Weekly news wrap

A longstanding issue in Central Asia, landmines have killed two Tajik herdsmen and wounded five other men near the unmarked Uzbek border, the AP reported on Monday. Four of the injured were hospitalised in a serious condition after the incident in the northern district of Asht on 10 February, said the press office of Tajikistan's border service. According to officials, 64 Tajiks have been killed and 66 wounded since Uzbekistan began mining its borders with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in 2000, claiming the measure was needed to keep out drugs, smuggled weapons and fighters linked with the al-Qaida-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Uzbekistan said in June it would remove the mines, but that it would take several years. Borders between the regional countries have remained unmarked since they were part of the former Soviet Union. The largest European security organisation offered Tashkent help in removing mines on its borders, the Russian ferghana.ru news site reported on Thursday. The 55-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is prepared to help Uzbekistan with removing landmines from the Uzbek borders and ensuring their security, Dmitrij Rupel, visiting OSCE Chairman-in-Office, reportedly said. The European Union (EU) and Washington are expected to provide some US $20 million to Tajikistan to help Dushanbe protect its Afghan border, the Russian Interfax news agency reported on Wednesday. Summing up the results of an international conference on aid to the Tajik government in border protection, Alan Vaddams, EU Ambassador to Tajikistan, said that total aid from the EU would amount to 6.5 million euros (some US $8.45 million) plus 2 million euros ($2.60 million) from Britain. The US embassy said Washington would earmark some $9.5 million for Tajik-Afghan border enforcement. A former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, an outspoken critic of Tashkent's poor human rights record, pledged to stand against the foreign minister in Britain's upcoming elections, AFP reported on Wednesday. Murray said he would use some of his redundancy payoff from the Foreign Office (FO) worth almost $600,000 to contest Jack Straw's seat as an independent candidate in the polls, widely expected to take place in May, the Financial Times reported. Murray was recalled to Britain in October after a memo was leaked to the media in which he criticised the FO's use of information claiming it was obtained under torture in Uzbekistan. He was suspended on full pay pending an investigation. In Kyrgyzstan, a US-based rights watchdog said on Monday that Bishkek was stepping up repression in advance of 27 February parliamentary elections to forestall a repeat of the ‘Ukraine scenario.’ In a letter to President Askar Akaev, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned that the clampdown could compromise the fairness of the poll, urging the government to take specific steps to ensure respect for fundamental rights. HRW's 12-page letter details how the Kyrgyz authorities unfairly excluded opposition candidates from running for office, launched new restrictions on freedom of assembly and harassed opposition supporters and civil society activists. The letter said that a series of public statements by senior government officials who, warning against the ‘Ukraine scenario,’ attempted to equate political opposition with subversion. Echoing that view, the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), an international media freedom group, said on Thursday that Akaev was using his control of Kyrgyzstan's news media to smear or neutralise the opposition and avoid the political upheaval that has been seen in recent months following elections in Georgia and Ukraine. The organisation called on Akaev to respect the principle of media pluralism as an essential guarantor of democratic elections. The Association of Non-Government and Non-Profit Organisations of Kyrgyzstan intends to organise alternative counting of votes in this month's parliamentary elections, acting association chief Chinara Konushalieva said on Wednesday. The NGO body plans to hold an alternative vote count by interviewing people leaving polling stations on condition of anonymity. Some 2,000 observers are expected to be at polling stations to monitor the voting process and another 3,000 people would be engaged in alternative counting, Konushalieva said. In Kazakhstan, the country's economy surged 9.4 percent last year and may grow by 9 percent this year, in a boom fuelled by high prices for the ex-Soviet state's oil and metal exports, the statistics agency said on Monday. Kazakhstan's gross domestic product (GDP) has grown at an average annual rate of 10 percent over the past five years. However, in a recent report the UN Development Programme (UNDP) urged Astana to diversify its economy to ensure long term sustainable growth. On Thursday, the EU said it feared that Kazakhstan's new law on extremism and a court ruling dissolving the main opposition party infringed on human rights and damaged democracy. In a letter from the current EU president Luxembourg to OSCE, the bloc urged that the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK) party not be dissolved until all possibilities of appeal had been exhausted. A court ruling last month stripped DCK of its party status. The EU also said it was concerned that a new law to combat extremism adopted by the Kazakh parliament on 9 February "could infringe on basic human rights and fundamental freedoms." It urged the former Soviet republic's President Nursultan Nazarbayev to block the adoption of the legislation. Also on Thursday, UNDP launched a new regional programme to support the countries along the historical Silk Road in strengthening regional cooperation to revitalise the famous ancient trading route, the development agency said in a statement. The Silk Road Regional Programme (SRRP) is a joint initiative between UNDP and the governments of China and four Central Asian countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, aiming to revive the Silk Road tradition of economic cooperation in three areas - trade, investment and tourism.