Videoblog
On Wednesday February 3, Kazakhstan’s Secretary of State and Foreign Minister, Kanat Saudabayev spoke to a group of journalists and foreign policy community specialists at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. (transcript in English and MP3 in Russian here). This talk comes on the wings of Kazakhstan chairing the OSCE this year. Saudabayev is in Washington for several weeks talking up Kazakhstan’s achievements in his capacity as OSCE chairman (RUS).
It’s been a big year for barcamping in Central Asia. There was, of course, the mother of all barcamps in Almaty in the Spring, organized by neweurasia’s own Yelena. Another one was pulled off in the Fall in Kyrgyzstan, followed-up by a training seminar in Bakten — trailblazing the digital frontier — not to mention EduCamp back in Almaty.
But when 2009 started, no one could have imagined that there would be barcamps in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (consider this post by neweurasia’s Vadim from a while back). Yet, the impossible has happened in both Tashkent and Dushanbe.
The attached video is a short story about an amateur tour for Kyrgyz during the event in Dushanbe (and when I say “ameteur”, I really mean it). If you watch closely you might catch some familiar faces from neweurasia et al. Enjoy! ;-)
Editor’s note: Turkmenistan may be second only to North Korea in its self-imposed isolation, but this hasn’t stopped the global phenomenon of “urban culture”, especially in the form of Hip Hop, from arriving there, writes neweurasia’s Annasoltan. Read her previous entry in this post series here.
Due to its sexually explicit lyrics, tendency to glorify violence, and promote radical political views, Hip Hop has long been a subject of controversy in the West. However, precisely because of its gangland origins and lo-tech requirements, Hip Hop has also long been indefatigably grass roots.
So, it’s initially hard to imagine its sudden bloom in such a closed and strictly controlled country as Turkmenistan. After all, this a country where, as part of an extensive personality cult, the official state media broadcasts only songs in praise of the country’s leadership.
But the rigidities of Turkmen media culture are precisely why Hip Hop is suddenly popular: Turkmenistan’s youth are finding refuge in their own subculture and seeking new forms of expression.
Turkmen rap songs are gaining speedy popularity among the Turkmen youth. New rap websites are popping up left and right.
“Palestine”, a song about Palestinian children killed by Israeli security forces by Zumerchas of the rap group Darkroom Posse, has been rapidly making the rounds among listeners. Darkroom Posse has toured in Turkey and includes rappers from Turkmenistan, Russia, Canada, and the United States.
On his way to this year’s United Nations summit, long-ruling president of poor Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmon, first stopped over in Moscow, then in Croatia. Hmmm it’s not really clear to anyone which national interests he was trying to bargain in either place, especially Croatia. Maybe he just felt like visiting a pleasant fellow, exchanging a few kind words, and ticking off one more country on his “countries visited” checklist. Is he under the impression that our tax money is his to spend on holidays?
But let’s get to the point: during one of the roundtables at the UN summit, Rahmon made a speech in the Tajik language emphasizing the importance of constructing hydropower plants. Okay, so I concede a positive outcome from this rather odd vacation/business trip, but let’s face it: the odds of anything good coming out from this speech are slim to none. For that matter, I highly doubt that this is anything more than a continuation of his evidently blind reading of newspapers and manifestly careless attitude with regard to the critical problems facing his nation these days.
I attempted Uzbek Zharkop, which sounded like zharkoye, so didn’t intimidate me with its difficulty, like plov usually does.
Editor’s note: This is a mash-up of round-ups by Tokun Umaraliev (ENG) and Joshua Foust of Registan.net (ENG). neweurasia’s Kyrgyzstan coordinator, Elena Skochilo, has also been running her own survey about the election on her personal blog (RUS). She has also written about the official statistical results here on neweurasia (ENG, RUS).
Kyrgyz internet users have been very active in discussing the presidential elections in Kyrgyzstan. Members of popular internet forum Diesel created a thread yesterday on the elections, and today, it has more than 50 pages already!
Blive.kg, one of the video servers in Kyrgyz internet domain, has several videos showing the violations of election norms, including opening of polling stations before arrival of observers, ballot stuffingand carousel voting. As Blive is not accessible outside of Kyrgyzstan, I downloaded ‘norms violations videos’ from there and uploaded in YouTube. But the problem is that one cannot really prove that all these movies were taken during the 2009 presidential elections.
by: Tolkun Umaraliev
Translation of Adam’s post, photos by Flickr users Keirn and Remko Tanis (CC-usage), video by YouTube user 0ETAA0 (CC-usage).
Mass ethnic riots have taken place in Chinese Xinjiang Uighur Autonomour Region (XUAR). 156 people have been killed and 1080 wounded in Urumqi during massacre. Hundreds of vehicles and stores were burnt, and dozens of dwelling houses damaged. The government accuses foreign terrorists of inflicting the riots, and nearly 1,500 people have been already arrested. All communications and access to XUAR are blocked. Read the full story »
Russian President Dimitry Medvedev speaks. Sorry about the lopsided video, I didn’t realize it when I was filming!
Looking rather lonely up there....
Below are photos from the Council of Heads of States, which involved only SCO member countries, and the enormous, historical meeting between both member and observer countries. Again, sorry for the lousy quality!
Medvedev and Nazarbayev shake hands.
Presidents getting ready for the SCO Heads of State Council meeting
Medvedev,Karzai and Zardari talks about regional security through a trilateral format, a first for the SCO
Head of States of SCO and the Observer States. Again a first for the SCO
Medvedev looking uncomfortable...
This is a guest post from Registan.net
One of the strangest things about studying Central Asia is grappling with the severe inequalities. The big cities in a country like Kazakhstan are bastions of wealth sometimes difficult to comprehend.
For example, this is a photograph I took of the waterfront along the Ishim River in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, in July of 2003. Five years ago, apartments in those pastel towers were renting for $700 a month—in a country whose GDP per capita at the time was around $2,000.
That year, when I was in a cab in Almaty—the country’s enormous, beautiful city nestled up against the Tien Shan Mountain in the southeast—the Turk driving the car explained to me that there were such wonderful opportunities there that he and several of his friends had left Turkey for Kazakhstan because the pay was better. Things have only gotten worse since then, as oil (and, moreso now, uranium) money has flooded into the country, making its politics rather more Russian in character, if you get my drift.
But Kazakhstan is also home to truly shocking poverty. Venture a half-hour outside the limits of any noticeable city (”big” doesn’t apply to most of them) and you can find people still eking by on almost nothing—whether scraps from a failed collective farm, the toxic remains of a slowly draining overpolluted lake (the Aral Sea, sadly, is not alone), or even encroaching desertification in what was once Khrushchev’s vaunted “Virgin Lands.”
All of this is an introduction for a fascinating RFE/RL video of what life is still like in rural Kazakhstan. The reporter said the 21st century hadn’t reached this isolated village… but it sounds more like the 20th hadn’t either:
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