Field Reports

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.

On July 16-17 2010, the former capital of Kazakhstan, Almaty, hosted the OSCE Informal Ministerial Meeting to discuss the situation in Kyrgyzstan, reiterate Kazakhstan's commitment to the OSCE's fundamental principles and values and, more importantly, push for the summit at the end of this year, the first in the past 11 years.

Kyrgyzstan faced further unrest, which was seen by many as a clumsy attempt to overthrow the country’s shaky government. Despite the fact that mass disorder was successfully averted, the risk of new attempts at violent upheaval in view of the upcoming parliamentary elections remains high.

Hopes for real progress in the peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have deteriorated over the last month, as both sides have been acting according to the principle of “a tooth for a tooth”.

Through June 2010, the levels of violence in Russia’s North Caucasus mirror the amount of attacks that occurred in the region during 2009. Despite policy changes by the Kremlin, such as the official end of the counter-terrorism operation in Chechnya and the establishment of the North Caucasus Federal District, attacks against state security organs continue unabated. In fact, members of the Islamic militancy have displayed signs of becoming bolder, not only in their attacks against the state, but also in their attempts to control civilian activities and enforce their own moral standards. According to data compiled by the Georgetown University Emerging Threats Project, there have been approximately 30 “religiously motivated” attacks in the North Caucasus Federal District from the beginning of 2010 to the end of June. The majority of the attacks have taken place in Dagestan and it seems that the assaults are on the rise. There were two assaults in April, five attacks in May, and the number jumped to nineteen such “religiously motivated” violent incidents in June.