Weekly news wrap

The head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Antonio Mario Costa, touring the Central Asian region this week, expressed concern on Thursday over the planned withdrawal of Russian border guards patrolling the Tajik-Afghan border - a major frontline in the fight against illicit drug-trafficking from Afghanistan, the world's top opium producer. According to the UNODC Central Asia office, Costa said in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, that the Russian border troops' departure, starting this year, could make drug interdiction efforts more difficult. He noted that the country's UN-sponsored drug control agency could be facing even more serious problems with the Russian withdrawal, but said he understood that Tajikistan wanted to make the move as an independent state. However, he mentioned that he would be raising the border protection issue with Tajik President Emomali Rahmonov during their meeting on Friday. The Tajik drug control agency confiscated 90 percent of narcotics seized across Central Asia. Earlier this week, Costa inaugurated a similar new drug control agency in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan and called on Uzbek authorities to establish a unified agency in charge of counter-narcotics efforts. Staying in Tajikistan, Mikhail Kravchenko, visiting deputy head of Russia's migration service, urged Dushanbe on Thursday to curb the flow of illegal labour migrants to Russia, the primary destination for them. "If a migrant is legal, he can come to us for help. If he is not, he cannot ask us for help. They are afraid and thus they feel that they have no rights," the AP quoted him as saying. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the number of Tajik labour migrants in Russia is some 600,000 - almost 10 percent of the country's population. Some reports estimate that remittances sent back by Tajik labourers in Russia exceeds the impoverished country's annual state budget. A recent survey by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said that a great number of illegal labour migrants from Central Asia, especially Tajiks, were exposed to various forms of forced labour - some equal to slavery. Kazakhstan needs additional aid from the international community to resolve the Aral Sea problems, Aitkul Samakova, that country's minister of environmental protection, said on Tuesday, during the fifth regular session of the Asia Pacific Forum for Environment and Development in the Kazakh capital Astana. "It is impossible to recover the Aral Sea, but we still hope that the environmental situation in the Aral Sea region may be stabilised," the local media quoted her as saying. Further aid was needed to resolve the issues of "supporting at least the existing water level in the Aral Sea, preventing further shallowing of the Syrdarya river, a key water source in the region, and the reduction of land degradation in the Aral Sea region. In Kyrgyzstan, Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev fired the head of the country's security council, his long time confidant and loyal friend, on Monday after he joined an opposition-led group to monitor next year's elections, the AP reported. Misir Ashirkulov, 58, who had served as Akayev's chief of staff, said that he believed his dismissal was likely related to his decision to lead the Civic Union for Fair Elections, which would oversee compliance with election laws during next year's polls. Ashirkulov was appointed head of the security council in 2001, and had served as Akayev's chief of staff from 1999 until February this year. In an unprecedented move, Uzbekistan allowed an international investigation into the alleged death by torture of Andrei Shelkovenko, 36, who died in police custody in the Uzbek town of Gazalkent, some 40 km far from the capital, Tashkent, on 19 May. Uzbek law-enforcement bodies reported that he had committed suicide, while rights groups claimed that he was tortured to death and Shelkovenko's mother Lyudmila Bochkaryova refused to bury him without an independent autopsy. On Thursday, US and Canadian experts were due to observe an autopsy of his body, kept in a hospital morgue in Tashkent. In addition, the Uzbek authorities have formed a special investigative team to probe the death. Meanwhile in Turkmenistan, President Saparmurat Niyazov said on Tuesday, that the energy-rich country was getting its fair share of water from the Amudarya river, another key water source in the region. "When I became president, I asked [the former Soviet leader] Gorbachev to issue a paper allowing Turkmenistan to take 50 percent of the water from the Amudarya river near Kerki [on the Turkmen-Afghan border]. Since then we have been getting half of the water from the Amudarya river coming from the Tajik mountains, instead of the previous 22 percent. God is a witness that this is a fair share for us and for others too because 70 percent of the Amudarya runs via Turkmen territory," state media quoted Niyazov as saying.