Weekly News Wrap

This week in Central Asia, a controversial media bill was approved on Thursday by Kazakhstan’s upper chamber of parliament, English Politics News reported. Lawmakers unanimously voted 36 to none for the bill, which will impose wider restrictions on the media. Earlier in the week hundreds of Kazakh activists, mainly opposition journalists and their supporters, protested against the bill in the commercial capital, Almaty, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported. The OSCE’s chairman, Belgian foreign minister Karel De Gucht, on Tuesday rejected allegations by the Turkmen government that an OSCE staff member in the capital, Ashgabat, had been involved in a plot to undermine the Turkmen government, RFE/RL reported on Wednesday. De Gucht said he had every confidence in Benjamin Moreau, the OSCE staff member working on issues of human rights and civil society, and did not understand the Turkmen accusations. Moreau was called in for questioning by the Turkmen ministry earlier this month. Tajikistan has been granted a US $600 million dollar credit line by its eastern neighbour China for the building of a motorway, linking the centre of Tajikistan to the Uzbek border in the north. The grant will also be used for power lines linking the north and the south, as well as allowing power to be exported into neighbouring Afghanistan, AFP reported on Saturday. China, that shares a 520 km border with Tajikistan, has given more than $30 million in technical aid to the Tajik police and army since 1993. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) will prepare a project to improve Tajikistan’s education sector and support poor and disadvantaged children - especially girls and those with special needs, ADB announced on Thursday. ADB will help the impoverished former Soviet republic with a technical assistance grant of $400,000. On Monday, the regional representative of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) for Central Asia, James Callahan, stated in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, that there had been no reduction in drug trafficking in the region, a Kazakh news agency reported. Uzbek law enforcement authorities confiscated 467 kg of heroin in 2005 – drugs intended for sale abroad, as well as locally. Central Asian law enforcement officials reportedly seized over 4,000 mt of opiates in 2005. Meanwhile, Canadian citizen, Huseyin Cecil, faces a possible death penalty in China. Cecil was extradited from Uzbekistan to China where he might be executed on charges of promoting cessation by the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang Uighurs Autonomous Region (XUAR). Cecil fled China a decade ago and came to Canada in 2001 as a refugee, where he subsequently became a citizen. He was arrested in March 2006 in Tashkent while visiting family and reportedly trying to get his three children out of China. Uzbek citizen Gabdurafih Temirboev was detained on Saturday in Almaty despite having refugee status, RFE/RL reported on Wednesday. Temirboev had lived in neighbouring Kazakhstan with his family and three other Uzbek asylum seeks and their families for more than seven years. Kazakh police denied arresting him.