Russian troops participating in the 2012 Peace Mission SCO exercises in Tajikistan
Over the last few years, two large multilateral security organizations that have emerged in Central Asia: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), dominated by China, and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), dominated by Russia. For the most part, these two groups have looked past one another, staking out complementary, rather than competing, mandates, and including many of the same members (Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan all belong to both). But there is still under-the-surface competition between the two groups.
As the new International Crisis Group report, China's Central Asian Problem, notes, China's ambitious economic moves into Central Asia have not been matched by political or military efforts of the same scope. That's in part because the Russian influence in Central Asia's security structures remains so strong that China is reluctant to try to compete. The SCO, China's main tool for engaging in Central Asian security, has moved away from joint military training -- its 2012 exercise was the smallest since 2003 -- and more toward getting Central Asia to crack down on Uyghur exile groups. The CSTO, meanwhile, claims to be building up a joint military structure, including rapid reaction forces.
Russia is "increasingly distrustful" of the SCO, the ICG writes:
A small crowd of frail, elderly Georgians bearing red banners and wreaths gathered on Tuesday in front of Joseph Stalin’s childhood home in the town of Gori to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Soviet leader’s death.
“Comrades, we have gathered here to remember the great leader,” said Alexandre Lursmanashvili, the chairperson of Gori’s tiny Community Party, as he stood in front of the Stalin museum. With their hair blowing in the wind, elderly men and women swaddled in winter coats listened and applauded solemnly.
“Don’t film just the old people. Film the young as well,” some instructed reporters, pointing at a younger woman with a red flag. After some photo-opp'ing, the crowd walked to a nearby church to attend a memorial service for the city’s most famous son.
A recent study commissioned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has shown that Stalin is still very popular in his native Georgia, though diehard admirers like members of the small Communist Party are few in number. The study, which includes surveys of respondents in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, showed that a startling 45 percent of an unspecified number of Georgian respondents still view the Great Terror's architect positively. Unlike for other ex-Soviet spots, though, in Georgia Stalin is more of a national brand than just a USSR leader and a victor of World War II.
“He made us famous,” commented one elderly woman in Gori to EurasiaNet.org. “He was born here, in our town, he built a great, beautiful country and then he saved the world from Nazi Germany. Did any other Georgian do anything that even comes near to that?”
A lawmaker in Kyrgyzstan is pushing a resolution that would ban young women from leaving the country without their parents’ written consent.
Irgal Kadyralieva from the Social Democratic Party says the resolution, which would apply to girls under 23 years of age, is intended to "protect their honor and dignity” from trafficking or sex work. “Such measures are needed to increase morality and preserve the gene pool," Vechernii Bishkek quoted her as saying on March 4.
The ban would not prevent girls from studying abroad, Kadyralieva says, but is specifically designed to stop them from traveling abroad for work. Hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyz women work abroad, mostly in Russia, often in unskilled jobs for low wages and sometimes in dangerous conditions.
Kadyralieva says she was specifically motivated by a series of reports last year about Kyrgyz women in Russia being beaten and raped by Kyrgyz men calling themselves “patriots.” The men were angry at the sight of Kyrgyz women socializing with non-Kyrgyz men.
"This proposal of mine protects national security, social security, moral security and [is an] economic issue," Kadyralieva said in an interview with Kloop.kg.
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.”
Turkmenistan's switch to a 12-year educational system is the clearest sign to date of the cataclysmic lack of intellectual capital created by poor and often erratic policy.
The change, which is to take effect on September 1, will see the period of mandatory education increased from the current 10 years.
A presidential decree published in newspapers Saturday talks about wanting to bring up "deeply educated, broad-minded and talented individuals" in the era of "might and happiness."
If those qualities have been wanting, the causes go back to 1991, when the late President Saparmurat Niyazov introduced a nine-year curriculum, flying in the face of pedagogical practice the world round. It was a short step from that to abolishing the Academy of Sciences and reducing the minimum period of theoretical instruction in higher education institutes, a holdover of the Soviet system, from five to two years.
Niyazov was instead fond of more practical, or "hands-on," approaches to education that would, for instance, lead to budding agriculture specialists spending their time laboring in the field instead of studying in the classroom.
In the reading of U.S. diplomats, the sinister intent was to engineer the population into a state of stupefied passivity: "Niyazov's decisions are not surprising, given his determination to keep the Turkmen population ignorant,” reads one Wikileaked U.S. diplomatic cable from early 2006.
When President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov became president at the end of 2006 he began reversing these often-destructive measures.
KFC shocked the fast food world last month when it announced that it had plans to start selling its fried chicken in Mongolia, which has mostly remained terra incognita for global fast food brands. The previous international fried chicken chain to have tried its luck in Mongolia was Kenny Rogers Roasters', whose gamble on the country lasted only a few years.
Home to Asia's fastest-growing economy, Mongolia may make sense as the Colonel's next target for international growth, but the Financial Times has an interesting column about why the Mongolian market is such a tough one to crack, especially for fast food chains. From the FT:
The crux for franchises in Mongolia has been the challenge of delivering – in what is after all a distant and isolated location – the consistency and quality control customers demand. Relying on a single railway line from China and the absence of other transport infrastructure raises the cost of essential ingredients and drives prices beyond levels familiar to western consumers.
Though Mongolia has 14 head of cattle per person, meat producer Just Agro is the only one with facilities that meet export standards. Russia banned imports of Mongolian meat following outbreaks of diseases such as foot and mouth. The ban was lifted in November 2011 and the Mongolian government has since been looking at ways of selling its meat as a high-quality, speciality product.
“I’m very sceptical that chain restaurants will be able to provide the same low-cost service they can in the US in these developing markets due to ingredient scarcity,” says [Matt Jones, an associate at Mongolian Investment Capital Corporation a local investment bank], who has yet to find a franchise interested in coming to Mongolia. “To obtain high-quality and consistent products, you have to pay a higher price relative to the rest of the market.”
Energy exports from Uzbekistan jumped in value by 81 percent last year, new figures show, thanks in part to a new pipeline to China. But as Tashkent enjoys the windfall, the vast majority of Uzbeks continue to face gas, electricity and heat shortages.
According to the State Statistics Committee, gas and other energy exports were worth $5.03 billion in 2012. That’s an increase of 81 percent over 2011, when the country exported $2.78 billion worth of energy products, mostly hydrocarbons. Citing government statistics, Uzdaily.uz reports that energy accounted for 35.3 percent of Uzbekistan’s total exports in 2012, up from 18.5 percent in 2011.
Last year, Uzbekistan joined a Turkmenistan-to-China pipeline that had opened in 2010 and, in August, started pumping China-bound gas for the first time. The pipeline was expected to export up to 4 billion cubic meters (bcm) of Uzbek gas to China by the end 2012 and 10 bcm this year.
The exports are sparking some resentment in Uzbekistan, however, as they negatively impact domestic supplies. Net output from Uzbekistan’s aging wells also appears to be falling. Local reports suggest output of oil and gas condensate in 2012 decreased by 11.6 percent year-on-year to 3.2 million metric tons and gas production by 0.2 percent year-on-year to 62.9 bcm.
Armenian presidential candidate Raffi Hovhannisian, who argues that a rigged February 18 presidential election deprived "the people" of "victory" against incumbent President Serzh Sargsyan, has said that he will demand today that the country's Constitutional Court throw out the official election results.
The Court has said that it will consider the appeal in ten days, Aysor.am reported. The March 4 move will open a legal front in Hovhannisian’s battle for the presidency, which, so far, has mostly unfolded in the form of street protests and campaigning. The US-born leader of the tiny opposition Heritage Party ambitiously has described his fight as the “Hello Revolution,” or "Barevolution."
But the chances remain slim that Hovhannisian, a onetime foreign minister, will get a favorable court decision or a critical mass of popular support for greeting his arrival in the presidential residence. His rival Sargsyan has already been welcomed back into the presidents’ club by world leaders such as US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sargsyan also commands influence with Armenia’s state institutions and the Constitutional Court is no exception, local commentators say.
Armenia’s handling of the voting process scarcely passed muster with international observers, who noted “implausibly high” support for the incumbent in several precincts, but the election monitors did not say that the irregularities warranted reconsidering the outcome of the national vote. Local observers have dismissed such findings as wide of the mark.
Turkmenistan’s schoolchildren could be forgiven for getting dizzy. Their president is again changing the number of years they are expected in the classroom.
Effective this fall, Turkmen children will be required to attend 12 years of school, rather than just 10, starting at age six. The state-run Turkmenistan.ru online newspaper reports that President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov approved the change last week.
According to the decree, the switch aims "to further improve" secondary schools and to ensure that "the quality of education in them" meets global standards.
Berdymukhamedov's predecessor Saparmurat Niyazov reduced the number of years Turkmen schoolchildren were required in the classroom from 11 years to nine. Berdymukhamedov increased the curriculum to 10 years shortly after he came to power in 2006.
Niyazov – apparently no fan of school – also cut university education from five years to two. Soon after assuming office, Berdymukhamedov restored university curricula to five years.
France’s Foreign Minister should have used a trip to Uzbekistan this weekend to demand an artist be allowed the right to travel abroad, an international group of artists urged last week.
In January, Vyacheslav Akhunov was barred from leaving Uzbekistan. He has been invited to perform at the prestigious Venice Biennale this June.
In an open letter last week to French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who visited Uzbekistan on March 2 to talk trade and development with President Islam Karimov, artists from the United States, Russia and other countries called on France’s top diplomat to "urge the government of Uzbekistan to honor the rights and freedoms of artist Akhunov, who represents the modern independent art of Uzbekistan abroad."
There is no indication Fabius responded to the request or discussed Akhunov’s situation with Karimov during his visit.
Akhunov has taken part in approximately 200 international exhibitions. But in January "authorities banned him from going abroad, explaining that his creative tours are 'inadvisable.' This response points to a political motive in the decision," the artists said in their letter, which was posted on February 27.
