Field Reports

At a time when Kazakhstan is preparing to hold an OSCE summit, local media are buzzing with shocking news from a number of detention facilities across the country.

In early September, Gazprom reached a deal to double supplies from Azerbaijan next year, making good on the Russian gas monopoly’s promise to buy “as much gas as SOCAR can supply”.

On September 3, a heavy explosion occurred in an administrative building of Tajikistan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs in the northern city of Khujand. A suicide bomber drove a car into the building of the Regional Department against Organized Crime in the city of Khujand, which is the administrative centre of Tajikistan’s Sughd province. This was Tajikistan’s first experience of a terrorist act committed by a suicide bomber.

The past two weeks in Turkmenistan were marked with President Bedimuhammedov’s calls for expediting the intergovernmental negotiation process over the construction of the long-delayed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan and India (TAPI) gas pipeline. Following his conversation with Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai two weeks ago and the signature of the bilateral Turkmen-Afghan inter-governmental agreement over the construction of the pipeline in Kabul on August 30, Berdimuhammedov spoke with Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari on September 9.

The Kyrgyz government offers an amnesty to former high officials of Bakiyev’s regime, suspected of embezzlement. While some claim this is a desperate attempt to relieve the state budget deficit, others see it as a way of neutralizing political opponents in advance of the October parliamentary elections.

On September 7, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Georgian-backed resolution “The status of IDPs and Refugees from Abkhazia, Georgia and Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia, Georgia”.

Early in the morning on August 23, 25 recently convicted prisoners escaped from a high-security detention centre run by Tajikistan’s State Committee for National Security (GKNB) in central Dushanbe. According to GKNB’s statement released soon after the first media reports on the bold escape, three inmates had “taken advantage of the guards’ negligence” by wrestling the keys away from them and setting other convicts free. The prisoners then killed one guard, severely beat another, and seized camouflage uniforms and firearms. As the GKNB’s ward is part of a larger pretrial detention facility, the convicts then attacked guards at the exit of the facility, killing another four, and escaped in three cars. The next day the cars were found in a valley not far from Dushanbe where the fugitives had reportedly taken to the mountains.

Over the past few weeks, controversy has emerged in Turkmenistan over what is termed a ‘dual citizenship and passport fiasco’ in the country. The Turkmen authorities unexpectedly announced the cancellation of the dual Turkmen-Russian citizenship and started enforcing this regulation at the airports, seaport and railway stations across the country. Since the news were first not publicly announced in the media, a sudden enforcement of these regulations caught the holders of a double citizenship by surprise and created confusion among those wanting to travel abroad.

As Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus continue to intensify their trade and investment cooperation within the framework of the newly created Customs Union, their law enforcement authorities are voicing concerns over the spread of organized crime across the single customs area of three member states. Such statements were made on August 23 and 24 when the Kazakhstani, Russian and Belorussian interior ministers met in Uralsk (West Kazakhstan) and Astana to discuss new ways to combat transnational crime and ensure law and order in the changed circumstances. These high-level meetings also assembled representatives of the Border Control Service of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee, the Customs Control Committee of Kazakhstan’s Finance Ministry, and the Border Service and the Federal Customs Service of the Russian Federation.