Weekly news wrap

The week saw a visit by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where he held meetings with senior government officials on security and defence issues. Rumsfeld arrived in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, on Tuesday for talks with President Islam Karimov and military chiefs. His visit to the most populous Central Asian nation, his third over the past two years, illustrates Washington's interest and commitment to the region. After meeting Karimov, Rumsfeld said they discussed setting up a US military staging point in Uzbekistan, where US forces could drop in to gain quick access to crisis areas without maintaining a permanent base. He noted that the Pentagon had no plans to establish permanent bases in the region. Uzbekistan became a staunch Washington ally after the 11 September 2001 attacks, offering the use of the Khanabad air base near the Afghan border, which was instrumental for the US forces who ousted the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Continuing his visit to the region, Rumsfeld met Kazakh Prime Minister Daniyal Akhmetov and other senior government officials on Wednesday. He reaffirmed Washington's support on security issues in the Caspian Sea region, a step that could serve US interests through having an ally to check Iran's ambitions in the south of the oil-rich sea. Rumsfeld noted on Wednesday that it was "important to the world that security be assured in that area". Military and security cooperation issues between the two countries intensified after Astana provided support to the US-led coalition war against terror by allowing the use of its airports. The two countries signed a five-year cooperation plan in September for the delivery of Huey helicopters, C-130 Hercules military cargo aircraft and ships for Kazakhstan's Caspian Sea forces, the Kazakh Defence Ministry said. Still in Kazakhstan, some 655 families of Oralmans - ethnic Kazakhs - were expected to settle in southern Kazakhstan's Almaty province this year under a state quota, the Interfax-Kazakhstan news agency reported on Tuesday. It noted that this figure was 350 per cent higher than in 2003. The Kazakh authorities adopted some years ago a programme on the repatriation of ethnic Kazakhs who fled the country during the early 20th century. Also on Tuesday, the World Bank warned of an explosion in HIV and AIDS across Central Asia as a possible threat to economic growth in the region. According to experts, rapidly growing HIV infection in the region, fuelled by injecting drug usage, could affect the economies of the region by cutting gross domestic product (GDP) by up to one percent a year. "HIV/AIDS is not only a health problem... It has a real impact on other areas of the economy," Armin Fidler, an expert in health, nutrition and population at the World Bank, said. On Wednesday, the US State Department published its 2003 country reports on human rights around the world, describing the situation as poor amongst the five Central Asian states. It said the human rights position had worsened in Turkmenistan and remained very poor in Uzbekistan. The report maintained that governments continued to commit numerous abuses, using judiciary and law-enforcement bodies to crack down on opposition and independent media, admitting however that there had been some improvements. "I think you can perceive some positive trends in the area... But clearly, as you see in the reports, there are many, many problems," US Secretary of State Colin Powell said. In Tajikistan, it was reported that, during a three-day visit to that country that ended on Wednesday, Jerzy Osiantynski, the United Nations Adviser for Millennium Development Goals (MDG), was scheduled to hold a series of meeting with government officials on ways of achieving internationally concerted goals for a significant reduction of poverty by 2015 and raising public awareness of the UN's approach and policy on the MDG. Tajikistan is the poorest of the former Soviet republics. According to the World Bank, over 83 percent of the country's 6.5 million inhabitants live below the national poverty line, with a full 17 percent considered destitute. In neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, Prime Minister Nikolay Tanaev pledged on Thursday to prevent the mountainous country from further becoming a nuclear wasteland, AP reported. "The country first needs to solve problems regarding its own uranium waste sites," he said. His comments follow a series of recent public statements protesting at government plans to process uranium from Germany. There are a number of radioactive waste dumps in the country - a legacy of the Soviet era - that need to rehabilitated, with the one in the southern town of Mailuu-Suu being particularly problematic. Meanwhile, in Turkmenistan, AFP reported on Wednesday that a major dam being constructed by Iran and Turkmenistan along their common border should be ready for commissioning in October. Work "is practically finished" on the Friendship dam on the Tejen river, which flows northwards from Afghanistan along the Turkmenistan-Iran border, an official at Turkmenistan's water resources ministry said. The planned dam is expected to create a reservoir stretching over 48 square kilometres and irrigating 50,000 hectares of under-developed territory on either side of the Turkmen-Iran frontier. Also in Turkmenistan, it was also reported on Wednesday that the energy-rich country's authoritarian President Saparmurat Niyazov had passed a decree forbidding young Turkmen males to wear long hair or beards. The president said the Education Ministry should be in charge of checking people's hair as the issue was most pressing among the young. The BBC reported that Niyazov appeared on television saying that men can no longer grow their hair and that beards were not allowed - at least among the young. Niyazov's regime is one of the most reclusive in the former Soviet Union, and has built a personality cult around himself rivalling that of Stalin's. The president's portrait adorns all currency and is an ever-present logo on state TV, while a golden statue of him in the centre of Ashgabat slowly rotates to face the sun. But some reports say that Niyazov's laws are becoming more and more personal. It is now forbidden to listen to car radios or to smoke in the street, while opera and ballet performances have been banned on the grounds that they are unnecessary.