Field Reports

At midnight on June 10, what started as a conflict between young people in one of the casinos in Osh, the largest city in southern Kyrgyzstan, led to bloody, inter-ethnic clashes between the Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities. A few days later, mass unrest rapidly spread to the neighboring region of Jalalabad, leading to chaos in the entire southern part of the country. It took more than a week for the authorities to take control of the situation.

As a result of the massive interethnic clashes that started in the south of Kyrgyzstan on June 11, tens of thousands of ethnic Uzbek residents of the Osh and Jalalabad districts of Kyrgyzstan crossed the border to Uzbekistan as refugees. According to UNICEF, about 75 refugee camps were set up near the city of Andijan in Uzbekistan. About 90 percent of these refugees are children, women and elderly people. Some sources report that about 30,000 more are at the border between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, trying to cross. However, in some border areas, passage is restricted as there is physically no place to house more refugees. Nevertheless, Uzbekistan accepts all the injured and sick without any exceptions. In light of the massive influx of refugees, Uzbek authorities call for humanitarian assistance and support from the international community.

On June 1-4, 2010, Baku hosted the 17th Caspian International Oil and Gas Conference whose practical dimension was highlighted by a Refining and Petrochemicals Exhibition organized at the Baku Expo Centre.

On June 8, the high-level International Conference “Water for life” was held in Dushanbe. The conference was organized jointly by the Government of Tajikistan and the United Nations, and dedicated to the mid-term comprehensive review of the implementation of the International Decade for Action “Water for Life 2005-2015”. The main goal of the conference was a stocktaking of the progress achieved in the implementation and prospects for the fulfillment of international commitments on water and water related issues by 2015.

On May 23, Nagorno-Karabakh held its fifth parliamentary elections since 1992, when the first parliamentary ballot took place. The Central Electoral Committee put the turnout figure at around 70 percent of some 95,000 eligible voters. According to the final results, the majority of the 33 seats were taken by the Free Homeland Party led by incumbent Prime Minister Ara Harutiunian, followed by Parliamentary Speaker Ashot Ghulian’s Democratic Party of Artsakh [Karabakh] and the ARF-Dashnaktsutiun Party.

The recent incident in the Uzbek Sokh enclave in southern Kyrgyzstan once more serves as a reminder of the importance of disputed border areas in the Fergana Valley between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. As temporary solutions are being offered, the reality remains – a final delimitation of state borders is required in order to avoid possible inter-governmental conflicts, experts argue.

On June 9, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Tajikistan, becoming the only head of state attending a high-level international conference on water in Dushanbe. President Ahmadinejad’s personal appearance at the conference is the latest in a series of developments that indicate rapidly improving ties between Tehran and Dushanbe.

The Armenian economy, which was hit strongly by the global economic crisis last year, has started to recover at a more rapid pace than expected. After a drastic drop of the GDP by 14.4 percent in 2009, which was one of the worst downturns in the world, the economy grew by 7.2 percent in January-April 2010, in comparison with the same period the previous year. This development is markedly more positive than the government’s budgetary forecasts, which predicted a growth of 1-2 percent. In the same four-month period, the foreign trade turnover grew by more than 30 percent, including a 64.3 percent jump in exports. In fact, the recovery was not only more rapid than expected; it also showed that after the crisis in 2009, Armenia’s economy underwent beneficial structural changes.

The Georgian Public Broadcaster, with financial support from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) hosted the first pre-electoral two-day live TV debates of the Tbilisi mayoral candidates three weeks ahead of the May 30 local elections.

The Kyrgyz Interim Government has appointed Roza Otunbaeva as a transitional President for a 1.5-year term to ensure stability in the country and provide free and fair parliamentary elections in October this year. However, the appointment has to be approved in an upcoming referendum. If approved, the country will have a legitimate state institution; otherwise, it will face an even more serious political crisis.