Weekly news wrap

Described by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as failing to comply with international standards, Sunday's parliamentary election in Kazakhstan were, nonetheless, welcomed by some independent observers, the Russian Interfax news agency reported on Monday. The elections were the most open and competitive in the history of independent Kazakhstan, according to one US-based independent observer mission. Frederick Starr, president of the Central Asia and Caucasus Institute of John Hopkins University, who signed the statement, said that the recent elections in Kazakhstan were characterised by more vigorous and competitive activities by political parties. However, the US government did not agree with Starr's observations, saying that Washington generally shared the point of view of the OSCE on the poll. "The election process did not comply with international standards that Kazakhstan had undertaken to follow," the US Embassy to Kazakhstan said in a statement on Wednesday, according to media reports. But the head of the Kazakh Central Electoral Commission (CEC), Zagipa Baliyeva, stated on Wednesday that she didn't share the remarks made by the OSCE mission about the elections. Baliyeva said that the statement that the CEC conducted its work in secret was incorrect and untrue. Staying in Kazakhstan, the Interfax-Kazakhstan news agency reported on Monday that HIV/AIDS was stabilising in Central Asia's largest nation. According to the Kazakh statistics agency, 39 new cases of HIV/AIDS had been registered over the first six months of 2004, while in the same period of 2003 that figure was 40. As of May 2004, there were 4,227 cases of officially registered HIV cases in the country, including 153 people with full-blown AIDS. However, experts estimated the real number of infected people to be 10 times that figure. In Tajikistan, a mine blast killed one and injured four local inhabitants along the Uzbek border, the Iranian media reported on Wednesday. The report said a resident of the Roj village in northern Soghd Region's Panjakent District, Mavlon Tilloyev, 14, died as a result of the mine explosion. Another four people, who had tried to take Mavlonov's body to the village, had stepped on another mine and sustained severe injuries. The injured people were taken to hospital, the report added. The trial of 20 members of the religious extremist party Hizb ut-Tahrir banned in Tajikistan, ended in the southern Kulyab province, the local media reported on Wednesday. Nine of them were sentenced to 13-15 years imprisonment, while the rest to minimal terms mainly for failure to report a crime. More than 70 members of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, which says that it doesn't advocate violence, have been arrested by Tajik law enforcement agencies since the beginning of the year. Although the exact number of Hizb ut-Tahrir followers in the country is not known, some experts estimate it to be 1,500 to 2,000 people. A typhoid outbreak in northern Tajikistan has been eliminated, health officials said on Thursday. "A typhoid outbreak in Panjakent [northern Tajikistan] has been curbed," Abdujalol Jabborov, chief doctor of the Soghd provincial epidemiological department, told the Tajik Asia-Plus news agency. "No new cases have been registered. About 30 or 40 people, on average, come down with typhoid in Soghd every year," he said, adding that 93 patients diagnosed with typhoid, including 38 children under 14, were undergoing treatment. A UN official said Russia's handover of control of the Tajik-Afghan border to Tajik border guards is an internal affair of Tajikistan. "The decision made by the [Tajik] authorities to strengthen the country's independence through agreements with Russia on the gradual withdrawal of Russian border guards from the Tajik-Afghan border seems right to me," Vladimir Sotirov, a UN Secretary-General envoy and head of the UN Tajikistan Office of Peace-Building, said on Tuesday, adding that the international community wouldn't leave Tajikistan without assistance to protect its vulnerable Afghan border, a frontline in the flow of narcotics from Afghanistan. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) delivered aid worth more then US $22,000 to the Tajik border protection agency on Tuesday aimed at assisting the border guards to effectively protect the country's frontier with its southern neighbour. In Uzbekistan, a senior Uzbek health official said on Wednesday that hepatitis was no longer posing a major public health threat in Central Asia's most populous country. "The number of hepatitis cases has dropped significantly over the last few years. The epidemiological situation is pretty stable at the moment," the Uzbek media quoted him as saying. Meanwhile in Kyrgyzstan, the seventh mother and child protection forum opened in the capital, Bishkek, on Wednesday. According to the Kyrgyz health ministry, representatives of major international organisations and delegations from all the Central Asian countries are among the participants in the event scheduled to end on Friday. The forum is a platform to tackle various issues of mother and child protection, infant and maternal mortality, and the strategy of preventing HIV/AIDS mother-to-child transfer. Starting from 1996, representatives of Central Asian countries and Kazakhstan annually meet at the mother and child protection forums organised by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Each year one of the regional countries bears responsibility for this event. Last November the forum was held in Almaty.