Weekly news wrap

This week in Central Asia started with a warning from Tajikistan about conditions in and around Lake Sarez in the east of the mountainous country. The Tajik emergency minister Mirzo Ziyo, expressed concern on Saturday over heavy precipitation in the area following an already heavy snowfall this year. "I do not wish to make a fuss about this issue. However, the level of water at Sarez is rising by 20 cm annually," the minister said. Lake Sarez was created in 1911 when an enormous landslide caused by an earthquake in the Pamir Mountains of eastern Tajikistan blocked the Murgab river. The natural dam which retains the lake, named Usoi, is located at an altitude of 3,200 meters. With a height of over 550 meters and a length of some 2 km, it is the tallest natural dam in the world. Some reports warn that, should a strong earthquake occur in the vicinity of the lake, the dangerous "right bank", a partially collapsed body of earth and rock with a mass of roughly 3 cu km, might fall into the lake. Such an event could trigger an enormous wave which could well bring the rest of the dam down with it. Impact projections suggested that the flood could affect roughly five million people living along the Bartang, Pyanj and Amu-Darya rivers, a path traversing Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Also in Tajikistan, government officials in the impoverished state have acknowledged the benefit of labour migrants for the impoverished Central Asian state. "Tajikistan's labour migrants working abroad are bringing great benefit, first of all to their families, sending them remittances," the chairman of the State Statistics Committee, Mirgand Shabozov, said on Monday. Some suggest if each of the estimated 650,000 Tajik labour migrants sends a US $100 remittance through banks every month, it will amount up to $800 million per year, surpassing the country's annual budget of some $415 million. Going to Kazakhstan, a new law banning street rallies during and after elections was published on Monday, with opposition groups slamming the move as an attempt to stave off a possible Ukraine-style "people's revolution". "I have not the slightest doubt that the new law aims to nip in the bud street protests over possible electoral fraud in Kazakhstan that could repeat the events seen in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan," said opposition spokesman Vladimir Kozlov. Kazakhstan's amended electoral code, which comes into force after being published in the official press, bans rallies and demonstrations during elections and until the publication of final official results. "People's revolutions" in the three ex-Soviet states were all sparked by flawed elections. Kazakhstan, which seeks the 2009 chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), has itself never held an election judged free or fair by many international bodies. Meanwhile, the US ambassador to the OSCE said on Wednesday that Washington had yet to decide whether to back Astana's bid. During four days of talks with officials and civil society groups in Central Asia's largest state, Stephan Minikes noted that a country chairing the OSCE "must exemplify the principles of the organisation," a US Embassy statement reported him as saying so. In Uzbekistan, a dissident journalist and activist was severely beaten by an unknown assailant amid simmering tensions in a southern region of Uzbekistan, AFP reported on Monday. The attacker beat up Ulugbek Haidarov, 42, a journalist and district head of the Ezgulik (Kindness) human rights group late on Saturday, breaking one of his collar bones, Haidarov said. "I think the attack is directly related to my publications on the Internet about the situation in this region," he claimed. The mainly cotton-growing Jizzakh region has seen a number of disturbances in recent months, including one in which protestors burnt down a police station and set alight two police cars, according to witnesses. Staying in Uzbekistan, authorities in the region's most populous nation begun a major restructuring programme in the capital, Tashkent, removing several main roads and blocking off the city centre, BBC reported on Tuesday. Officials gave no public explanation for the changes, which has proven extremely unpopular. It is widely believed that the changes are designed to prevent any kind of assault on government buildings. In March and April of 2004, the capital and the central Bukhara region were shaken by a string of explosions and assaults against police that killed 47 people. In July, suicide bombers attacked the US and Israeli embassies and the chief prosecutor's office in Tashkent, killing seven and injuring another seven. In Kyrgyzstan, investigators called on the US and UK to help in an investigation of alleged money laundering by ousted President Askar Akayev and his relatives, AP reported on Wednesday. Deputy Prime Minister Daniyar Usenov said that officials had nearly doubled the list of companies under investigation. The move came one week after a state commission was set up to investigate a number of properties had been obtained legally by Akayev and his family members and businesses had been managed fairly. Akayev's family had used companies based abroad to establish Kyrgyz companies and run their businesses, Usenov alleged, charges the Akayev family flatly denied. Authorities in Turkmenistan, which has the fourth largest natural gas supplies in the world, have scrapped a law requiring foreigners marrying Turkmen citizens to pay the state US $50,000, AFP reported on Monday. The autocratic President Saparmurat Niyazov issued a new marriage law on Saturday omitting the payment rule originally portrayed as a way to protect Turkmen women from unscrupulous foreigners. Under the new law, foreigners must now have lived in Turkmenistan for at least one year, making no mention of the fee that was reportedly to be used to support any offspring in the event that a foreign partner left their spouse. The marriage fee was among a number of eccentricities that have been associated with Niyazov's 14 year-presidency. The Turkmen leader has built a personality cult around himself and his deceased parents, mixing in elements of Islam and nomadic folklore and suppressing all dissent.