Weekly news wrap

This week in Central Asia an avalanche claimed the lives of a family of three in Tajikistan, the country's emergency ministry reported on Wednesday. The disaster killed the family near the eastern city of Khorog, about 650 km east of the capital, Dushanbe. About 93 percent of the Central Asian nation's territory is mountainous and avalanches are common during winter and spring. On 31 January, an avalanche in the northeastern Jirgital district killed 18 people and injured 12 others. In Kyrgyzstan, an earthquake measuring 4 on the Richter scale struck the northeast of the country, the Kyrgyz emergency ministry reported on Monday. According to the central seismological station in the capital, Bishkek, the tremor was registered early on Sunday local time in the northeastern Issyk-Kul province, with no casualties or damage reported. Earlier this month, scientists from the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences warned that there could be a major earthquake in the former Soviet republic in the near future, based on recent seismic reports. Central Asia is prone to various natural disasters, including earthquakes, landslides, floods, avalanches and drought. Natural disasters have killed about 2,500 people and affected some 5.5 million (almost 10 percent of the total population) in Central Asia over the past decade, according to aid groups. A former member of the Tajik opposition had been sentenced to 16 years of imprisonment for alleged involvement in a criminal group, murder, possession of weapons and forged documents, AP reported on Wednesday. Tojiddin Abdurakhmonov, a loyalist of the Tajik opposition that fought against the Moscow-backed government during the country's five-year civil war in the 1990s, was convicted on Tuesday, Saifullo Giyoyev, chairman of the Supreme Court's military board, said. Abdurakhmonov had been arrested and prosecuted in 1999 but was released under an amnesty. In 2003 he was detained in the Russian city of Magnitogorsk for allegedly using a forged passport, Giyoyev said. Giyoyev said all the crimes for which he was convicted, except for forging a passport, had been committed before the amnesty law. But Abdurakhmonov was sentenced again, Giyoyev said, "taking into account that he continued to break the law." The Russian RIA Novosti news agency has highlighted the plight of hundreds of thousands of Central Asian labour migrants working in major Russian cities. Eight migrant labourers from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan died in a fire outside Moscow, the agency reported on Tuesday. Two other Tajik workers were brought to a Moscow hospital with severe burns. Some estimates suggest that there may be over 2 million Central Asian labour migrants in Russia, the majority of whom are illegal and likely to be subjected to various forms of exploitation. The leaders of several Central Asian nations have urged Moscow to improve their working conditions and protect their rights. In Uzbekistan, a court has sentenced a human rights activist to seven years in prison after he briefed foreign media about last year's bloody government crackdown in the eastern city of Andijan, Reuters reported on Thursday. The jailing of Saidjakhon Zainabitdinov on charges of conspiring with "terrorists", defaming the state and religious extremism follows months of trials of residents of the town and dissidents in the authoritarian Central Asian state. New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), citing information provided by the Uzbek embassy in Washington, said the government had confirmed that Zainabitdinov was sentenced on 5 January. An Uzbek human rights group reported in early January that he had gone on trial in secret, but there has been no public comment on his fate by the authorities in Tashkent. The court’s decision coincided with a rejection of an appeal from an international rights watchdog by a civil court in the capital, Tashkent. The US-based Freedom House has been ordered to suspend its activities in Uzbekistan until July after a civil court in Tashkent rejected the organisation's appeal against a six-month suspension of its activities. The Ministry of Justice said the organisation was violating Uzbek legislation regulating NGOs. The charges included offering free Internet access to Uzbeks and playing host to unregistered organisations, including human rights defenders and political parties, at Freedom House events. Last year, Uzbek courts suspended and later shut down the US-funded Internews media group and IREX, which ran education projects. The London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) media group closed its office citing security concerns. Earlier authorities shut down the offices of the philanthropist George Soros’s pro-democracy Open Society organisation. In reclusive Turkmenistan, protests over pension cuts were reported from some cities. Open dissent against the government is almost unheard of in the largely desert but energy-rich state. The Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported on Monday, citing independent Turkmen rights groups, that retirees had gathered in front of government offices and in other areas to voice their discontent over the cuts. Protests were reported in the Ilyaly and Kunya-Urgench districts of northern Dashoguz province. Another report places a crowd of pensioners holding a protest in the centre of the western port city of Turkmenbashi. The cuts will reportedly eliminate pensions previously paid to more than 100,000 people. On Wednesday, the Turkmen government confined a 70-year-old pensioner who publicly criticised Turkmenistan's authoritarian President Saparmurat Niyazov, to a psychiatric hospital, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial said. Kakabai Tedjenov was forcibly hospitalised in the eastern border town of Turkmenabat on 4 January after he tried to distribute to foreign institutions and embassies a text he had written: "Declaration on attacks on human rights in Turkmenistan", Moscow-based Memorial said. Tedjenov had previously sent telegrams of protest to Niyazov and organised other protests over human rights and provision of utilities. In Kazakhstan, a prominent opposition figure found dead in November - just ahead of presidential elections - with bullet wounds in his chest and head, committed suicide, AFP reported on Wednesday quoting a lead investigator for the case. "It's a suicide," the investigator, Marat Akhmedjanov, said, adding, however, that the inquiry was continuing. Zamanbek Nurkadilov, 61, a former government minister who fell out with President Nursultan Nazarbayev's autocratic regime, was found dead by his wife at their home on 13 November with two bullets in the left side of his chest and one in the head. His death came three weeks ahead of the 4 December presidential elections in which Nazarbayev easily won re-election, sparking opposition claims of a politically motivated murder. "It's completely absurd. The authorities want to bury this affair...It's murder, physically and politically," Amirjan Kosanov, a spokesman for the opposition movement, said.