Field Reports

On June 11, Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Imangali Tasmagambetov publicly announced his resignation. The news hardly came as a big surprise to home observers who were closely following dramatic events that lead to intense confrontation between government and parliament over the much-debated land privatization issue.

President Niyazov\'s latest decree of April 22, 2003 stipulated the complete cancellation of dual citizenship between Turkmenistan and Russia, and put an end to the ongoing confusion over citizens\' travels to Russia. However, this decree keeps causing unexpected results by creating uneasiness within and consolidation of the opposition abroad.

On May 27, the Azerbaijani parliament passed the law on the adoption of a new elections code, in its third and final reading, with a vote of 95 to 5. According to this document, the provisions of the Election Code (EC) touching upon the formation of election commissions at all levels would come into force after the new parliamentarian elections in 2005.

The Kyrgyzstan government closed its borders with China to prevent the possible penetration of SARS into the country. The Kyrgyz authorities have heeded the request of the Health Care Minister, Mitalip Mamytov, who appealed to the Prime Minister to shut its borders with China. Earlier, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan had done the same. Physicians say Kyrgyzstan has a damp, hot, subtropical climate, which means great conditions for the spread of SARS.

The already tense relations between Azerbaijan and Iran have again become the focus of this week\'s political agenda in the region after an article in the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta\'s on May 29. In this article, the newspaper claimed that the U.S. Administration had already secured the Azerbaijani government\'s approval for the usage of the latter\'s territory for a possible attack on Iran.

The beginning of May brought new initiatives to the issue of the Unified Election Code, a document long awaited by political parties in Azerbaijan and the international community. The Council of Europe\'s Venice Commission, a body responsible for election procedures, has suggested to the Parliament of Azerbaijan to include all major political parties in the election commissions. The suggestion was effectively shelved by the Parliamentarian majority.

The World Bank’s International Financial Corporation is planning to approve the allocation of credits for the engineering design of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline in October - November of this year. As executive vice-president of the IFC Peter Woicke declared while visiting Baku, the credit will be of US$150 million.

An unprecedented event took place in southern Kyrgyzstan last Thursday morning. Criminal gang members attacked the regional and city police departments of Jalal-Abad, and beat policemen, took their arms, and fled. The suspects were detained that same day.

At first, Kazakh authorities seemed to be merely stunned by the news of the rapid spread of a hitherto unknown deadly disease in China. They were too slow to introduce necessary precaution measures to prevent the severe acute respiratory syndrome from popping up in the country, which shares 1700 kilometer long border with China.

A landslide in Kara-Taryk village of Uzgen district in southern Kyrgyzstan, caused by frequent rains, killed 38 people, and put 11 houses under ground. Specialists warn that such natural disasters create danger of destruction of uranium tailing dumps in the Kyrgyz Mailuu-Suu district. This could lead to ecologic catastrophe throughout the whole Ferghana region.