Central Asia's week that was #18

Regional leaders meet, Olympic joy and disappointment, and a Kazakh ex-minister punished. Also, stolen assets recovered, fewer Tajiks going to Russia, and officials to design women's clothes.

So this happened…

The plenary session of the sixth Consultative Meeting of Central Asian Heads of State.

• The presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan met in Astana for the sixth Consultative Meeting of Central Asian Heads of State. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev was also in attendance. Speaking at the opening of the gathering, the host, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, hailed what he described as the progress countries in the region have made in improving cooperation on border management, water supply, migration, and bringing down trade barriers. In an article published ahead of the meeting, Tokayev noted that mutual trade between countries in the region had doubled from $5.7 billion in 2018 to $11 billion in 2023. 

• Uzbekistan registered its most successful-ever Olympics by winning 13 medals, including eights golds. The country’s boxers did much of the heavy lifting by securing five gold medals. Champions were rewarded back home with $200,000, a Chevrolet Tahoe SUV and a two-story home. Kyrgyzstan’s team also received a warm homecoming. Of the 16 people in the team that went to Paris, six returned with medals. The mood was a less buoyant in Kazakhstan, whose Olympic team managed to reap only a relatively modest seven medals, only one of which was a gold. An embittered sports journalist noted that Uzbekistan spent $160 million on preparations for the Games, while Kazakhstan earmarked $660 million for the same purpose.

  

  Turkmenistan’s ex-president Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov driving a car at a motor sports track in Ashgabat.

• Before the Olympics were yet over, Turkmenistan’s President Serdar Berdymukhamedov issued a “severe reprimand” to the head of the state committee for sports and physical culture, seemingly over the country’s poor showing at the Games. Turkmenistan’s Olympic medals cabinet is almost entirely bare. The only medal the country has ever won arrived at the Tokyo 2020 Games, when Polina Guryeva bagged silver in the 59-kilogram weightlifting category. This time around, there were no medals, an embarrassment for a nation whose leaders have over the past decade made the promotion of sport a core component of the regime’s ideology. The former president (and father of the current president), Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, salved his disappointment by doing doughnuts at a motor sports track in Ashgabat. A detailed report on this outing led the evening news on Sunday.

• Kazakhstan’s arbitration claims against international oil majors involved in the Kashagan oil field have soared to over $160 billion, following allegations of corruption in certain deals, Bloomberg news agency reported. That figure is $10 billion more than the Kazakh government was earlier said to be seeking and may rise yet further, the news agency’s sources said. Astana argues that the operators of the offshore Caspian Sea field, which has been beset by technical difficulties since the start of development in the mid-2000s, artificially inflated project costs, thereby depriving the Kazakh government of its share of profits. Officials have not confirmed the reported increase in the size of the government’s claim.

• A court in Kazakhstan’s capital sentenced former Interior Minister Yerlan Turgumbayev to a five-year suspended sentence for abuse of power over his role in the deadly unrest of January 2022. The details of the case against Turgumbayev have not been made public, so the behind-closed-doors trial has shed little light on events which remain heavily cloaked in mystery. The ex-minister is said to have admitted his guilt and expressed remorse. The unrest was sparked by protests in the west of the country against rising car fuel prices. That quickly escalated into a nationwide show of discontent against the ruling order that culminated in clashes that caused the death of 230 people. State investigators have obliquely suggested the turmoil was ultimately orchestrated by top-level insiders in the nation’s security apparatus in an attempted power grab.

• Tajikistan’s anti-corruption agency said that 52 employees of the Defence Ministry and other government agencies are facing embezzlement charges. The suspects, who have not been identified, are accused of purloining 123 million somoni ($11.7 million) from the state. Tajikistan’s military is riddled with corruption, but that only reflects a broader issue. Transparency International ranked Tajikistan 162nd out of 180 countries in its most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, which measures perceptions of public sector corruption. A report published by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in May revealed that the wife of Tajikistan’s prime minister, who is not known to have any income of her own, has purchased $1.4 million of real estate in Dubai. 

• Turkmenistan has officially banned the use of child labor in cotton harvesting. A government decree that was approved in July, but only reported now, adds cotton-picking to a list of hazardous occupations prohibited for people aged under 18. Activist groups have applied pressure to the Turkmen regime by highlighting the ways in which cotton from Turkmenistan, much of which is harvested through the deployment of forced labour, ends up in textile supply chains that produce clothing sold to consumers in the West. A report published in May by the Cotton Campaign, a pressure group, stated that the Turkmen state did not directly mobilise children into picking cotton. It said, however, that a “policy of forcing adults to pick cotton or pay for a replacement appeared to be the primary driver of child labour, since many children who picked cotton did so to earn money as replacement pickers or to replace a relative.”

And there’s this too…

• Criminal offenders violating the terms of their parole in Uzbekistan will be made to wear electronic tags under new rules approved by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. The measure is among a broader piece of legislation regulating how probation is enforced. The turn toward non-custodial punishments is designed in part to ease the pressure on the country’s prisons, which have been the object of sustained complaints from inmates over the decades. A lawyer acting on behalf of inmates in pre-trial detention centre No. 1, commonly known as Tashtyurma, earlier this month issued a public complaint about overcrowding and lack of access to medical care and water.

• The anti-corruption service in Kazakhstan announced that it has to date managed to claw back $1.6 billion in assets stolen by Kairat Satybaldy, the imprisoned nephew of former President Nursultan Nazarbayev and a one-time high-ranking officer in the National Security Committee (KNB). Officials said the reclaimed assets included money, real estate, jewellery, automobiles, and stakes in companies. The reclamation process has involved working with numerous foreign jurisdictions, including Austria, Liechtenstein, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. Satybaldy was sentenced to six years in prison for embezzlement in September 2022. A court in April began hearing a fresh criminal case against Satybaldy, on money laundering charges. 

  

  Labour, Migration and Employment Minister Gulnora Hasanzoda, right, speaking to reporters.

• Around 392,000 Tajik nationals left the country for work in the period from January to June, a 16 percent drop compared to the same period in 2023, according to Tajikistan’s Labour, Migration and Employment Ministry. The vast majority — almost 386,000 people — went to Russia. The head of the ministry, Gulnora Hasanzoda, indicated that this decrease was related to ongoing changes to legislation in Russia. Hostility from the public and lawmakers toward migrant labourers, particularly those from Central Asia, has spiked in Russia since the Crocus City Hall massacre in March. Investigators have accused a group of Tajik nationals of being responsible for the atrocity.

• The government in Kyrgyzstan has created a body tasked with shielding the public from what officials deem to be “unreliable information.” The Information Environment Research Centre will operate under the auspices of the Culture, Information, Sports and Youth Policy Ministry and will monitor media outlets to ensure they are complying with the country’s laws, according to an article in the government gazette. Deputy Prime Minister Edil Baisalov last week published a post on Facebook calling for changes to the law to bolster provisions against the circulation of disinformation on social media. Baisalov’s outburst was prompted by what he described as false online claims that Kyrgyzstan’s Olympic team had not been provided with adequate food supplies for the duration of their stay in Paris. Critics of Baisalov’s proposals said that attempts to enforce more rigid censorship policies threaten to silence legitimate criticism of the authorities.

  

  The tactical mini-drone burning near Tamchy airport in Kyrgyzstan.

• An aircraft that Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee for National Security (GKNB) described as a new type of “tactical mini-drone” crashed and caught fire near the Tamchy airport, near the Issyk-Kul Lake. The GKNB said the drone crashed as it was coming in to land. Local media earlier reported that the stricken aircraft was one of the Turkish-made Bayraktar drones operated by the GKNB. 

• Government agencies in Tajikistan have been put to work designing female clothing that complies with both traditional Tajik and Islamic norms. The authorities in June banned the wearing of clothing “alien to the nation’s traditions,” in what was widely interpreted as a de facto prohibition on hijabs and other forms of Islamic dress. Officials later clarified that the ban also extended to ripped jeans and overly revealing clothing. Abdurakhim Kholikzoda, the director of the state-run Islamic Studies Center, who announced the plans on designing a suitable form of dress, said that claims that these provisions were an infringement on religious and personal freedoms were unfounded and based on rumours circulated by foreign media.

Production note

The weekly bulletin will be on a two-week hiatus due to an ill-advised decision by its author to take part in another edition of the Silk Road Mountain Race. Lack of progress caused by poor to non-existent preparation is strongly anticipated.