Weekly news wrap

This week in Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan threatened on Wednesday to expel two US diplomats accusing them of interfering in the internal affairs of the former Soviet republic, Reuters reported. Kyrgyz authorities reportedly said that the diplomats had had “inappropriate” contact with NGOs in the republic, which is home to a US military airbase, a Kyrgyz news site reported. The Central Asian country has been in talks with US officials over a rise in rent for the Manas military base, located just outside the capital, Bishkek. The Kyrgyz government wants Washington to pay US $200 million for use of the base that is used to support anti-terrorist campaigns in nearby Afghanistan – a 100-fold increase on what the US is currently paying for the facility. Tajikistan officially launched a project to reconstruct the Dushanbe-Chanak highway on Tuesday, an Uzbek news site reported on Wednesday. The two-year reconstruction effort is estimated to cost close to $300 million. Tajikistan’s second biggest foreign investor, China, provided some $281 million in the form of a long-term loan to the impoverished former Soviet republic. The highway will run from the Tajik capital, Dushanbe to the country’s northern border with Uzbekistan. Six men, including three policemen, were charged in Tajikistan with helping a suspected religious extremist escape from prison, an official said on Monday, English General News reported. The six are alleged accomplices of four men who attacked a detention centre in the northern city of Kanibadam in January, freeing a suspected member of the banned Movement of Turkestan, formerly known as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Fathullo Rakhimov. Meanwhile in Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev has signed a law on the prevention of HIV/AIDS and the elimination of all forms of discrimination against HIV-infected people in the country, a Kazakh news site reported on Saturday. In line with the approved changes, a provision on the deportation of HIV-infected foreign citizens from Kazakhstan was omitted from the current law. However, it states at the same time that deportation of foreign citizens is still possible if they refuse to be tested for the deadly virus.