Weekly news wrap

This week in Central Asia, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)’s annual week-long meeting opened on Thursday in Shanghai with the leaders from China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to sign agreements on security and transportation, as well as discuss how to help Afghanistan to combat drug trafficking, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported on Thursday. China signed a deal with Tajikistan to build a highway in the former Soviet republic and announced a financial plan to build a hydro-electric station in Kazakhstan. China also secured Uzbekistan’s support against China’s Muslim Uyghurs separatist minority. Iran is prepared to transfer its experience in security and border safeguarding to Tajikistan, according to the Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), Maj Gen Yahya Rahim Safavi, an Iranian news agency reported on Tuesday. Safavi noted that the way to sustainable security is for Tajikistan to manage to control its 4,000-km border and also gain political, economic, scientific and defence independence. He also stressed that Iran is also ready to cooperate in the fields of terrorism and drug trafficking. The Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) said in their 2006 report, released on Monday, that governments in Central Asia were increasingly using security concerns to justify repressive measures toward civil society, media and opposition groups in 2005. The “Human Rights in the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] Region” report said that the worst crackdown on democratic forces took place in Uzbekistan in the aftermath of the May massacre of civilian protestors in the eastern city of Andijan last year, where, according to some rights groups, up to 1,000 people may have been killed by security forces. Uzbek officials place the official death toll at 187. The report also said that the few civil society activists and foreign journalists who continued to work in Turkmenistan, a repressive and closed society where president-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov controls all branches of power, did so at serious risk to their own safety. The Kyrgyz Supreme Court on Tuesday denied refugee status to an Uzbek citizen who had fled to Kyrgyzstan after the Andijan crackdown, RFE/RL reported. Rasuljon Pirmatov is one of four Uzbeks who have been held in Kyrgyz detention on charges of murder by the Uzbek authorities who are demanding their extradition. The four men are recognised as refugees by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The Tajik foreign ministry on Saturday said in a note to the Russian ambassador, Ramazan Abdulatipov, that Tajik officials were concerned over the “brutal beating” in Moscow of citizens of the former Soviet republic, ITAR-TASS reported. The note came one day after Moscow’s prosecutor’s office said that a policeman had been arrested in connection with the beating of six Tajik students, allegedly by a group of people who burst into their dormitory rooms at a university on 7 June. Officials from the Committee for the Protection of the State Border of Tajikistan, together with the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), arrested two Afghan citizens last weekend for trying to smuggle 72 kg of heroin from Afghanistan into neighbouring Tajikistan, a Tajik news agency reported on Monday. Afghanistan is the world’s leading opium producer and Tajikistan is a transit country for drug smuggling into the Central Asian region and to Europe. A DCA investigation department has launched a criminal case into the incident.