Weekly news wrap

Developments in the plight of some 450 asylum seekers who fled the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan in May dominated news this week. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) appealed urgently to several countries to take Uzbek asylum seekers from Kyrgyzstan because of fears they could be forced to return to Uzbekistan, a senior UNHCR official said on Thursday. "What we are asking for is an emergency resettlement," Kamel Morjane, assistant high commissioner for refugees, told AP. Uzbeks from Andijan have been seeking asylum in Kyrgyzstan since they fled Uzbekistan after government troops killed up to 1,000 people on 13 May in and around the city, according to rights activists. Morjane said he had already contacted the US and some Nordic countries as possible resettlement countries and planned to meet their representatives on Friday to explain the situation and appeal for assistance. Although he did not single out any other countries he had contacted, UNHCR chief spokesman Ron Redmond said traditional resettlement countries, including Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the US, had been invited to the meeting. Also in Kyrgyzstan, more than 9,000 prisoners will be freed under a new amnesty law the national parliament endorsed on Tuesday, the Russian Itar-Tass news agency reported. The amnesty is granted on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. According to the report, a total of 1,124 convicts, most of them women older than 55 and men older than 60, are expected to be amnestied in full, while other convicts will get a reduction of jail terms by one-third or by a half depending on their crime and the number of years served already. The amnesty does not cover the prisoners convicted on charges of abuse of power and money embezzlement and especially 'grave crimes' or the ones who were amnestied previously but committed crimes again. The law will take effect after being signed by Kyrgyzstan's acting president. An Uzbek opposition leader, Muhammed Salih, who lives in exile in Europe, on Wednesday brushed aside concerns that Islamic fundamentalists would take over Uzbekistan if the government of President Islam Karimov collapses, AP reported. Salih testified before a joint US Congressional panel that specialises in human rights issues in Europe and the former Soviet Union. Salih was visiting the US to speak out against the 'horrible injustices' that he says have been committed by Karimov's government. In prepared remarks, Salih said the 13 May killing of anti-government protesters in Andijan could be compared to the one in Tiananmen Square in China in 1989. He regretted that the "response of the world community to the events in Andijan was many times smaller". Karimov has blamed the violence on Islamic militants and rejected US and other Western calls for an independent international inquiry into the killings. Salih predicted the ouster of the Karimov government and said "America and the rest of the world must understand that estimates that Islamic fundamentalists would come to take over" are not true. He said fundamentalist religious groups lack popular support among Uzbeks. The crackdown on independent media continued in Uzbekistan, where at least two more reporters had been targeted following the 13 May unrest in Andijan, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF), an international media freedom group, said in a statement on Tuesday. RSF accused Uzbek authorities of systematic repression of the media, adding that Gafur Yuldashev, a US Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (FRE/RL) correspondent, was questioned for four hours by police on Sunday in Andijan, where he had planned to interview opposition activists. Police also seized Yuldashev's tape recorder, it said. Also on Sunday, independent journalist Ulugbek Khaidarov was brutally beaten by unidentified assailants in the southern Uzbek city of Karshi, where he had gone to visit his colleague. The media is tightly controlled in the former Soviet republic and independent journalists are regularly targeted and harassed. Authorities further tightened their grip on the media following the government's harsh suppression of the uprising in Andijan. In Tajikistan, a local court on Tuesday sentenced Rustam Faiziyev, a leading opposition activist, to nearly six years in prison on charges of insulting the president and inciting hatred, AP reported. The charges against Faiziyev stemmed from an open letter written by leaders of his Tarakkiet party that accused President Emomali Rakhmonov of practicing 'the politics of genocide' by denying services such as regular electricity and clean water to most of the country, other than to the capital and his home region. In Turkmenistan, a visiting senior International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) official met Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov and other high ranking government officials, ICRC said in a statement on Wednesday. During his talks Jacques Forster, vice-president of ICRC, discussed various aspects of the ICRC's activities in the country with a view to working with the authorities to spread knowledge of international humanitarian law and help them implement that law. Turkmenistan is the most reclusive Central Asian nation known for its authoritarian regime, rivalling those of North Korea, rights groups say. Niazov's government is also blamed for widespread abuse of humanitarian law, including reported poor treatment of detainees and prisoners. Meanwhile, journalists working for Turkmenistan's entirely state-controlled media have been banned from meeting foreigners, passing foreigners information and attending training courses and conferences abroad, AFP reported on Thursday. All journalists working for domestic outlets had to sign statements promising to avoid such foreign contacts and were told they would lose their jobs if they failed to comply, a local journalist in the capital, Ashgabat, told AFP on condition of anonymity. "Every journalist working for a newspaper, a television or radio station, was summoned by his editor-in-chief and was made to sign a document obliging them not to meet foreigners, not to pass them information and, except with special authorisation, not to attend meetings organised by foreign organisations," the journalist said. In Kazakhstan, state media said on Tuesday that vulnerable families living in the ecologic disaster area of the Aral Sea would pay 50 percent less for utilities. Local residents are faced with numerous problems related to the adverse effects of the shrinking sea, including environmental, health and poverty issues. The Kazakh agriculture ministry spent over US $370 million last year on its programme to develop rural areas in the region and the number of villages without electricity was cut by 40 percent.