The United States has announced nearly $600 million in new humanitarian assistance in response to the war in Syria, noting that it is aimed at helping people who have faced “innumerable atrocities,” including air strikes carried out by the regime and its ally, Russia.
U.S. assistance will benefit many of the estimated 13.4 million Syrians inside Syria, as well as 5.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.
“We offer support to alleviate the suffering of the world’s most vulnerable people because it aligns with our values as a nation and with our national interests,” Blinken said, urging other donors to support the Syrian people.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his backers, including Russia, have been blamed for much of the violence, which started in March 2011 as part of a wave of protests calling for political reforms in several countries in the Middle East.
Blinken said his statement that the Syrian people “have faced atrocities, including Assad regime and Russian air strikes, forced disappearances, [Islamic State] brutality, and chemical-weapons attacks.”
Corruption and economic mismanagement by the Assad regime have exacerbated the dire humanitarian crisis, which has been further compounded by COVID-19, Blinken said.
The aid was announced during the fifth Brussels Conference on supporting Syria and the region, which brings together more than 50 countries and 30 international organizations in the biggest annual drive for pledges to assist people affected by the war.
The United Nations has set a goal of $10 billion in 2021 for Syria and refugees in neighboring countries. The UN says about $4 billion of the total is needed for humanitarian relief inside Syria. The rest is for refugees and the nations in the region hosting them.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said more than 13 million people need humanitarian assistance to survive this year.
“That’s over 20 percent more than last year, and the majority of the population is now facing hunger,” Guterres said in a video message.
The $596 million pledged by the United States brings total U.S. humanitarian assistance to Syria and the region to nearly $13 billion since 2011.
Germany has pledged the most during the donor conference — 1.74 billion euros ($2 billion).
“The Syrian tragedy must not last another 10 years. Ending it begins by restoring hope. It begins with our commitments — here, today,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said.
Nearly all of the world’s national statistical snapshots this year will be skewed by distance working and learning, travel bans, and other household anomalies brought on by lockdowns in one of the most transformative global health crises in human history.
With COVID-19 still a serious threat, governments and census organizers face stark challenges that arise with the decennial tallies.
Data collection that began last week in England, Wales, and the Czech Republic is, for the first time, mostly electronic and online. Internet servers in the Czech Republic were briefly overwhelmed.
Russia is due to gather all of its data in April for the third national census under President Vladimir Putin, who will have overseen each of his country’s post-Soviet censuses — highlighting population decline fed partly by cronyism and denied opportunity.
The United States is still readying its 2020 census following a Supreme Court challenge over the counting of noncitizens and other delays, as well as concerns about deliberate disruption.
Meanwhile, in the Balkans, a handful of census efforts have been postponed indefinitely or placed on last-minute hold because questions of ethnicity and nationality remain especially sensitive since the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
After decades of steady emigration for aspiring EU states in the Western Balkans, statistical overviews that will shape public and private life for a generation are pivotal for populations with newly won sovereignty or recognition and sizable minorities that identify with a neighboring state.
Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is still governed under a structure set out by the international Dayton accords 25 years ago, is the exception because it managed to conduct a census in 2013.
A census taker (left) talks to an ethnic Albanian family from the Serbian village of Veliki Trnovac on the Serbia-Kosovo border during a census in April 2002.
Kosovo has already postponed its nationwide headcount until at least 2022 in the face of political paralysis and logistical obstacles at least partly stemming from COVID-19.
But from Belgrade to Podgorica to Skopje, three other former Yugoslav republics in a region synonymous with cultural and historical fragmentation are offering fresh reminders of how fraught a census can be.
North Macedonia in March began an initial phase of its census-taking for Macedonians abroad before abruptly postponing its scheduled April launch of data gathering until September.
Serbia and Montenegro outwardly hope to hold their censuses after postponements of their own, with the stakes high for political and ethnic reasons.
Each has treaded carefully amid potentially divisive cross-border political pronouncements with ethnic components that threaten to undermine confidence in representative government and infrastructure planning.
North Macedonia
Registering abroad had already begun in March for the census of North Macedonia, which comes just two years since the country was renamed to assuage the cultural and territorial concerns of neighboring Greece.
Counting within North Macedonia was scheduled to begin on April 1 and continue for three weeks.
But Prime Minister Zoran Zaev announced on March 29 after a meeting with the main opposition leader that they had agreed to delay the enumeration until September, citing a surge of coronavirus infections and a vaccine shortage.
It was an abrupt reversal for Zaev, who had recently demanded the census go ahead despite opposition complaints that the pandemic threatened its accuracy.
“Probably some countries can afford to postpone, but they have a census from 10 years ago and we haven’t had a census for almost 20 years,” Zaev said.
The lack of reliable census data, he said, puts institutions “in the position of working in a fog, in the unknown.”
One of the major questions Skopje’s census should answer is the ethnic makeup of the country, including its sizable ethnic Albanian population.
Officials conduct a census for homeless families in the village of Vizbegovo near Skopje on March 3. North Macedonia began a census of its diaspora, prisoners, the army, and the homeless one month before the official census was due to begin on April 1. It has now been postponed until September.
Ethnic Albanians are generally estimated to make up around one-quarter of North Macedonia’s 2.1 million people.
Some minority rights in North Macedonia, including the inclusion of official languages, are dependent on a group composing at least 20 percent of the local population.
There have already been notable calls from ethnic Albanians within North Macedonia’s opposition and in neighboring Kosovo for ethnic Albanians to make their mark on the tally.
Arber Ademi is a leading member of the junior coalition party in North Macedonia that represents ethnic Albanians, the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI). Ademi has already threatened to discount the results of the census if Albanians don’t reach the 20 percent mark.
In neighboring Kosovo, one of the first actions that Albin Kurti took after being elected prime minister this month was to appeal to ethnic Albanians in North Macedonia to participate in the census.
An Albanian nationalist, Kurti has led the upstart Self-Determination (Vetevendosje) party to successive electoral upsets — in 2019 and again in February. Tens of thousands of diaspora ballots, in a country of under 2 million people that allows noncitizens of Kosovar descent to vote, were crucial to those victories.
“Since even with the current constitution, the political rights of the citizens in Northern Macedonia are dictated and derived from the numbers, the registration of every citizen is extremely important,” Kurti saidin a Facebook post.
“The registration of every citizen is extremely important,” Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti said in a Facebook post.
Aiming a statement at a neighboring country’s census might have seemed like a curious opening gambit for a prime minister.
But Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani did the same.
And the very next day, North Macedonia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Artan Grubi — an ethnic Albanian — went to Kosovo to seemingly urge further public participation.
Kurti’s main domestic opponent, Democratic Party of Kosovo acting Chairman Enver Hoxhaj, responded that North Macedonia’s census was more than “technical” but rather “a very important political process.”
We are not interfering in the [Montenegrin] census…but it’s important for us that the Serbian people don’t disappear and disappear.”
It was a clear riposte to Prime Minister Zaev’s attempt to assure minorities that “no one can challenge…acquired rights of minority peoples,” regardless of census results that he has downplayed as “a statistical operation for administrative needs and planning.”
Ethnic Albanians in North Macedonia must “prove through statistics that they are to the Balkans what the Germans are to Europe,” Hoxhaj said.
Sefer Selimi, founding head of the Democracy Lab, a nonprofit organization aimed at “strengthening democratic values” in North Macedonia and the Balkans, warned that opposition attacks on the census could undermine a crucial process that should lead to more sound government policies.
“These obstructions are influenced by nationalism and set us back at least 10 years,” Selimi told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service.
It is partly a result of making “the rights of one group of citizens dependent on their population,” he said.
Selimi cited a political narrative that has emerged portraying the opposition — and ethnic Albanians — as beholden to “extreme national movements” seeking to unfairly eclipse the “famous 20 percent” in an effort to get overrepresented.
Montenegro
In Montenegro, which declared independence from Serbia in 2006, a recently elected administration has already delayed a census scheduled for April to later this year.
But organizational obstacles, a lack of political consensus, and implied risks to Podgorica’s authority could imperil even that time frame.
Montenegro’s government was elected in August on a razor-thin margin and includes disparate groups with a Serbian nationalist grouping at its head for the first time in three decades.
The senior coalition alliance of Prime Minister Zdravko Krivokapic, For The Future Of Montenegro, a pro-Serb and pro-Serbian Orthodox alliance, faces increasing pressure from junior allies to commit to a full four-year cabinet to replace the current government of technocrats.
Such a transition could expose political fissures, including with ethnic Albanian Deputy Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic and his Black On White bloc.
A woman walks past a billboard reading “Free Census 2011” in downtown Podgorica, Montenegro, in April 2011.
Meanwhile, because of their shared culture, religion, and history, many Montenegrins remain reluctant to shed the Serb identity. The resulting morass of national identity and politics is sure to affect any census campaign.
And the pressure, even from abroad, to assert minority presence is strong.
Belgrade has long sought to leverage Serb identity in Montenegro’s populace to reinforce its national presence in a splintered neighborhood and boost regional influence.
Even without the census, 2021 would be dynamic. With the census, we should expect heightened tensions and an aggressive campaign of both blocs.”
A billboard campaign during the last Montenegrin census, in 2011, showed Serbian tennis superstar Novak Djokovic encouraging respondents to “be what you are.” In the end, nearly 29 percent of those in Montenegro declared themselves Serbs in that count.
At least twice in the past 18 months, Serbian President Aleskandar Vucic has publicly stressed the importance of Serb participation in Montenegro’s census.
“We are not interfering in the census…but it’s important for us that the Serbian people don’t disappear and disappear,” Vucic said last May.
Months later, in August, he said it was essential “to keep Serb numbers up in Montenegro because then we can say that we succeeded in helping our people.”
Respondents to Montenegro’s census can skip questions about nationality, language, and religion. But doing so risks legislatively determined rights for minorities with significant representation.
“Even without the census, 2021 would be dynamic,” Daliborka Uljarevic, who heads the NGO Center for Civic Education in Podgorica, said recently. “With the census, we should expect heightened tensions and an aggressive campaign of both blocs.”
In February, Krivokapic further stirred the ethno-nationalist pot by backing a path to citizenship for people who have lived there for decades but hold foreign citizenship.
Krivokapic’s government is unlikely to muster the votes for such a change — if it is even permissible. But it struck a nerve in a country still scarred by the breakup of Yugoslavia and animated by its own declaration of sovereignty just 14 years ago.
Serbia
Back in Vucic’s own country, meanwhile, officials have already postponed census work from April to October, citing the obstacles to recruiting and training enumerators in a pandemic.
Serbia has lost hundreds of thousands of people to emigration since its last official count in 2011, with many complaining of political stagnation, corruption and state capture by Vucic and his allies, and a lack of economic opportunity.
The most serious challenges to its upcoming census might lie in convincing all sides of its credibility.
An opposition boycott of the rescheduled national elections in June 2020, during a reopening amid the pandemic, left Vucic’s Progressive Party with a supermajority that mostly excludes serious political oversight of the census process.
But officials will also have to overcome an ethnically fueled credibility problem.
An ethnic Albanian man rests near graffiti reading “Boycott of the census” in the southern Serbian city of Bujanovac in October 2011.
Around 6 million of Serbia’s roughly 7 million people declared themselves Serbs in the last census.
Minority groups included more than a quarter of a million ethnic Hungarians, followed by 150,000 or so Roma, nearly as many Bosniaks, and other much smaller contingents.
But many Bosniaks and ethnic Albanians boycotted the enumeration a decade ago, complaining that language and distribution of census takers were contributing to an undercount.
It is unclear whether this time will be any different.
Shaip Kamberi, a lawmaker for the Albanian Democratic Alternative-United Valley grouping, told RFE/RL that ethnic Albanian political representatives were still unsure and would wait to see how local elections were conducted in Presevo, in southern Serbia, on March 28.
“Our path to the boycott in 2011 was a consequence of the state not wanting to listen to our demands,” Kamberi said. “At this initial stage, we left it to the National Council of the Albanian national minority to establish contact with the [Serbian national] Bureau of Statistics and agree on terms.”
In addition to technical hurdles, Kamberi cited the de facto disenfranchisement of many ethnic Albanians forced out by violence in the late 1990s between Serbian forces and Kosovar independence fighters.
Decades later, he said, many are still in legal limbo despite being among the demands in a “Seven-Point Plan” lodged with the Serbian government in 2013.
Serbia’s Statistical Office told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service that they are cooperating with the official coordination body of national councils of minorities to identify key problems.
Meetings are scheduled with representatives of local self-government and with such national councils, the office said.
“We will certainly talk to everyone in order to remove any doubts about the census,” the office said. “It is in everyone’s interest to collect quality census data.”
TASHKENT — Uzbekistan’s Interior Ministry has blamed Miraziz Bazarov, a well-known rights activist and blogger, for “provoking” an attack that left him in hospital with severe head and leg injuries.
In a video statement placed on YouTube on March 29, the ministry claimed that Bazarov was attacked after he called on “individuals with nontraditional sexual orientation” to hold mass demonstrations near the Hazrati Imam mosque and Amir Timur avenue in downtown Tashkent.
According to the latest statement by physicians at the Tashkent Traumatology Hospital, Bazarov sustained open and closed traumas to his skull, an open fracture of the right leg, and numerous bruises to his body.
The ministry said in its video that Bazarov “had deliberately ignored” social-behavior rules by distributing videos with contents “not typical for the Uzbek nation,” and “demonstrating his perverted behavior to the society.”
“[Bazarov], acting with the assistance and support of destructive external forces and ill-intentioned international nongovernmental organizations, attempted to propagate homosexualism and similar evils, despite the fact that it is banned by Uzbek law, and created the atmosphere of protest and intolerance,” the ministry’s statement said.
Among other issues, Bazarov has publicly urged the government to decriminalize same-sex sexual conduct, which is considered a crime in Uzbekistan.
Bazarov has said several times that he is not an LGBT activist, but believes that being gay is a personal issue and that laws should not be created to regulate it.
Pop Music Event
His mother, Miraziza Bazarova, who was allowed to see her son on March 29, told RFE/RL that she was shocked to see the severity of injuries her son sustained.
“There must be no place for such brutality and violence in our society. I met with law enforcement officers. They promised to find and punish the attackers. I hope very much that they will,” Bazarova said.
WATCH: Uzbek Rights Campaigner And Government Critic Severely Beaten
Uzbek photographer Timur Karpov told RFE/RL that Bazarov was attacked when he was approaching his home with his girlfriend, Nelya. According to him, the couple had noted that they had been followed by a vehicle for several days before the attack.
Hours before the attack, a weekly public event for fans of Japanese anime and Korean pop music, which Bazarov organizes each Sunday, was disrupted by dozens of aggressive men who chanted Allah Akbar! (God is great!).
The Interior Ministry’s video statement said that incident was the result of Bazarov’s “provocative” statements.
“As a result, on March 28, a group of our citizens who considered [Bazarov’s] calls as an insult, gathered on Amir Timur avenue,” and “created a situation compromising public safety by staging mass disorders,” the ministry said, adding that “individuals responsible for the disorder have been apprehended.”
The ministry did not say whether any of those apprehended were also involved in the attack on Bazarov.
Bazarov has been critical of President Shavkat Mirziyoev for failing to rein in corruption and has questioned the efficiency of ongoing restrictions to battle the coronavirus pandemic.
Last summer, Bazarov was questioned by State Security Service investigators after he called on the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank not to provide loans to Uzbekistan without strict control over how the funds are used.
Bazarov had told RFE/RL that in recent weeks he had received many online threats. Despite informing police of the threats, no action was taken by law enforcement, he said.
Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, and the U.S. Ambassador to Uzbekistan Daniel Rosenblum have condemned the attack against Bazarov and urged Uzbek authorities to thoroughly investigate it.
Forty-eight-year-old Izzat Amon has spent half his life helping Tajik migrant laborers in Russia.
On March 25, Russian authorities detained Amon and forcibly returned him to Tajikistan, where he faces charges of fraud in connection to his work in Moscow.
In a hastily convened hearing before his deportation, a Russian court also deprived him of his Russian citizenship
Amon is not the first Tajik to be apprehended in Russia and sent back to Tajikistan. But his case differs from others.
Amon is not a member of a Tajik opposition party, although he did recently criticize Tajikistan’s government.
Amon’s case illustrates that under authoritarian Tajik President Emomali Rahmon’s rule, any civic or legal activism independent of his government’s control is viewed as an existential threat.”
In Moscow, Amon offered the sorts of services to Tajik migrant laborers that even Tajik officials say are needed. Also known as Izzat Kholov, Amon has lived in Russia since 1996, when he obtained his Russian citizenship.
In 2000, he moved to Moscow and helped establish the Center for Tajiks of Moscow — an organization that has helped Tajik citizens properly register with Russian authorities, as well as to find places to live and work. Amon’s organization has also helped Tajiks facing legal issues in Russia.
Amon has publicly chided Tajik authorities for failing to sufficiently press Russia on the issue of rights abuses against Tajik migrant laborers.
Steve Swerdlow, an attorney and associate professor of human rights at the University of Southern California, has closely followed crackdowns against the rights of Central Asians in Russia. He says Tajik migrant laborers “are among the most vulnerable people in Russia.”
Judging by the number of reports of Tajik nationals who’ve been beaten and even killed in Russia, it is difficult to dispute his conclusion.
Swerdlow says the targeting of Amon by Tajik and Russian authorities violates several binding international human rights commitments made by each country. That includes a prohibition on returning a person to a country where they are likely to face torture, as well as arbitrarily depriving an individual of their citizenship.
But Amon’s case also reflects the extent to which Tajikistan’s rights crisis has worsened during the past several years.
“Known in Moscow’s human rights community primarily as an advocate for Tajik migrants’ rights, Amon is far from the typical opposition figure Dushanbe has been accustomed to targeting,” Swerdlow says. “His case illustrates that under authoritarian President Emomali Rahmon’s rule, any civic or legal activism independent of his government’s control is viewed as an existential threat.”
Amon has worked for more than two decades with Russian authorities to help Tajiks migrants, who number in the hundreds of thousands. He has a reputation as a person who solves problems.
His understanding of Russia’s system for migrant laborers cannot be easily replicated. Amon’s forced return to Tajikistan will leave a vacuum for many Tajiks trying to navigate Russian laws and regulations.
In fact, it may have been Amon’s popularity among migrants that worried authorities back in Tajikistan.
In 2019, Amon briefly contemplated forming a new political party called Changes, Reforms, And Progress. He’d planned to court voters among migrant laborers with an eye on being elected to parliament and representing their interests there.
Amon released a video in which he said Tajik migrants “have been outside the government…and have had no influence. We wanted to participate in the further political reconciliation of our country by establishing a party.”
Amon also said: “We who have provided 70 percent of the country’s budget for 30 years [through remittances] must unite and bring about radical changes in the country.”
But Amon abandoned the idea of forming a political party due to a requirement in Tajikistan’s election laws that says candidates must reside in the country for at least 10 years prior to elections.
Tajik authorities were displeased with Amon in 2006 when he resisted an effort by then-Tajik Ambassador to Russia Abdulmajid Dostiev to bring all Tajik migrant and diaspora organizations in Russia under one umbrella. Amon and another leader of a Tajik migrant group, Karomat Sharifov, refused to join. Sharifov was the head of the Tajik Labor Migrants organization in Russia.
Tajik authorities became concerned about Sharifov’s activities in Russia after he publicly criticized Moscow’s policies on migrant laborers.
Sharifov also had a Russian passport. But in December 2017, a Russian court ruled he’d violated a law on “foreigners” illegally entering Russia or remaining in the country after their entry visas expire. The court ordered Sharifov’s deportation to Tajikistan.
Sharifov was not arrested in Tajikistan, but he died there at the age of 57 under suspicious circumstances in May 2020.
The circumstances of Amon’s forcible return to Tajikistan are equally troubling, as they have become all too familiar.
Amon confided to friends months ago that he knew Tajik authorities wanted him sent back to Tajikistan. He’d told friends that he expected charges of being involved in terrorist activities to eventually be filed against him.
RFE/RL’s Tajik Service, known locally as Ozodi, reports that Amon was accused on March 4 in Moscow’s Tverskoi court of illegal employment in Russia. It was then that he was threatened with deportation, which the court ordered on March 16.
His wife, Sayora Taghoeva, who remains in Russia, said the family hired a lawyer in order to appeal the deportation order.
One of Amon’s colleagues told Ozodi that Russian police detained Amon on March 25 and took him to an unknown location. His family was never informed by Russian authorities of his detention.
Amon was back in Tajikistan by March 27.
Asia-Plus reported on March 27 that Tajikistan’s Interior Ministry denied that Tajik law enforcement agencies had any connection to Amon’s detention in Russia. But later, the Interior Ministry announced several charges of fraud against Amon in Tajikistan.
Recurring Pattern
Human rights campaigners note that those fraud allegations are similar to charges brought against Tajik rights lawyer Buzurgmehr Yorov, who has been serving a 28-year prison sentence in Tajikistan since 2015.
Russia has never been a safe haven for Tajiks who are wanted by authorities back in Tajikistan. But it is one of the easiest destinations for Tajik citizens to reach. For some Tajik migrants, Russia is the end of the line as they do not have the possibility of legally traveling to other countries.
Buzurgmehr Yorov
Swerdlow says forced returns and sometimes outright kidnappings of Central Asian dissidents on Russian soil have turned the country into a “graveyard for Tajik dissent.”
Edward Lemon, an assistant professor at the Washington-based Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, has written extensively on transnational repression by Central Asian governments.
“This kidnapping is certainly not an isolated incident,” Lemon says. “Despite being a small and impoverished state, the Tajik government has developed a relatively extensive network to control the opposition abroad, subjecting them to intimidation, harassment, attacks, detention, and rendition.”
Lemon says that during his research on transnational repression, he has recorded 63 cases of Tajik citizens who’ve been targeted abroad since 1991. He says most have come “since 2015, when the government cracked down on the opposition, forcing many opposition members, journalists, and academics to flee the country.”
All of those cases involved Tajiks who were in Russia or Turkey.
Swerdlow says there have been similar cases in Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, as well as further afield in Greece.
Both Lemon and Swerdlow say Amon’s case resembles that of Maksud Ibragimov, a Tajik businessman living in Russia who established an organization called Youth for the Revival of Tajikistan. Ibragimov was detained in Russia in November 2014, based on a warrant issued by Tajikistan.
As a Russian passport holder, he was released without being deported. Soon after his release, he was stabbed by an unknown assailant near his Moscow home.
Ibragimov was arrested again in January 2015 and brought to the local prosecutor’s office before he was released again without being charged.
Lemon recounts that “when he left the building, he was detained by unidentified men who took him to the airport and put him in the baggage hold of a plane.”
“The Tajik government did not acknowledge that Ibragimov was back in Tajikistan until June 2015, when he was sentenced to 17 years in prison on a host of charges, including extremism,” Lemon said.
Russian authorities have cooperated with Dushanbe more recently on the return of other Tajik dissidents. They include the opposition figures Shobuddin Badalov (2020, detained in Nizhny Novgorod); Sharofiddin Gadoev (2019, kidnapped from Moscow); and Naimjon Samiev (2018, detained in Grozny).
Among all of those cases, only Gadoev made it out of Tajikistan. His release has been attributed to intervention by the Netherlands, where he’d received refugee status.
Dismal Prospects
The current situation does not bode well for Amon, as the fraud charges against him may only be the beginning. Tajik authorities are notorious for piling on charges against perceived opponents of the government in order to portray them as acting illegally and immorally.
But for now, the most urgent concern for Amon’s family and colleagues is that he has not been seen or heard from since arriving in Dushanbe. That has raised fears that he may be being subjected to torture.
Swerdlow and Lemon say it is going to take a lot more than wishful thinking to change this awful trajectory. At a minimum, they hope the Dushanbe embassies of the United States and European Union states will raise concerns about the cases of Amon and other political prisoners.
They say Western embassies also should monitor Amon’s trial and explore options for reuniting him with his family abroad.
RFE/RL’s Tajik Service contributed to this report.
CHISINAU — Moldovan President Maia Sandu says she has appealed to the Constitutional Court for its opinion regarding her intention to dissolve parliament and call early parliamentary elections.
“I, like experts on constitutional law, believe that the legal circumstances for the dissolution of parliament have been met,” Sandu told reporters on March 30, five days after the Socialist-dominated parliament failed for a second time to approve the candidate nominated by the pro-Western president to serve as prime minister.
Lawmakers on February 11 rejected Sandu’s first choice for the post, former Finance Minister Natalia Gavrilita.
Under the constitution, the president has the right to ask for the dissolution of the legislature and organize snap elections after a second failure to approve a new prime minister within 45 days, or if the formation of a new government is blocked for three months.
In her press conference, Sandu reiterated her criticism of the current parliament, saying it includes corrupt deputies who “impoverish the country.”
The president has refused to nominate two candidates for prime minister proposed by the parliamentary majority led by the Moscow-leaning Socialist Party.
After Sandu’s announcement, the Socialist Party head and former Moldovan President Igor Dodon said his party would use “all legal means” to prevent general elections from being held during the coronavirus pandemic.
A U.S.-educated former adviser with the World Bank, Sandu defeated Dodon in November 2020 on a pledge to fight entrenched corruption and improve relations with the European Union.
She has repeatedly said she wants to push for snap elections in order to acquire a working majority in the 101-seat legislature.
Moldova, with a population of about 3.5 million, is one of Europe’s poorest countries and is sharply divided between those who support closer ties with Russia and those who advocate stronger links to Brussels and neighboring EU member Romania.
ISTANBUL, Turkey — Well-known Uzbek singer and opposition activist Jahongir Otajonov says he has been threatened with bodily harm after he announced his intention to run for Uzbekistan’s October presidential election.
Otajonov provided RFE/RL with what he said was a video taken by a security camera in his office in the Turkish city of Istanbul that showed three unknown men making thinly veiled threats against him on March 27.
The men in the video, who refused to identify themselves, told Otajonov that they came “just to tell” him that up to $15,000 had been offered to potential attackers in recent weeks to “seriously beat” him.
The three men speak broken Russian mixed with Uzbek in the video, using phrases that are common among criminal groups in the former Soviet Union, as well as continuously calling Otajonov “brother.”
“If you think this is just a joke, well, it’s not. Time will prove it and place everything in its proper perspective, right? That is why we came, to discuss the situation with you. We know those people [who ordered the beating] through connections and we can ask them, at this point, to calm down,” one of the visitors says.
Otajonov told RFE/RL that he considers the visit to be an obvious attempt of “blackmail and a threat to frighten” him because of his intention to take part in the October presidential election.
He said, however, he had no plans to change his mind on running for the presidency or curbing his political activities.
The incident comes days after Uzbek rights activist and government critic Miraziz Bazarov was hospitalized after he was attacked by unknown men hours after a public event he held was disrupted by dozens of aggressive men in Tashkent.
The men informed Otajonov that they knew his plans for the near future, namely his intention to visit Uzbekistan in the coming days.
“Brother, you are going to return to Tashkent in four days, aren’t you? They will be waiting for you there as well,” another man says in Uzbek on the video.
The visitors said they know Otajonov to be “a good person” and therefore “just wanted to let him know” about the possible danger he faces.
Otajonov said that a day after the visit he turned to Istanbul police, asking for help.
Otajonov announced his plans to run for the presidency in January. The founding congress of his Interests Of The People party was disrupted by a group of unknown women.
Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev took over the most-populous nation of the Central Asian region of 32 million people after his authoritarian predecessor Islam Karimov’s death was announced on September 1, 2016.
Since then, Mirziyoev has positioned himself as a reformer, releasing political prisoners and opening the country to its neighbors and the outside world, though many activists have cautioned that the reforms have not gone far enough.
Though Mirziyoev has said he is not against having opposition political groups in Uzbekistan, it has been nearly impossible for any genuine opposition party to be registered in Uzbekistan since the country gained independence in late 1991.
The presidential election will be held on October 24.
MOSCOW — Hundreds of Russian physicians have demanded authorities provide immediate medical assistance to jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny amid growing concerns over the state of his health.
Some 500 doctors and medical experts signed the online petition that was launched on March 28, one of the initiators of the petition, a journalist from the Insider website, Oleg Pshenichny, told RFE/RL.
The petition says that at a bare minimum, an independent physician whom Navalny trusts should have the opportunity to examine him. Better yet, it suggests Navalny be examined by experts from the Charite clinic in Berlin, Germany, where he was treated after he was poisoned in Siberia last year as the current deterioration of his condition may be related to the attack.
“We demand the Federal Penitentiary Service, all related entities, and the political leadership of our country immediately intervene in the situation and, without delay, secure medical assistance to create all necessary conditions for the normalization of Aleksei Navalny’s state of health,” the petition states.
Back Pain
Navalny’s health condition became an issue last week after his allies said they were concerned over his deteriorating health and called on prison authorities to clarify his condition.
Navalny said he was suffering from severe back pain and that “nothing” was being done by prison authorities to solve the problem other than being given some ibuprofen.
Members of the Public Monitoring Commission in the Vladimir Region visited the prison over the weekend and met with Navalny “in order to learn about problems with his health and the provision of medical treatment,” according to the commission.
The commission’s deputy chairman Vladimir Grigoryan told Dozhd television channel on March 29 that Navalny was faking his illness.
Grigoryan was unable to explain why he thinks that Navalny is simulating the illness and stopped the interview when he was asked to explain his comments, abruptly telling the Dozhd correspondent: “Goodbye, my dear.”
Navalny’s lawyers, meanwhile, have said that their client has not yet received official results of his MRI examination he had in a hospital outside the prison last week.
Vadim Kobzev, one of Navalny’s lawyer, quoted his client as saying that the Public Monitoring Commission in the Vladimir region is “a bunch of swindlers and liars, who serve the administrations of concentration camps and make the situation for inmates even worse.”
Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport in January immediately upon returning from Berlin, where he was recovering from what several Western laboratories determined was a poisoning attempt using a Novichok-type nerve agent that saw him fall seriously ill on a flight in Siberia in August 2020.
Navalny has said the assassination attempt was ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin — an allegation rejected by the Kremlin.
A Moscow court in February ruled that while being treated in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His suspended 3 1/2-year sentence was converted into jail time, though the court reduced that amount to 2 1/2 years for time already served in detention.
The petition signed by Russian physicians reminded Russian authorities that the European Court of Human Rights in 2017 ruled that the case which is the basis for Navalny’s current incarceration was “unfair,” and therefore Putin’s most-vocal critic should not even be in jail.
Navalny’s imprisonment set off a wave of national protests and, in turn, a violent police crackdown against his supporters.
The European Union, the United States, and Canada imposed a series of sanctions against Russia over the Navalny poisoning, his jailing, and the treatment of protesters by security forces.
Tehran won’t agree to stop its 20 percent uranium-enrichment work before the United States lifts all sanctions, state television quoted an unnamed official as saying, after a U.S. media report said Washington would offer a new proposal for talks to resolve the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.
“A senior Iranian official tells Press TV that Tehran will stop its 20 percent uranium enrichment only if the U.S. lifts ALL its sanctions on Iran first,” the state-run TV channel reported on its website on March 30.
The report quoted the official as saying that Tehran will further reduce its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers if the United States does not lift the sanctions.
“Washington is rapidly running out of time” as Iran holds a presidential election in June, with campaign season kicking off in May, it added.
The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has been seeking to engage Iran in talks about both sides resuming compliance with the international nuclear agreement.
The accord provided relief for Iran from international sanctions in exchange for limitations on its nuclear program, which Iran says is strictly for civilian energy purposes.
But Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, withdrew the United States from the pact in 2018 and reimposed crippling economic sanctions on Iran.
Tehran responded by violating some of the accord’s nuclear restrictions, including a 3.67 percent limit on the purity to which it can enrich uranium.
The media outlet Politico on March 29 quoted “two people familiar with the situation” as saying that U.S. administration officials “plan to put forth a new proposal to jump-start the talks as soon as this week.”
The proposal would ask Iran to halt some of its nuclear activities such as work on advanced centrifuges and the enrichment of uranium to 20 percent purity, in exchange for some relief from U.S. sanctions, according to one of the people, who said the details were “still being worked out.”
Iran’s mission at the United Nations tweeted that “no proposal is needed for the U.S. to rejoin” the nuclear agreement.
“It only requires a political decision by the U.S. to fully and immediately implement all of its obligations under the accord,” it added.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on March 21 reiterated Iran’s “definite policy” that the United States must lift all sanctions if Washington wants to see Iran return to its commitments under the 2015 agreement.
With reporting by Reuters and RFE/RL’s Radio Farda
Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti became the first person in the country to receive the COVID-19 vaccine on March 29. He received one of the 24,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that were flown in to Kosovo the day before as part of the international COVAX initiative. COVAX is the global donation program led by the World Health Organization.
He scrabbled in the vacuum of Czechoslovakia’s postcommunist, early 1990s with photocopiers and office supplies. He rose to the moneyed heights of the Czech business world, becoming the country’s wealthiest businessman, a media magnate, publicity-shy philanthropist, and government whisperer.
Petr Kellner, who died over the weekend in a helicopter crash on a ski trip in Alaska, was both admired and feared, as his company PPF Group morphed in a financial behemoth with holdings ranging from insurance to real estate to telecommunications, from Central Europe to China and beyond.
Bloomberg put his wealth at $15.7 billion, Forbes at $17.5 billion.
U.S. authorities say, for the moment, that there is nothing to suggest anything other than an accident — possibly human error, possibly mechanical problems. Federal aviation officials and state police are still investigating. Four other people including the pilot also died in the incident. https://dailydispatch.dps.alaska.gov/Home/DisplayIncident?incidentNumber=AK21031918
Kellner’s death reverberated in the Czech Republic, where the reports led newscasts and the top of newspaper websites all day on March 29, and throughout much of Central Europe.
Here’s a quick look at who Kellner was.
Privatization
Trained in economics, Kellner, 56, cut his capitalist teeth after the 1989 Velvet Revolution that brought an end to communism in the country. His official biography says that, for several years, he worked as an office supply salesman, including in the import and servicing of photocopiers.
He also garnered sufficient financial capital, and business connections, to start an investment fund to invest in the state assets being privatized by the postcommunist government through a “voucher-for-shares” scheme.
The Prvni Privatizacni Fond (PPF) became his main investment vehicle, buying stock and shares in more than 200 enterprises, and later acquiring a 20 percent stake in the country’s largest insurer, Ceska Pojistovna.
PPF propelled Kellner on a yearslong buying spree of assets not only in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, after the Czechoslovak breakup, but in other Central and Eastern European countries. PPF Group’s holdings grew to include biotechnology, media broadcasting, real estate, banking, and consumer finance. The group is a major player in Russia’s home lending industry, and has also invested in Russia’s booming agriculture and farming industry.
A 2007 deal between Ceska Pojistovna and Italy’s Generali created an insurance giant for Central and Eastern Europe, adding further to Kellner’s fortune when he exited the partnership in 2012 for 2.5 billion euros.
Media Magnate
PPF Group’s telecom holdings include majority ownership of the O2 cell phone and Internet operations in the Czech Republic in 2014. In 2018, the company closed on a 2.8 billion-euro purchase of the telecom assets of Norwegian-owned Telenor located in Hungary, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Serbia. https://www.ppf.eu/en/press-releases/ppf-group-completes-its-acquisition-of-telenors-telecommunications-assets-in-cee-countries
But it was his holdings of media and TV companies that garnered not only profits but also scrutiny. In 2004, PPF Group restructured the largest domestic Czech television channel, TV Nova, and then sold it to Central European Media Enterprises, a U.S.-based holding company known as CME. Kellner later joined the company’s board.
Over the next decade, CME bought — and sold — media and distribution companies in Romania. And in 2019, PPF Group said it would buy out the other shareholders in CME — including U.S. media giant Time Warner — to become CME’s sole owner, a deal estimated to be valued at $2.1 billion. https://www.ppf.eu/en/press-releases/ppf-signs-agreement-to-acquire-cme
The company’s media operations now over cover five European countries, with more than 30 TV channels, which PPF says reach over 45 million viewers. The company also has four radio stations in Bulgaria.
The CME purchase by Kellner’s group, and the larger trend of independent news media groups being bought or controlled by powerful business interests, prompted a Czech media watchdog group to issue a public warning.
“Recent years have shown that the situation where the largest entrepreneurs and their groups buy the most influential media in the country fundamentally undermines confidence in their independence and puts pressure on the journalists themselves,” the Endowment Fund for Independent Journalism said in 2019. “Petr Kellner’s latest transaction continues on this path.” https://www.nfnz.cz/aktuality/vyjadreni-nfnz-ke-koupi-cme-skupinou-ppf/
A Czech In China
One of PPF Group’s biggest profit-making engines has been one of its earliest investments: the consumer lending division, Home Credit.
In the late 1990s, Kellner used Home Credit to buy up banks in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and then later expanded into Russia, where it quickly gained a dominant position, focusing on quick, uncomplicated consumer lending.
Two years after first testing the water in China, Home Credit in 2010 became that country’s first fully-licensed foreign consumer lender, harnessing the country’s economic growth and Chinese consumers’ appetite for everything from mortgages and easy retail loans on things like cell phones, cars, or home computers. The strategy has paid off, making Home Credit a major source of value for PPF Group overall. https://www.ft.com/content/49095500-fcac-11df-bfdd-00144feab49a
According to a 2019 report by the Czech online news site Aktualne.cz, Home Credit has lent about 300 billion Czech crowns (US$13 billion) in China since first entering the market.
Home Credit’s push into China hit major road bumps in late 2019 and 2020 when the country, and consumers, went into lockdown, amid the government’s efforts to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-31/how-a-bet-on-china-s-consumers-is-backfiring-for-richest-czech?sref=Uk5xAhoO
Back home, PPF Group’s Chinese investments are reflected in Kellner’s support for closer Czech ties with China. He has accompanied President Milos Zeman on business junkets to China, something that has drawn controversy in some Czech political circles.
In 2019, Aktualne.cz reported that Home Credit had secretly hired a public relations company to burnish China’s image within the Czech Republic. https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/home-credit-ppf-petr-kellner-campaign-china/r~265579361bf511ea926e0cc47ab5f122/
The company, and Kellner, were battered by criticism from liberal Czech lawmakers, who are sympathetic to Taiwan’s fights with Beijing and opposed to China’s heavy-handed Communism. Home Credit officials later said the goal of the campaign was merely to “weaken extreme positions in the public sphere” about business and life in China.
PPF’s Future
The Czech Republic’s most prominent political figures, including Zeman and Prime Minister Andrej Babis, publicly mourned the news of Kellner’s death. https://twitter.com/AndrejBabis/status/1376420780850970627?s=20
Investors and analysts meanwhile turned to the question of what Kellner’s death would mean for the future of PPF Group, of which he held 99 percent ownership.
Home Credit had been planning to go public through an initial public offering in Hong Kong, plans that were already shelved due to the pandemic. PPF Group earlier this year indicated it was looking to consolidate some of its European banking operations and its digital start-up bank Air Bank.
Among those who analysts say are contenders to take the leadership of PPF Group are Jean-Pascal Duvieusart, who is CEO of Home Credit, and, along with Ladislav Bartonicek, is the other holder of outstanding shares not held by Kellner.
In a statement, PPF Group, which is now formally headquartered in the Netherlands, expressed “deepest grief” at the death of its founder.
“His professional life was known for his incredible work ethic and creativity, but his private life belonged to his family,” the company said.
Kellner was well known for shunning publicity and gave few media interviews over the years. He and his family had a well-known philanthropic foundation that donated millions for Czech educational causes.
In the company’s most recent annual report, Kellner offered his own musings about his company, and the previous year, when the Czech Republic, and the rest of the world, was battered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We know that every crisis is also an opportunity, and that problems are there to be confronted and resolved. Life is what we make of it. What our work brings to others. The real and tangible outcomes we can see behind us indicate what lies ahead,” he said in the 2019 report. https://www.ppf.eu/files/ppf-vz2019-eng-web.pdf
Beijing has pledged to invest $400 billion in Iran over 25 years in a deal that could see China’s economic, political, and military influence there and across the Middle East expand.
China and Iran signed the expansive deal during a ceremony in Tehran on March 27 between their respective foreign ministers, Mohammad Javad Zarif and Wang Yi. The agreement, in which Iran offered a steady supply of oil in exchange for Chinese investment under a vast economic and security accord, capped off a two-day visit that reflects Beijing’s growing desire to play a defining role in the region.
“China firmly supports Iran in safeguarding its state sovereignty and national dignity,” Wang said during a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rohani before calling on the United States to drop its sanctions against Tehran and “remove its long arm of jurisdictional measures that have been aimed at China, among others.”
China became a lifeline for Iran’s economy and ties between Beijing and Iranian political leaders have warmed in recent years, as both have grappled with intensified diplomatic and economic confrontations with the West.
Warships in the Sea of Oman take part in joint Iranian-Chinese-Russian naval exercises in December 2019.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration pursued a policy of “maximum pressure” on Tehran over the latter’s nuclear and missile programs after withdrawing unilaterally from a 2015 nuclear agreement between Tehran and six world powers, including China. His successor, President Joe Biden, has kept those tough policies in place while also signaling a readiness to revive the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
While the Chinese deal with Iran is about furthering Beijing’s regional and global ambitions as a leading power, they also undercut Washington’s efforts to keep Iran isolated and better position Beijing ahead of any future nuclear negotiations regarding Iran.
“China wants to show that it is indispensable in solving some of the world’s thorniest problems,” Daniel Markey, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and the author of China’s Western Horizon, told RFE/RL. “Beijing is looking to portray itself as an evenhanded broker, while painting the United States as the more problematic global player.”
Decades And Hundreds Of Billions
Neither the Iranian nor the Chinese government gave specifics about the agreement during the signing, but a leaked draft obtained by Western newspapers in July pointed to large investments in Iranian infrastructure.
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The draft covered $400 billion of Chinese investments in exchange for a steady supply of discounted oil to fuel China’s economy. Those investments would focus on energy and high-tech sectors as well as plans for other fields such as telecommunications, ports, railways, and health care, while also promoting Iran’s role in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy project, the Belt and Road Initiative, over the next quarter century.
The leaked draft also reportedly called for deepening military cooperation, including joint training and exercises, as well as intelligence sharing.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has publicly backed the deal, which was said to have been proposed by Xi during a January 2016 trip to Iran.
But the deal has been met with criticism inside Iran that officials are hiding details amid fears that Tehran may be giving too much and selling off the country’s resources to Beijing.
After last year’s leak of the draft agreement, Iranians were skeptical and lashed out on social media, with many urging the government not to sign the deal.
Critics have cited previous Chinese investment projects that have left countries in Africa and Asia indebted and ultimately beholden to Beijing and Chinese firms.
Beyond internal pushback, it is also not immediately clear how much of the agreement can be implemented with U.S. financial sanctions reimposed after the JCPOA withdrawal limiting how much business Chinese entities can conduct in Iran.
“The agreement’s success will depend on either de-escalation of tensions between Iran and the [United States] or further escalation of competition between China and the [United States],” Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s Iran project director, told RFE/RL.
Delivering On The Deal
It also remains to be seen how many of the ambitious projects detailed in the agreement will come to fruition.
Should the nuclear agreement remain stalled or worse, Chinese firms could face secondary sanctions from Washington. Beijing also has a mixed track record in Iran when it comes to executing large projects.
China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the state-owned oil and gas company, signed a contract to develop Iran’s South Azadegan oil field in 2009 after a Japanese firm pulled out. But Tehran ultimately ended the arrangement due to alleged underperformance and delays.
A natural gas refinery at the South Pars gas field on the northern coast of the Persian Gulf, in Asaluyeh, Iran. China’s state oil company pulled out of a $5 billion deal to develop a portion of Iran’s massive offshore natural gas field in 2019. (file photo)
“Signing an agreement is one thing; its materialization is quite another,” said Vaez. “China’s track record indicates that it often overpromises but underdelivers to Iran.”
‘A Friend for Hard Times’
Despite lingering concerns over the controversial deal signed with China, Beijing has offered Tehran a vital economic and political lifeline.
While Xi first proposed the strategic investment deal back in 2016, negotiations moved slowly.
Iranian President Hassan Rohani (right) meets with his Chinese countrpart, Xi Jinping, in Tehran January 2016.
Tehran signing the JCPOA nearly six years ago and reaching a deal with Washington to ease sanctions on its economy opened the door for European companies, who courted Iran with investments and plans to develop oil and gas fields.
But the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the deal and ensuing sanctions forced European companies to leave, leading Tehran to look east to China once again.
After signing the deal with Wang, Zarif said that “China is a friend for hard times,” referring to the economic and diplomatic support that Beijing has provided in recent years.
As the Biden administration looks to revive nuclear talks with Iran since taking over in January, Chinese support will be crucial for Tehran.
(Left to right:) Foreign ministers/secretaries of state Wang Yi (China), Laurent Fabius (France), Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Germany), Federica Mogherini (EU), Mohammad Javad Zarif (Iran), Philip Hammond (UK), and John Kerry (United States) pose for a group photograph at a meeting in Vienna that saw the conclusion of the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran on July 14, 2015.
U.S. officials say that steps can be taken to bring Iran back into compliance with the terms of the agreement while the United States gradually lifts sanctions, but Tehran insists those penalties be lifted before any negotiations resume.
While calling for a return to the nuclear deal, China has so far backed Iran and demanded that the United States act first to return to the agreement by lifting sanctions that have strangled Iran’s economy and its currency.
John Calabrese, an expert on China-Iran relations at The Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said he thinks Beijing is looking to preserve the JCPOA and prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program. He warned that such a program could lead to further regional instability and jeopardize Beijing’s diplomatic inroads in the Middle East, where “Chinese stakes in energy and other economic sectors have grown significantly.”
Regional Ambitions
China continues to play a growing role in the Middle East.
Prior to his visit to Iran, Wang visited Saudi Arabia, Tehran’s main rival, and was warmly received in Riyadh. The Chinese foreign minister also visited Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, with additional stops in Bahrain and Oman.
Beijing has long avoided taking sides in conflicts in the Middle East, and Wang has offered China’s diplomatic capital to be a “peace broker” in the region. At a press conference at the annual National People’s Congress on March 8, Wang talked up Beijing’s deepening ties with the Arab world and said a host of agreements heralded “a new chapter” of Sino-Arab relations.
Calabrese, who is also an assistant professor at American University, said that given China’s diverse ties in the region and ambitions for the Middle East, it will be treading cautiously following this month’s deal not to alarm Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Iran’s regional rivals.
Moving forward, he said, Beijing is positioning itself to play a more central role in reviving the Iran nuclear agreement and de-escalating tensions between powers in the Middle East, which could be a major diplomatic win for China.
“If that is the case and [it] bears fruit, then Beijing comes out stronger and [looks] stronger all around,” Calabrese said.
ASHGABAT — Citizens in Turkmenistan have voted in members of the parliament’s upper chamber, the People’s Council, for the first time since constitutional amendments in September 2020 made parliament bicameral.
State media outlets in the tightly controlled and extremely isolated former Soviet republic said that 112 registered candidates vied for the 48 seats available in the newly established parliamentary chamber, stressing that the elections were “fair” and monitored by “independent” domestic observers.
With a cult of personality around the 63-year-old authoritarian ruler, dissent is not tolerated in Turkmenistan and all media is under strict state control.
Voters on March 28 had only two hours to cast ballots, between the hours of 10 a.m. and noon, at six polling stations across the country — one in the capital Ashgabat and five in other regions.
Turkmen authorities declared within hours of the vote that turnout in the country of 5.8 million people was 98.7 percent of eligible voters.
Foreign observers were not allowed to monitor the polling stations and no opposition candidates were on the ballot in the Central Asian former Soviet republic, which is considered one of the most repressive countries in the world.
Results from the balloting have yet to be released.
With the exception of turning the parliament into the two-chamber institution, other details of the constitutional changes that the Central Asian nation’s authoritarian leader, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, signed into law in September remain largely unknown.
Berdymukhammedov initiated the constitutional changes in 2019 and led a commission he established that prepared a bill of amendments.
The People’s Council was created in 2017 on the basis of the Council of Elders. Berdymukhammedov was the body’s chairman.
Critics have said that Berdymukhammedov plans to use the constitutional amendments to secure his lifetime presidency — and for the eventual succession of his son and grandchildren.
Before the bill was signed into law last year, dozens of Turkmen citizens held rallies in Washington, as well as in the cities of Houston and Pittsburgh, protesting the plan.
Government critics and human rights groups say Berdymukhammedov has suppressed dissent and made few changes in the restrictive country since he came to power after the death of autocrat Saparmurat Niyazov in 2006.
Like his late predecessor, Berdymukhammedov has relied on subsidized prices for basic goods and utilities to help maintain his grip on power.
The father of Ivan Zhdanov, the director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) of jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, has been detained on a charge of abuse of office.
Zhdanov wrote on social media on March 29 that his 66-year-old father Yury Zhdanov was sent to pretrial detention over the weekend after police searched his home in the city of Rostov-on-Don on March 26.
“I have no doubts that the criminal case was launched because of me and my activities,” Zhdanov wrote, adding that his father’s arrest was “absolutely a new level of villainy and turpitude from the presidential administration.”
According to Zhdanov, before retirement last summer his father worked as an official in a remote town for several years.
Investigators now accuse Yury Zhdanov of recommending the town’s administration provide a local woman with a subsidized apartment though it later turned out that the woman’s family had previously received housing allocations.
The apartment was later returned to municipal ownership in accordance with a court decision and no one among those who made the decision were held responsible.
“I do not know if the situation was intentionally organized to frame him. The events took place in July 2019, during the peak of the campaign in the Moscow municipal elections,” Zhdanov wrote.
In late-July 2019, the younger Zhdanov was serving a 15-day jail term for taking part in an unsanctioned rally to protest against a decision by election officials to refuse to register him and several other opposition figures as candidates to the Moscow City Council.
Navalny’s FBK is known for publishing investigative reports about corruption among Russia’s top officials, including President Vladimir Putin.
The latest report focused on a lavish Black Sea mansion which Navalny’s team called “a palace for Putin,” capturing worldwide attention with more than 115 million views on YouTube.
The report showcases the luxurious, 100 billion-ruble ($1.32 billion) estate near the popular holiday town of Gelendzhik. It said Putin effectively owns this palace via a complex trail of companies.
The Kremlin has denied the report saying “one or several [businessmen] directly or indirectly own” the property, adding that it “has no right to reveal the names of these owners.”
MOSCOW — Jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny says he fears the possibility of solitary confinement in a punishment cell after being accused of minor infractions.
Navalny said in an Instagram post on March 29 that he had been given six reprimands within two weeks at the correctional colony where he is being held.
“You get two reprimands and you go to punitive isolation, which is an unpleasant place, conditions there are close to torture,” he said.
Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic, is currently incarcerated in Correctional Colony No. 2, about 100 kilometers from Moscow, which is known as one of the toughest penitentiaries in Russia.
Navalny said his infractions include “getting out of bed 10 minutes before the ‘wake up’ command” and wearing a T-shirt during a meeting with his lawyers.
“I’m waiting for a reprimand with the wording ‘grinning though the routine of the day said it was time to suffer,’” Navalny said in the post, adding that the situation reminded him of grade school, when students were told not to argue with the teacher because they knew “everything better.”
Navalny’s health condition became an issue last week after allies said they were concerned over his deteriorating health and called on prison authorities to clarify his condition.
Navalny said he was suffering from severe back pain and that “nothing” was being done by prison authorities to solve the problem.
He said in a message on Instagram on March 26 that “getting out of bed is hard and very painful” and that the prison doctor prescribed two tablets of ibuprofen a day.
Members of the Public Oversight Commission in the Vladimir region visited the colony and met with Navalny “in order to learn about problems with his health and the provision of medical treatment,” according to the commission.
Commission Chairman Vyacheslav Kulikov said on March 28 that Navalny “complained about pain in his leg and asked for assistance in getting injections to treat this pain.”
“We asked doctors to pay attention to this and, in case it is necessary, to carry out an additional medical checkup,” Kulikov said.
Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport in January immediately upon returning from Berlin, where he had been recovering from what several Western laboratories determined was a poisoning attempt using a Novichok-type nerve agent that saw him fall seriously ill on a flight in Siberia in August 2020.
Navalny has said it was an assassination attempt ordered by Putin — an allegation rejected by the Kremlin.
A Moscow court in February ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an older embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His suspended 3 1/2-year sentence was converted into jail time, though the court reduced that amount to 2 1/2 years for time already served in detention.
Navalny’s incarceration set off a wave of national protests and a crackdown on his supporters.
The European Union, the United States, and Canada have imposed a series of sanctions against Russia over the Navalny case.
MOSCOW — Jailed Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny says he fears the possibility of solitary confinement in a punishment cell after being accused of minor infractions.
Navalny said in an Instagram post on March 29 that he had been given six reprimands within two weeks at the correctional colony where he is being held.
“You get two reprimands and you go to punitive isolation, which is an unpleasant place, conditions there are close to torture,” he said.
Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic, is currently incarcerated in Correctional Colony No. 2, about 100 kilometers from Moscow, which is known as one of the toughest penitentiaries in Russia.
Navalny said his infractions include “getting out of bed 10 minutes before the ‘wake up’ command” and wearing a T-shirt during a meeting with his lawyers.
“I’m waiting for a reprimand with the wording ‘grinning though the routine of the day said it was time to suffer,’” Navalny said in the post, adding that the situation reminded him of grade school, when students were told not to argue with the teacher because they knew “everything better.”
Navalny’s health condition became an issue last week after allies said they were concerned over his deteriorating health and called on prison authorities to clarify his condition.
Navalny said he was suffering from severe back pain and that “nothing” was being done by prison authorities to solve the problem.
He said in a message on Instagram on March 26 that “getting out of bed is hard and very painful” and that the prison doctor prescribed two tablets of ibuprofen a day.
Members of the Public Oversight Commission in the Vladimir region visited the colony and met with Navalny “in order to learn about problems with his health and the provision of medical treatment,” according to the commission.
Commission Chairman Vyacheslav Kulikov said on March 28 that Navalny “complained about pain in his leg and asked for assistance in getting injections to treat this pain.”
“We asked doctors to pay attention to this and, in case it is necessary, to carry out an additional medical checkup,” Kulikov said.
Navalny was detained at a Moscow airport in January immediately upon returning from Berlin, where he had been recovering from what several Western laboratories determined was a poisoning attempt using a Novichok-type nerve agent that saw him fall seriously ill on a flight in Siberia in August 2020.
Navalny has said it was an assassination attempt ordered by Putin — an allegation rejected by the Kremlin.
A Moscow court in February ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an older embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His suspended 3 1/2-year sentence was converted into jail time, though the court reduced that amount to 2 1/2 years for time already served in detention.
Navalny’s incarceration set off a wave of national protests and a crackdown on his supporters.
The European Union, the United States, and Canada have imposed a series of sanctions against Russia over the Navalny case.
The Czech Republic’s richest man, Petr Kellner, whose financial group has deep roots across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, has died in a helicopter crash in Alaska.
“With great sadness, PPF announces that on March 27, 2021, majority shareholder of PPF Mr. Petr Kellner tragically passed away in a helicopter accident in the Alaskan mountains,” the group said in a short statement on March 29.
It said that the crash, which claimed five lives, was under investigation. Alaska State Troopers said one survivor was listed in serious but stable condition.
U.S. media has reported that the accident occurred when the helicopter, which was taking the group on a heli-skiing excursion, crashed near the Knik Glacier in Alaska.
The 56-year-old Kellner, the world’s 68th-wealthiest person according to Forbes, died along with another guest of the Tordrillo Mountain Lodge, Benjamin Larochaix, also of the Czech Republic, two of the lodge’s guides, and the pilot of the helicopter, the reports said, citing officials.
Kellner, whose wealth was estimated by Forbes magazine at $17.5 billion, started his business selling copy machines and founded the PPF Group investment company with partners in 1991, two years after the fall of communism in the former Czechoslovakia, to take part in the country’s scheme to privatize state-owned firms.
Petr Kellner
PPF Group went on to grow in finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, media, and engineering in businesses spanning mainly Europe, Asia, and the United States. Its assets amounted to nearly $52 billion by mid-2020.
The group includes Home Credit International, the world’s largest nonbanking consumer lender with extensive activities on the Russian and Chinese markets.
PPF last year acquired the CME media group operating TV companies in Central and Eastern Europe. In 2018, it became the sole owner of Telenor’s telecommunications assets in Hungary, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Serbia.
The group has donated millions of respirators and masks and thousands of coronavirus testing kits to help countries in the coronavirus pandemic, according to Czech media reports.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis offered his condolences to Kellner’s family, saying on Twitter: “Unbelievable tragedy. I am very sorry.”
Kellner’s daughter Anna Kellnerova, a two-time Czech junior equestrian show-jumping champion, said his funeral will be held “with only close family members.”
With reporting by The New York Times, AP, Reuters, and AFP
TASHKENT — Uzbek gay rights campaigner Miraziz Bazarov has been hospitalized after being brutally attacked by unknown men.
Physicians at the Tashkent Traumatology Hospital told RFE/RL on March 29 that the 29-year-old government critic sustained multiple injures to his internal organs and legs, including an open fracture of the left leg, and a concussion.
They said he was brought to the hospital the night before.
According to the doctors, Bazarov’s situation was very serious and he will be moved to another hospital, where he may need to undergo brain surgery.
One of Bazarov’s neighbors, who said he witnessed the assault, told RFE/RL that the blogger was attacked in the evening on March 28 near his apartment block by three masked men, one of whom had a baseball bat.
According to the witness, the attack lasted only about three minutes.
The director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), Hugh Williamson, condemned the attack, calling it “totally awful.”
“Uzbekistan has committed at UN Human Rights Council this month — in theory — to uphold int’l human rights standards. It should do so! End attacks on lgbt people,” Williamson tweeted on March 28.
Last week, HRW said in a statement that gay men in Uzbekistan face arbitrary detention, prosecution, and imprisonment and called on Tashkent to guarantee lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights and decriminalize same-sex sexual conduct.
Earlier on March 28, Bazarov told journalists that a weekly public event for fans of Japanese anime and Korean pop music, which he organizes each Sunday, had been disrupted by dozens of aggressive men who chanted “Allah Akbar!” or “God is great.”
Bazarov is known for his criticism of the Uzbek government on his Telegram channel.
He has called on the authorities to decriminalize same-sex sexual conduct in the Central Asian country, criticized President Shavkat Mirziyoev’s government for its poor efforts fighting corruption, and questioned the efficiency of ongoing restrictions to battle the coronavirus pandemic.
Last summer, Bazarov was questioned by State Security Service investigators after he called on the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank on Facebook not to provide loans to Uzbekistan without strict control over how the funds are used.
Bazarov earlier told RFE/RL that in recent weeks he had received many online threats, of which he had informed the police, but they had not taken any action.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) says Belarusian authorities have “escalated” repression against independent media over the past five months, arbitrarily detaining and beating journalists, imposing fines and prison sentences on politically motivated charges, revoking their media credentials, and raiding their homes and offices.
The crackdown “is part of the government’s efforts to silence media reporting on human rights violations and peaceful, countrywide protests” that have rocked the country in the wake of an August election, the New York-based human rights watchdog said in a report published on March 29.
The Belarusian opposition and the West say the vote that authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka claimed extended his iron-fisted rule for a sixth term was rigged, and are demanding fair elections and justice for abuses since the vote.
Since protests erupted, more than 30,000 people have been detained, hundreds beaten, several killed, and there have been widespread reports of torture, while most the opposition leadership has been arrested or forced into exile.
“Instead of ensuring justice for sweeping police brutality and other abuses, Belarusian authorities are prosecuting journalists reporting on sensitive issues,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at HRW.
“The authorities should guarantee that all journalists in Belarus are able to carry out their work without fear of reprisals and without abusive restrictions,” Williamson added.
Crisis In Belarus
Read our coverage as Belarusians continue to demand the resignation of Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid a brutal crackdown on protesters. The West refuses to recognize him as the country’s legitimate leader after an August 9 election considered fraudulent.
Between September and March, the authorities opened at least 18 criminal cases against journalists, “apparently in reprisal for their work,” HRW said.
Three of them were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six months to two years, while seven others are awaiting trial behind bars on criminal charges of violating public order, tax evasion, and interfering with police work. One journalist accused of insulting the president is under house arrest.
The authorities “coerced lawyers representing many of these journalists into signing vaguely worded nondisclosure agreements, barring them from sharing any information about their clients’ cases,” HRW said, adding that several lawyers who refused to sign have faced disbarment.
In some criminal cases involving “bogus” charges, the authorities have designated journalists as witnesses and subjected them to “police and judicial harassment,” according to the watchdog.
“The journalists reported being summoned for police questioning, threatened with criminal charges, and subjected to home and office searches and seizure of their equipment,” HRW said, adding that at least one newspaper “had to temporarily close due to a threat of criminal prosecution, raids, and confiscated equipment.”
Belarusian authorities “wrongly equate reporting on unauthorized demonstrations with participation in them, particularly if the reporter works for an outlet that the authorities refuse to grant accreditation,” HRW said.
The Belarusian Association of Journalists said that about 400 journalists had been detained on administrative charges since August.
At least 100 of them were given short administrative jail terms since December, while others were fined on administrative charges of “violating the rules on mass gatherings,” “disobeying the police,” and “violating the laws on mass media.”
HRW quoted several journalists as saying they were brutally beaten during their detention, denied medical assistance, and held in poor conditions. Some had their equipment destroyed.
It said the authorities deported at least two journalists with Russian citizenship in recent months, apparently in retaliation for their work in Belarus, and at least three journalists who were threatened with having custody of their children taken away fled the country with their families.
At least one media outlet was “unjustly” stripped of its media credentials for violating the media law, and state-owned printing houses refused to print at least five independent newspapers according to HRW.
In October, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry adopted new rules on foreign media accreditation in the country, “canceling all existing accreditations and making the accreditation process significantly more complicated,” it said.
The head of the trauma and orthopedics department at the Russian hospital where opposition politician Aleksei Navalny was treated for poisoning last summer has died, according to a Russian newspaper.
Rustam Agishev, 63, died of a stroke, Taiga.info reported on March 28. Agishev worked at Omsk emergency hospital No. 1 for 30 years.
The chief physician of the hospital, Yevgeny Osipov, said his death was “an irreplaceable loss for the entire medical community.”
Agishev will always remain an example of “boundless dedication to the profession, mercy, and wisdom. He was a talented doctor, a responsible leader, a man of high moral and ethical qualities,” Osipov said, according to Taiga.info.
The report said Agishev suffered the stroke in December and never recovered. He died on March 26.
His death comes two months after the death of the deputy chief physician for anesthesiology and resuscitation at Omsk emergency hospital No. 1.
Sergei Maksimishin died in his ward from a heart attack, the press service of the regional Health Ministry said on February 4. He was 55.
Navalny was admitted to the acute-poisoning unit of the hospital on August 20 after he became ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow.
Initially, doctors at the hospital publicly admitted that the cause of Navalny’s illness was a poisoning, but then denied that it was.
Navalny was put into a medically induced coma and evacuated to Germany, where he spent five months recovering from the poisoning. Tests in Europe determined that the toxin was from the Novichok family of Soviet-era nerve agents.
Navalny, who returned to Russia from Germany in January, is currently incarcerated in Correctional Colony No. 2, about 100 kilometers from Moscow.
A Moscow court in February ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an older embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His suspended 3 1/2-year sentence was converted into jail time, though the court reduced that amount to 2 1/2 years for time already served in detention.
Navalny’s allies said on March 24 they were concerned over his deteriorating health and called on prison authorities to clarify his condition.
Members of the Public Oversight Commission in the Vladimir region met with Navalny on March 28, and Vyacheslav Kulikov, the chairman of the commission, said in a statement that Navalny complained about pain in his leg during the meeting and asked for assistance in getting injections to treat it.
Kulikov also said Navalny was able to walk and did not voice any other complaints. He said Navalny’s request for injections had been officially registered.
“We asked doctors to pay attention to this and, in case it is necessary, to carry out an additional medical checkup,” Kulikov said.
Correctional Colony No. 2 is known as one of the toughest penitentiaries in Russia.
PRISTINA — Kosovo has received its first shipment of a vaccine against COVID-19 as it becomes the last country in Europe to start an immunization program.
Kosovo received its first consignment of 24,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine through the COVAX donation program on March 28.
The Balkan nation will receive a total of 100,800 doses of the vaccine via the scheme.
Prime Minister Albin Kurti said the government will start administering the vaccinations immediately.
“This is a small consignment, but (it) inspires a lot of hope in our country that we will begin saving lives, especially those of our medical staff and the population groups at risk,” Kurti told media at the Pristina airport as the vaccines arrived.
Kurti said Kosovo was not a wealthy country and needed international support, especially from the United States and the European Union, to help battle the deadly virus.
Washington and Brussels are the main contributors to the COVAX program.
Kosovo Health Minister Arben Vitia said that medical staff will be the first to get vaccinated.
A few hundred Kosovo health workers were vaccinated last week in Albania.
Kosovo is in negotiations with Pfizer to acquire doses of its drug against COVID-19, but no agreement has yet been reached.
The European Union announced on March 27 that the Western Balkans will receive 650,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine from the European Union.
Kosovo plans to immunize its population in three phases with the first phase consisting of health workers, nursing home patients, citizens over 80 years old, and those with chronic diseases.
The second phase will focus on workers employed in education, people involved in managing the pandemic, and those aged 65 to 79.
In the third phase, the state will vaccinate 50 percent of the population.
On March 28, Kosovo registered 914 new COVID-19 cases, the highest since the start of the year.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Kosovo has registered 87,981 cases and 1,840 deaths.
A shipment of AstraZeneca vaccines has reached North Macedonia. Western diplomats observed the arrival of the vaccines at Skopje International Airport on March 28. It is the first COVID-19 vaccine delivery that the Western Balkan country has received under the international vaccine-sharing program COVAX. Serbia donated some Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines to North Macedonia in mid-February, while Skopje also bought Sputnik V vaccines from Russia in early March.
Turkmenistan held its first elections to a newly created senate on March 28 with 112 candidates contesting 48 senate seats.
There were no opposition candidates on the ballot in the Central Asian former Soviet republic, which is considered one of the most repressive countries in the world.
With a cult of personality around the 63-year-old authoritarian ruler, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, dissent is not tolerated in Turkmenistan and all media is under strict state control.
Voters on March 28 had only two hours to cast ballots, between the hours of 10 a.m. and noon local time, at one of six polling stations across the country — one in the capital Ashgabat and five in other regions.
Turkmen authorities declared within hours of the vote that turnout in the country of 5.8 million people was 98.7 percent of eligible voters.
Foreign observers were not allowed to monitor the polling stations.
Profiles of candidates published by the government newspaper, Netralny Turkmenistan, indicated that most of the candidates in the March 28 vote were civil servants.
Turkmenistan’s new two-chamber parliament, known as the Milli Genes, or National Council, will be made up of 56 senators and 125 deputies.
In addition to the 48 candidates to be declared as the winners of senate seats during the next week, Berdymukhammedov also will designate his own choices for eight other senate seats.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released separate reports on Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan on March 23.
Relative to Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have the most media-friendly environments but the CPJ reports highlight various problems. In Kazakhstan, for example, the government has been limiting the ability of journalists to do their job. Meanwhile, troll factories have been operating in Kyrgyzstan to discredit the work of some reporters, and at least one journalist says death threats are being posted on his social network accounts.
The situation is still grim for independent media in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan remain grim, although some outlets in Uzbekistan have been testing the limits of what can and cannot be reported.
On this week’s Majlis Podcast, RFE/RL media-relations manager Muhammad Tahir moderates a discussion on the problems media outlets and journalists face in Central Asia.
This week’s guests are: from Kazakhstan, Diana Okremova, the director of the Legal Media Center in Nur-Sultan; from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Timur Toktonaliev, the Central Asia editor for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting; from New York, Gulnoza Said, the Central Asia coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists; and Bruce Pannier, the author of the Qishloq Ovozi blog.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released separate reports on Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan on March 23.
Relative to Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have the most media-friendly environments but the CPJ reports highlight various problems. In Kazakhstan, for example, the government has been limiting the ability of journalists to do their job. Meanwhile, troll factories have been operating in Kyrgyzstan to discredit the work of some reporters, and at least one journalist says death threats are being posted on his social network accounts.
The situation is still grim for independent media in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan remain grim, although some outlets in Uzbekistan have been testing the limits of what can and cannot be reported.
On this week’s Majlis Podcast, RFE/RL media-relations manager Muhammad Tahir moderates a discussion on the problems media outlets and journalists face in Central Asia.
This week’s guests are: from Kazakhstan, Diana Okremova, the director of the Legal Media Center in Nur-Sultan; from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Timur Toktonaliev, the Central Asia editor for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting; from New York, Gulnoza Said, the Central Asia coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists; and Bruce Pannier, the author of the Qishloq Ovozi blog.
Beijing has announced sanctions against two Americans, a Canadian, and a rights advocacy group over their criticism of China’s treatment of Uyghurs in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said China’s tit-for-tat measure would only focus more attention on “genocide” and rights abuses against ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim groups in Xinjiang.
“Beijing’s attempts to intimidate and silence those speaking out for human rights and fundamental freedoms only contribute to the growing international scrutiny of the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang,” Blinken said.
China’s action comes after the European Union, Britain, Canada and the United States sanctioned several members of Xinjiang’s political and economic hierarchy last week over rights abuses in the region.
China has retaliated in recent days by announcing its own sanctions against public officials and citizens of the EU, Britain, Canada, and the United States who have been critical of Beijing’s policies.
China’s Foreign Ministry has accused the United States and Canada of imposing sanctions “based on rumors and disinformation.”
Those named on March 27 as the latest targets of Chinese sanctions include two members of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Gayle Manchin and Tony Perkins, Canadian member of parliament Michael Chong, and a Canadian parliamentary committee on human rights.
They are prohibited from entering mainland China, Hong Kong, and Chinese-administered Macau.
‘Badge Of Honor’
Chong said being sanctioned by Beijing was a “badge of honor.”
“We’ve got a duty to call out China for its crackdown in #HongKong & its genocide of #Uyghurs,” Chong tweeted.
“We who live freely in democracies under the rule of law must speak for the voiceless.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described the measures as “an attack on transparency and freedom of expression.”
International human rights groups says at least one million Uyghurs and people from other mostly Muslim groups have been held in camps in Xinjiang.
Rights groups also accuse Chinese authorities of forcibly sterilizing women and imposing forced labor.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has dismissed two judges from the Constitutional Court, deepening a feud with the top court over anti-graft reform.
In a March 27 decree, Zelenskiy removed Constitutional Court Chairman Oleksandr Tupytskyi and another judge, Alexander Kasminin, for continuing to “threaten Ukraine’s independence and national security.”
Both judges were appointed by pro-Russia former President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014 following the Euromaidan protests.
The decree comes after the Constitutional Court in October struck down some anti-corruption legislation and curbed the powers of the National Anti-Corruption Agency (NAZK). The court decision dealt a blow to reforms demanded by the West and threatened to impact lending from the International Monetary Fund.
In response to the court ruling, Zelenskiy vowed to reverse its decision and continue with his anti-graft reform agenda.
In the decree, Zelenskiy invoked a parliamentary decision calling Yanukovych’s rule from 2010 to 2014 a “usurpation of power.”
“Certain judges of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine appointed by Viktor Yanukovych, by continuing to exercise their powers, threaten Ukraine’s independence and national security, which violates the constitution, human and civil rights, and freedoms,” the decree states.
It’s unclear if Zelenskiy’s decree is valid, potentially setting off a fresh dispute with the powerful court.
In December, Zelenskiy issued a decree suspending Tupytskyi, who is facing a preliminary investigation over suspected witness tampering and bribery.
The Constitutional Court then ruled that the president had exceeded his powers, in what Tupytskyi called an attempted “constitutional coup” against the judges.
According to Ukraine’s constitution, constitutional judges can only be dismissed by a vote of two-thirds of its 18 members.
With reporting by AFP, RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, and the Kyiv Post
Almost 8,000 business owners and their employees from Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and North Macedonia traveled to Belgrade and Nis in Serbia on March 27 to receive vaccinations against COVID-19. Some 10,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were secured by the Western Balkans Regional Investment Forum in cooperation with the Serbian government. Although Kosovo is also part of the forum, its Chamber of Commerce refused to participate.
More than 300 people gathered in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, on March 27 to protest China’s growing economic influence. The event was organized by two unregistered opposition parties — the Democratic Party of Kazakhstan (DPK) and Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK). At least 20 people were arrested ahead of the rally and the Internet was blocked in the neighborhood where the gathering took place. Protesters spoke against joint ventures with Beijing, Chinese investment in Kazakhstan’s economy, as well as the persecution of ethnic Kazakhs and Uyghurs in China’s autonomous region of Xinjiang. Similar protests took place in the capital, Nur-Sultan, as well as Oral, Shymkent, and Aqtobe.
What looked like a victory this month for Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev, his government, and their reform pledges instead risks becoming just another example of empty promises in Central Asia’s most populous country.
On March 19, around 280 workers from the Indorama Agro cotton farm gathered for the founding meeting of Uzbekistan’s first independent trade union, Halq Birligi (People’s Unity).
The Berlin-based Uzbek Forum for Human Rights called it a “historic day,” but the victory did not last long.
By March 24, Uzbek Forum was reporting that local officials were harassing members of the new union.
“Leaders of Xalq Birligi…reported receiving calls from officials at the local administration who did not identify themselves, warning them that their involvement in union activities would cause them problems,” Uzbek Forum wrote.
The report said police were also phoning union activists “demanding that they stop their organizing activities and leave the union.”
The new union aims to protect the rights of Indorama Agro’s workers in Syrdarya Province.
Singapore-based Indorama Agro has been active in Uzbekistan since 2010, mainly in the cotton industry.
According to Uzbek Forum, the Uzbek government made some 40,000 hectares of irrigated land available to Indorama Agro in four districts — the Kasbi and Nishan districts of Kashkadarya Province and the Akaltyn and Sardoba districts of Syrdarya Province — in August 2018 to “organize modern cotton-textile production.”
Indorama Agro established cluster farms, a controversial scheme that allows companies to invest money and reorganize land and local labor to boost efficiency in production.
Critics argue that this system has simply allowed the wealthy — some with alleged connections to senior Uzbek officials — to privatize agriculturally based businesses in the areas, depriving local farmers of their land and stripping local workers of many of their rights.
And some Uzbek farmers have alleged that they are being forced to work on cluster farms.
RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service, known locally as Ozodlik, reported in January that more than 100 textile workers from an Indorama Agro cluster farm in Kashkadarya Province’s Kasbi district demonstrated after they were laid off without being paid accrued wages.
One of the allegations was that Indorama Agro had dispensed with many full-time contract workers and switched to three-month contracts without sick pay, pensions, or compensation for overtime.
Some workers at Indorama Agro clusters complain of low wages, and Uzbek Forum quoted one farm worker as saying he had worked for two years without a vacation or holiday leave.
Halq Birligi is vowing to change that and otherwise work to rein in alleged abuses on cluster farms in Syrdarya Province, as well as to improve working conditions for agricultural laborers.
But the independent union appears to be running into some of the same obstacles that other local rights activists and opposition political parties have experienced.
Uzbek Forum reported that on March 19, when Halq Birligi unionists intended to hold their meeting, “workers had rented a meeting room to hold their election but when they arrived, the building administrator refused them entry, telling them the room was unavailable due to ‘urgent repairs.’”
Uzbek Forum said workers then moved to a nearly teahouse, “but the electricity was cut off soon after they began. They continued their meeting outside, with workers holding up their cell-phone flashlights to provide light.”
Roza Agaydarova was elected head of the union.
According to Uzbek Forum, Agaydarova said on March 23 that “she received a call from a regional representative of the Federation of Trade Unions of Uzbekistan, the national union federation, which is not considered independent from the government, and was told that according to the laws of Uzbekistan, they had to join the federation, otherwise their union is invalid.”
Uzbek Forum cited a guarantee in Uzbekistan’s new law on trade unions ensuring workers the right to join the organization of their choice and the right to avoid being forced into joining an organization.
Ozodlik contacted the head of the Syrdarya provincial branch of the Federation of Trade Unions of Uzbekistan, Rustambek Tursunmuradov, who confirmed he had phoned Agaydarova and told her that forming an independent trade union was a bad idea.
Asked why his organization had not defended the rights of farmers working for Indorama Agro, Tursunmuradov said that when those individuals started working for Indorama Agro they lost their membership in the Federation of Trade Unions of Uzbekistan.
After the death of Uzbekistan’s first president, Islam Karimov, in 2016, Mirziyoev came to power promising better working conditions, including the eradication of forced labor in the cotton fields.
Most observers agree that there has been significant progress toward ending forced labor in Uzbekistan. But the cluster-farm idea is not only unpopular; it could be counterproductive if the goal truly is to improve working conditions for agricultural workers.
The executive director of the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights, Umida Niyazova, credited Mirziyoev’s government for showing “the political will to combat forced labor and open its economy.”
But, she added, “The way it treats the first independent trade union is a test of the seriousness of its reforms, and the world is watching.”
