the bridge at Nizhny Pyanj, funded by the U.S., was given to Tajikistan to mollify the Tajiks disappointed by losing the clout, and money, they would have gotten by hosting a U.S. military base. Huddle told the story at a conference this week in Washington. Here's how he told it:
“Rumsfeld had come to Tajikistan, he'd had orders from the president to get a base in Tajikistan. I sat in in the meeting and translated, in fact [for part of the meeting]. That base was then given to them, and the Tajik government asked the Russians to leave, which was a big deal. Well, then Rumsfeld changed his mind and decided to use Kyrgyzstan instead, just as the base was all ready to open, trains were coming to bring ammunition. That was Christmas Eve. So Christmas Day, I had to go in an tell President Rahmon what was not a very nice piece of news. The Tajik government, to their credit, took it like a man and didn't say anything about it and kept the relationship going.
It was an expected decision and, so, in a way, is the hunger strike by former presidential candidate Raffi Hovhannisian -- now nearly five days and counting -- that accompanies it.
Armenia's Constitutional Court, a body not particularly known for robust independence from the government's executive branch, ruled in the early evening of March 14 that there are no grounds to support Hovhannisian's request that the country's February 18 presidential elections be declared invalid.
The court will not publish its full decision until March 18.
With Serzh Sargsyan already congratulated by foreign governments and making official visits as Armenia's president-elect, outsiders might get the impression that the train has already left the station, and Hovhannisian missed it.
How a hunger strike will change things is unclear.
Hovhannisian has tried the hunger-strike route before, stoically sitting in Liberty Square for 15 days in 2011 "to bring power back to the people." The measure brought no tangible result other than to make the full-figured politician much slimmer.
As the pro-opposition A1Plus.am news site laconically commented in a blooper, "Note that R. Hovhannisyan is on hunger-strike already 4 years."
This time round, he seems content to sit under a canopy on a bench in Liberty Square, with a scarf in the colors of the Armenian flag around his neck, and books and paintings on red-blue-orange blankets spread out alongside him.
The American-born politician is expected to comment on the Court's
The Uzbek president's eldest daughter, Gulnara Karimova, has rarely broached the idea of succeeding her aging father, Islam Karimov – at least publicly. But the idea has cropped up repeatedly in an interview that appeared this month with a celebrity publicist.
Las Vegas-based Peter Allman, whose website describes him as “Celebrity Interviewer To The Stars and Emcee,” set the sycophantic tone right from the start: "My special guest is a visionary, very talented, very politically oriented young lady. I call her 'the princess of Uzbekistan,' if you will," he said in his introduction to the 38-minute-long exclusive, recorded on the sidelines of the Golden Guepard Tashkent International Film Forum last autumn, and since March 7 available on YouTube.
After a long chat about Karimova's charitable and creative work, Allman compared Karimova – who is also known by her stage name, Googoosha – to the late Princess Diana: "I've talked to many people. When I first met you I told you that I thought you'd be princess of Uzbekistan, meaning, like, Princess Diana was to Great Britain. And I see that you, as I imagine, have a very good soul and care about people, and that's very important."
Then he slid into the six-million-dollar question. In Allman’s “vision” Karimova would be a great president: “What are your feelings about that?"
Karimova – appearing in a black business suit and dangly silver earrings – giggled and said, in English, "this is funny," adding that both her opponents and supporters call her "princess," which is "striking for me because I'm not trying to do it for sort of career or for PR."
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.
Now that the Roman Catholic Church has smoked out a new pope, everyone is looking for a local angle in the news from the Vatican. Armenia seems to have found one.
The Armenian Apostolic Church may be an introverted, exclusive club, much smaller than the Catholic Church, but, conceivably, backing from the Vatican could help the Armenian cause worldwide. The global, well-organized Armenian Diaspora has pointed out that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the newly crowned Pope Francis, has been a friend of the Armenian community in Argentina. The community hopes that the pontiff will take this friendship to his new home in the Vatican.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that Bergoglio often attended liturgies dedicated to the ethnic Armenians massacred in Ottoman Turkey in the early 20th century. As an archbishop, he reportedly called on Turkey to own up to the atrocities against Armenians, which Turkey insists was collateral damage of World War I.
Along with building support for its refusal to recognize breakaway Nagorno Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, achieving recognition of the 1915 massacre as genocide is an end that Armenia is pushing worldwide.
The Vatican is not immune to lobbying, and many ethnic Armenians, especially those in Argentina, hope that Bergoglio will stick to his alleged position on the massacre.
But Yerevan is not just leaving it to the Diaspora to advocate Armenian causes in the Holy See. Earlier this month, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan appointed his son-in-law Mikael Minasian as the country’s first-ever ambassador to the Vatican.
Alcoholism – a scourge across the former Soviet Union – is no joke. But Uzbekistan’s state-run television has turned it into one with a sexist, pseudoscientific report this week.
The message is, basically: It is unbecoming for women to drink.
"It is worth saying a lot of pleasant words about females, the owners of grace and charm. However, you now can face an unpleasant situation that does not suit an Uzbek woman. For instance, we can see women and girls drinking alcohol during weddings and parties in cafes and restaurants. We will focus on this topic today," said the announcer, in a BBC Monitoring translation of a program that appeared March 11 on O’zbekiston Channel Number One.
One narcologist told the program that women become addicted to alcohol twice as quickly as men do, and that women are ten times more difficult to treat for alcoholism than men are. The program warns that women who drink while pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with birth defects.
That last point is widely accepted. But while many studies have found women more vulnerable than men to the effects of alcohol, a Harvard-sponsored report, among others, says women are just as treatable as men for alcoholism.
Overall, the program seems more concerned about Uzbek women's image than their health.
Exploring the strange, new world of bipartisanship has been a school of hard knocks for Georgia and, so, perhaps it is only fitting that the country's power-share struggles have now entered the classroom.
An agriculture university, of all places, has suddenly become the main battlefield in the tug-of-war between Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili and President Mikheil Saakashvili. The government on March 12 stripped the university of its accreditation, sparking a maelstrom of protest and near-national debate.
Ivanishvili’s education officials explained the decision by citing allegedly deficient quality standards at the school, the brainchild and money pit of President Saakashvili’s former economy minister, the rich, rotund libertarian Kakha Bendukidze.
Bendukidze, chair of the university's supervisory board, scoffed at the government’s claims of glitches and described the school's loss of accreditation as the Ivanishvili government's personal vendetta.
“This university has one big, 187-kilo defect, and that’s me,” the economics guru declared. He sent the nitpicking education officials to hell, and called on the students to fight for their right to education.
The students, who have found their studies hanging up in the air just before midterms, did not have to be asked twice. Agriculture University students and sympathizers from other schools took to Tbilisi's streets, while debates rage on TV and online.
Russian hydrocarbons giant Lukoil is upping gas production in Uzbekistan. But as that gas is shipped abroad, local shortages are prompting Uzbek consumers to double their intake of dirty coal.
The private Uzdaily.uz website reported this week that Lukoil boosted gas production to about 4.3 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2012, up from 2.6 bcm the year before. Output at the Khauzak-Shady-Kandym-Kungrad field jumped by 24.2 percent and production at Gissar, which started operating in late 2011, reached almost 1 bcm.
Uzdaily.uz said Lukoil plans to extract 4.4 bcm this year, 5.2 bcm next year and 8.2 bcm in 2015. Uzbekistan's total gas production stayed roughly level at 62.9 bcm in 2012, according to government stats cited by RIA Novosti.
One might think all this gas would help ease Uzbekistan’s chronic energy shortfalls. But growing gas exports seem to be contributing to widespread shortages and an increasing reliance on coal.
Citing a source at the state-run Uzbek Coal company, Tashkent’s mildly critical independent Novyy Vek weekly reports that, across the country, residents doubled coal consumption last year. Uzbek Coal projects consumption to jump by almost 300 percent to 2.4 million metric tons by 2020. Uzbekistan produced about 3.9 million metric tons of coal in 2012.
Last week's visit to Turkey by Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras certainly hit all the right positive notes. Dozens of bilateral agreements were signed by the two countries and Samaras and his Turkish counterpart both vowed to increase trade between Turkey and Greece and to work together to solve the Cyprus problem.
The two once-bickering neighbors have certainly come a long way from decades past, when a visit like Samaras's to Turkey -- now something fairly routine -- would have been hailed as a major breakthrough. That said, it appears that some trouble might be in store for Turkey-Greece relations, particularly regarding the issue of Athens' desire to lay claim to a vast amount of potentially oil- and gas-rich maritime territory in the eastern Mediterranean. From a recent Wall Street Journal report that came out only days after Samaras left Turkey:
Greece has renewed its territorial claims over a broad swath of disputed waters in the eastern Mediterranean where the indebted country hopes to find vast oil and gas deposits—a plan that risks sparking a confrontation with Turkey.
Over the past several weeks, senior government officials have made a series of public statements—both at home and abroad—pointing to an almost two-decade-old international treaty granting those rights, one Greece hasn't asserted until now. Athens also has been building support in other European capitals and stepping up a diplomatic campaign at the United Nations….
The U.S. intelligence community believes that the greatest threat facing Central Asia is internal, rather than emanating from Afghanistan, in contrast to recent statements by State Department, members of Congress and Pentagon officials who have lately been emphasizing Afghanistan-based Islamist threats to the region.
In an annual ritual, the U.S. director of national intelligence delivers the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community to the Senate, and the current director, James Clapper, did so Tuesday morning. Obviously such a report can make the world sound like a very dangerous place (Micah Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, calls it the "World Cup of threat inflation"). But the section of the report dealing with The Bug Pit's beat is remarkably sober. While last year's report emphasized the threat to Central Asia from Afghanistan, this year's makes no such mention, instead focusing on the region's internal dynamics:
