Weekly news wrap

This week in Central Asia, five months after the Uzbek government ordered a US air base in the south of the country to close down, US troops left the military facility, which had been an important staging point for the US-led Coalition operations in Afghanistan. Tashkent issued a six month notice to Washington in July to shut the base after Washington criticised the violent crackdown on protests in the southeastern city of Andijan in May, pressing for an international probe into the killings of upwards of 1,000 people, according to rights groups. The Uzbek government said the death toll was 187 and refused any international investigation into what transpired in the city. The air base known as K-2, had been used by the US military since late 2001. A United Nations General Assembly committee called upon the government of Uzbek President Islam Karimov on Tuesday to stop harassing eyewitnesses to the Andijan events. The assembly's Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural), approved a draft resolution urging Tashkent to cooperate with United Nations human rights officials and grant permission for the establishment of an international commission of inquiry into the Andijan killings. A day earlier, the committee expressed grave concern over Turkmenistan's repression of political opposition groups, censorship of all media and biased legal system. A resolution adopted by the committee accused Ashgabat of restricting freedom of thought, assembly, conscience and religion. The measure pressed Turkmenistan to end harassment and detention of members of religious minorities, clean up its prison system and prosecute those responsible for human rights abuses. On Wednesday, Uzbekistan banned the European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from using its airspace or territory as a rear base for the alliance's peacekeeping operations in neighbouring Afghanistan, according to a report from the Chinese Xinhua news agency. The ban will take effect from 1 January and it is a response to a European Union (EU) decision to impose visa bans on 12 top Uzbek officials and an arms embargo on Uzbekistan, the report maintained. However, the ban excluded Germany, Xinhua said on Thursday, quoting an Uzbek senior official. Kazakhstan ratified a UN human rights covenant, the Kazakh Interfax-Kazakhstan news agency reported on Monday. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed the law ratifying the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, one of the fundamental UN covenants on human rights adopted in 1966. The Hungary-based Helsinki Committee said that the global fight against terror was overshadowing the issue of human rights in many countries. The rights group said at a general meeting of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) held in Budapest. The rights body called upon European governments to pay increased attention to several countries in Eurasia, including Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan where human rights were under threat. The rate of HIV/AIDS increased sharply in Eastern Europe and Central Asia over the past year, particularly among young people, the UN's main body for fighting the pandemic, UNAIDS, said in its new report on Monday. Ukraine and Russia registered the largest number of new cases, while Uzbekistan also saw a dramatic rise in HIV infection rates. Some 2,000 new cases of the infection were registered in Uzbekistan last year, bringing the total to 5,600. The increase meant the number of cases shot up by more than 55 percent compared to a year before. In 1999, the country's HIV/AIDS body had registered just 28 cases. The report also noted that more than 30 percent of all new reported HIV infections in Kazakhstan were due to unprotected sex, while in previous years the predominant mode of transmission was injecting drug usage. In Tajikistan, 11 people including seven women, were on Tuesday convicted and jailed for up to six years for forcing women into sex work in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), AFP reported. The prosecutor in the northern Sogd province said that the women were given forged passports and sent to the UAE via the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh. A number of reports and some officials interviewed by IRIN in Osh recently confirmed that many traffickers in the densely populated Ferghana Valley shared by Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan were using Osh airport as a regional hub for shuttling victims to the Gulf countries, using fake documents or bribing officials. Since the start of the year, Tajik security forces have arrested more than 40 people implicated in the trafficking of women. Officials say 200 Tajik women forced into prostitution are still in the UAE, and hundreds more are in Turkey, Israel and Russia. Staying in Tajikistan, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) gave the former Soviet republic a $29.5-million loan for the rehabilitation of a 90km section of highway, linking the capital, Dushanbe with neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, the Manila-based bank said on Monday. The highway is a part of a Central Asian highway, connecting Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and China. The cost of the project stands at US $39.5 million, of which $9.5 million will be funded by the Tajik government. Since its membership in the ADB Tajikistan has received $244.3 million in loans and $21.2 in grants. In Kyrgyzstan, a forum supported by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) gathered government officials, representatives of civil society and the media to discuss constitutional reform kicked off on Thursday. "We hope that constitutional reform will lead to a more balanced distribution of power and a solid base for the further democratic and socio-economic development of Kyrgyzstan," said Ambassador Markus Muller, head of the OSCE Centre, at the opening of the event. Following the change of regime in the Central Asian nation in March after opposition-led protesters ousted former leader, Askar Akaev, the need for constitutional reform with more power given to parliament and the government, along with limiting some presidential powers as a way of preventing authoritarianism, became one of the top issues on the political agenda. Former leader Akaev was accused of initiating numerous constitutional amendments and his critics said that those moves allowed him to concentrate power in his hands.