Field Reports

Several officials on all levels of government have been fired and hundreds of state employees have been subjected to administrative charges since Azerbaijan’s authorities commenced an anticorruption campaign a month ago. While ministries are competing over which one has punished the largest number of employees for abuse of authority, ordinary people are discussing how far the anticorruption campaign will go.

An American delegation headed by the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake arrived in Uzbekistan on February 17-18 to take part in annual bilateral consultations on political and economic issues. On February 18, representatives of ten leading American companies led by the head of the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce and Uzbek officials participated in a business forum. The agenda of the consultations included bilateral cooperation in the political, trade-economic, investment, cultural-humanitarian and other spheres. The parties also exchanged opinions on problems of international and regional security of common interest. Blake summarized the results of the consultations at the press conference that took place at the U.S. Embassy in Uzbekistan.

The clouds of suspense around the issue of a national referendum for the extension of President Nazarbayev’s mandate have been finally cleared. The Constitutional Court decided that the proposed constitutional amendments were illegitimate as they do not explicitly specify in which way the suggested referendum could be fitted into the existing legal framework.

On January 20, the process of evicting internally displaced persons (IDPs) from temporary accommodation in Tbilisi was resumed after being halted for several months, following sharp criticism from local and international organizations.

During a meeting of Tajikistan’s Security Council on February 10, 2011, President Emomali Rahmon expressed concern about “the growth of religious-extremist feelings in the society”. According to the President, these “feelings” threaten national security and stability in Tajikistan.

The social upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries of the Middle East have caused a risk of social and political instability also in post-Soviet countries, which are ruled by authoritarian regimes. In Muslim countries of the post-Soviet space, in particular in Azerbaijan, the unrest in the Maghreb region has encouraged Islamic groups supported by Iran to call for protests against the government, voicing complaints about corruption and strategic ties with the U.S. and Israel.

In January 2011, Tehran’s embassy in Dushanbe announced that an Iranian company will invest about US$ 300 million in building two cement plants in Tajikistan. When completed, the new coal-driven plants are expected to produce two million metric tons of cement a year. According to the embassy, Iran is now choosing from four sites with large limestone reserves, which have been proposed by the Tajik government, to decide where to build the plants.

The recent World Economic Forum in Davos, attended by more than 2,500 high-level decision-makers from all over the world, was the place where Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Karim Massimov promised that his country would double its daily oil output by 2020, thus reaching the level of 3 million barrels per day. A few months earlier, the Kazakh Minister of oil and gas, who had been traditionally invited to deliver a keynote speech at the Kazakhstan International Oil and Gas Exhibition (KIOGE) in Almaty, told the journalists that over 100 million tons of oil would be exported every year in ten years’ time. He also hinted at a possibility that such a trend might be sustained for at least four decades.

On January 11, the national commission investigating the causes of the inter-ethnic clashes between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in southern Kyrgyzstan presented its report to the Kyrgyz parliament. The long-awaited official results of the commission caused heated discussions for two full days in parliament.

The Georgian government and some European officials view the recently signed Mistral deal between Russia and France as a potential threat to Georgia and to regional security.