epubdos : Afghanistan
SCA MORNING PRESS CLIPS
Prepared for the U.S. Department of State
Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs
TO:
SCA & Staff
DATE:
Wednesday, July 3, 2024 6:30 AM ET

Afghanistan
An Afghan woman wanted to be a doctor. Now she makes pickles as the Taliban restricts women’s roles (AP)
AP [7/3/2024 12:55 AM, Riazat Butt, 456K, Negative]
Frozan Ahmadzai is one of 200,000 Afghan women who have the Taliban’s permission to work. She should have graduated from university this year in pursuit of her dream of becoming a doctor, but the Taliban have barred women from higher education and excluded them from many jobs.

Now, instead of suturing, she sews in a basement in Kabul. Instead of administering medication, she makes pickles.

Half of Afghanistan’s population now finds itself locked out of the freedom to work at a time when the country’s economy is worse than ever.

Few jobs are still available to women. They include tailoring and making food, which the 33-year-old Ahmadzai now does along with women who once were teachers or aspired to be one.

Women’s participation in the workforce in Afghanistan, always limited by conservative cultural beliefs, was 14.8% in 2021, before the Taliban seized power and imposed harsh restrictions on women and girls. They include banning female education beyond sixth grade, barring women from public spaces like parks, and enforcing dress codes.

Women’s participation in the workforce was down to 4.8% in 2023, according to World Bank data.

Ahmadzai’s eyes flare when talking about the new reality for Afghan women. “We are only looking for a way to escape,” she said, referring to the work in the basement. It’s a step, at least, beyond being confined at home.

But profits are slim for her and her 50 colleagues in the collective. In a good month, the pickle-making and tailoring businesses bring in around 30,000 afghanis ($426).

The women also have other complaints familiar to anyone in Afghanistan: The rent and utility bills are high. The sewing machines are old-fashioned. The electricity supply is erratic. Local retailers don’t compensate them fairly. They don’t receive support from banks or local authorities to help their businesses grow.

Just obtaining permission from the Taliban to work is challenging for women, though under Afghan labor laws, the process for work permits ought to be the same for both sexes.

The ministry responsible for issuing permits has banned women from its premises, setting up a female-only office elsewhere. It’s to “speed things up and make things easier” for women, said a spokesman for the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, Samiullah Ebrahimi.

There, women submit their paperwork, including their national identity card, a cover letter and a health certificate from a private clinic. That’s assuming they have the documents along with the money to cover any costs. It also assumes they can move around without being harassed if unaccompanied by a male guardian.

Last year, a top United Nations official said Afghanistan had become the most repressive country in the world for women and girls. Roza Otunbayeva, head of the U.N. political mission in Afghanistan, said that while the country needed to recover from decades of war, half of its potential doctors, scientists, journalists and politicians were “shut away in their homes, their dreams crushed and their talents confiscated.”

The Taliban have a different view. They have tried to provide women with a “safe, secure and separate” working environment in line with Islamic values and Afghan traditions in sectors where women’s work is needed, according to ministry spokesman Ebrahimi. They can work in retail or hospitality, but it must be a female-only setting.

He said women don’t need degrees for the majority of permissible work including cleaning, security screening, handicrafts, farming, tailoring or food manufacturing.

It’s heartbreaking for Ahmadzai and her colleagues to see their expertise go unused. Several also were training to be makeup artists, but beauty parlors have been closed.

Some jobs for women remain in education and health care, so Ahmadzai has pivoted to a nursing and midwifery course so she can become a medical professional. But not a doctor. The Taliban don’t want more female doctors.

The challenges for Afghan women of obeying Taliban edicts while helping to support their families while living conditions worsen is a strain on health, including mental health.

Ahmadzai said one of the few positives about her work in the basement in Kabul is the camaraderie and support system there.

“Afghan women nowadays all have the same role in society. They stay at home, care for children, mind the house and don’t work hard,” she said. “If my family didn’t encourage me, I wouldn’t be here. They support me because I work. My husband is unemployed and I have small children.”

Salma Yusufzai, the head of Afghanistan Women Chamber of Commerce and Industry, acknowledged that working under Taliban rule is a challenge.

The chamber has almost 10,000 members, but the lack of female representation within the Taliban-controlled administration is a challenge.

Yusufzai said the chamber supports women by giving them a platform at local markets and connecting them with the international community for participation in overseas exhibitions and other opportunities.

Chamber members include key Afghan industries like carpet-making and dried fruit. The businesses are male-owned but kept alive by women who want to support the economy, which she said would collapse without them.

She acknowledged that the chamber’s limited work was only possible through engagement with the Taliban: “If I close the door then nothing will happen, nothing will remain.”

Yusufzai once had three gemstone businesses and gave them up because of her chamber role. But she can’t own them anyway under Taliban rule, so the businesses are in her husband’s name.

“Since we are living in this country, we have to follow the rules,” she said. Her smile was tight.

“From nothing, it is better to have something.”
Concessions to Taliban govt ‘worth it’ for Doha talks: EU envoy (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [7/2/2024 10:17 AM, Callum Paton, 85570K, Neutral]
Making concessions to Taliban authorities by excluding civil society groups from UN-hosted talks was a price worth paying for further engagement, the EU’s special envoy to Afghanistan said Tuesday.

Rights groups have strongly criticised the UN move to exclude women’s rights and other groups from the Doha meeting which ended Monday, in a compromise to allow the Taliban government’s participation.

Civil society organisations and women’s activists were given the chance to meet with officials and international envoys on Tuesday outside the official agenda though some chose to boycott the extra day of talks.

"To have the opportunity to talk with the Taliban, and they came, and to talk with these individuals, civil society, private sector, and they came... I think this was worth it", Tomas Niklasson told AFP.

"I think it was a good discussion. We know the controversy around the event. Some civil society members have boycotted it for various reasons and I understand the reasons," he added at the end of the Tuesday talks.

The UN-hosted talks began on Sunday and were the third such meeting to be held in Qatar in a little over a year, but the first to include the Taliban authorities who seized power in Afghanistan in 2021.

In the aftermath of the Taliban’s return to power, the international community has wrestled with its approach to Afghanistan’s new rulers.

The Taliban government in Kabul has not been officially recognised by any other government since it took power in 2021.

The authorities have imposed a strict interpretation of Islamic law, with women subjected to laws characterised by the UN as "gender apartheid".

The Taliban authorities have repeatedly said the rights of all citizens are guaranteed under Islamic law.

Niklasson said the talks with the Taliban government delegation to discuss increasing engagement with Afghanistan and a more coordinated response to the country, including economic issues and counter-narcotics efforts, had been "a good starting point".

Though he explained there had been "no commitment to change anything on their side and no commitment on our side to do anything more at this stage", the EU envoy said the meetings with the Taliban authorities had been "better than I feared".

He said conversations on private sector and market access had been positive and an area where "we find a lot of common ground".

"Will that answer satisfy a girl who has been at home for 1,000 days and without a proper school? Probably not. But I think my realistic expectation for this meeting was also not that we were going to be able to fix that in three days," Niklasson said.

Plans for further UN talks with the Taliban government have not been confirmed but Niklasson said the authorities had "clearly expressed an interest and a willingness to continue".

"But I think for that we will need to solidly prepare meetings," he added.

In the opening session of their meetings with more than 20 assembled special envoys and UN officials the Taliban delegation said diplomats should "find ways of interaction and understanding rather than confrontation", despite "natural" differences in policy.

"Like any sovereign state, we uphold certain religious and cultural values and public aspirations that must be acknowledged," the head of the Taliban delegation, spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said.

The delegation also pressed to end international sanctions with Mujahid questioning whether ongoing sanctions were "fair practice" after "wars and insecurity for almost half a century as a result of foreign invasions and interference".

Niklasson explained the EU has implemented UN sanctions and, as such, their removal would "have to be dealt with the Security Council".

He explained that those individuals listed under additional EU sanctions were "linked to human rights violations".

"So for our sanctions to be lifted, they would have to take different positions when it comes to the rights of women and girls, for example," the envoy said.
Talks with the Taliban - no women allowed (BBC)
BBC [7/2/2024 11:32 AM, Caroline Davies, 65502K, Neutral]
Two days of talks between the international community and the Afghan Taliban have been productive, diplomats say.

The meetings in Doha were the first to include the Taliban – whose government no country recognises - since they seized power three years ago.

At the Taliban government’s insistence, no civil society representatives were in the room with the Taliban officials, meaning no women from Afghanistan were included, prompting criticism from rights groups and activists.

UN officials met Afghan civil society groups separately on Tuesday.

As the diplomats and media vacate the vast air-conditioned ballrooms of the Qatari capital, has anything changed for Afghanistan in the last few days?

There were no grand announcements, no massive breakthroughs, no solutions - but then none were expected - from the organisers or participants. Instead, the Taliban officials and diplomats seemed quietly and tentatively positive.

The tone was “respectful”, “engaged”, “frank”, according to different diplomats the BBC spoke to. The most repeated phrase was “this is a process”.

There were no concessions gained, nor pledges won from the Taliban delegation, led by spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid. I asked him what the Taliban government would be willing to offer.

“When we go ahead we will see what they [the international community] want and what we can do based on Sharia law,” he told us. “ Whatever is against Sharia law we will not discuss it. Whatever is in the framework of Sharia we will solve it. It is a process and it will continue; we will see where it will take us and how much we will improve.”

The topics on the agenda were counter-narcotics and the private sector, easier topics to cover than issues like human rights or the role of women.

On the latter, the Taliban remained immovable on their view that this is an internal matter.

“We don’t want to discuss these sorts of issues between other countries. We will find a solution for it back home,” said Zabihullah Mujahid.

When the BBC pointed out to him there had been no solutions for nearly three years, and asked why that was, he said: “We are not ignoring it, we are working on it. We are finding a solution for it based on Sharia law.”

The UN itself referred to the situation in Afghanistan as “gender apartheid” where women and girls are not able to attend secondary school, visit parks or gyms and hold certain jobs among an increasing list of restrictions.

“It is not just an internal issue and we have made that clear to them,” said Rosemary DiCarlo, the UN’s lead in these talks.

She cited the different treaties signed by Afghanistan prior to the Taliban authorities’ takeover in August 2021 that agree to human rights.

“It doesn’t matter if the government changes, they are still party to those.”

“I think they are ready to talk about some of these things [women’s rights], but they are not ready to move,” Tomas Niklasson, special envoy of the European Union for Afghanistan, told the BBC.

“I am hopeful that things will change on women’s rights, but I’m not sure about the time perspective.”

What made him hopeful?

“I’m surprised to see the way in which Afghans still manage through resilience to push back,” he said, adding after a pause. “Hope is not always a rational thing.”

The UN did arrange for a separate meeting to take place on Tuesday with civil society activists, although several chose to boycott it and none of those who attended wanted to speak to the media.

According to the list of attendees provided by the UN, several countries including China and Russia chose not to attend the session. The UN told us that several delegations not in attendance had travel arrangements.

There is no set date for the next meeting of this kind, although many of the countries that attended already meet the Taliban bilaterally and told the BBC that that would continue. All officials we spoke to thought that the few days had laid groundwork for more engagement and conversation.

After nearly three years of the Taliban authorities in control, the general mindset of the diplomats we met was that little would improve in Afghanistan if there was not an attempt to engage, at least on the areas of some overlap.

“We felt we had to start somewhere,” Ms DiCarlo said in Tuesday’s closing press conference.

The question still is where might these talks lead.
Engagement With the Taliban Cannot Come at the Cost of Ignoring Gender Apartheid (The Diplomat – opinion)
The Diplomat [7/2/2024 8:24 AM, Sarah Keeler and Mina Ahmadi, 1156K, Neutral]
On June 30 and July 1, special envoys from 22 countries gathered in Doha for the third round of talks meant to determine the future of Afghanistan, which since August 2021 has been in the grip of an extremist Taliban regime many say is more repressive than their last iteration in the late 1990s.

While Taliban representatives were not invited to the first round of talks and refused to participate in the second, it seems their representation at this round of talks has been deemed so important by the United Nations, which is leading the process in Doha, that this is worth betraying the fundamental rights and will of the Afghan people, and of several key U.N. resolutions in the process. U.N. officials agreed to the terms offered by the Taliban to ensure their participation, which include a complete absence of civil society representation and an agenda devoid of any discussions on women’s rights – the single issue agreed upon by the international community as a must-have for any meaningful engagement with the extremist group.

The U.N. Security Council Resolution on Women, Peace and Security (1325), which turns 25 next year, was reached to ensure the full and equal participation of women in all stages of conflict prevention, peacebuilding, and post-conflict reconstruction. Resolution 2721, adopted in December of last year with the aim of appointing a U.N. Special Envoy for Afghanistan and a reintegration of the country into the international system, further reinforces “the need to ensure the full, equal, meaningful and safe participation of Afghan women in the process.”

The United Nations exists as a system designed to uphold global values of peace, equality, and dignity for all, and the U.N. Charter contains these basic principles, which all members are expected to uphold. In return, the U.N. provides a forum for its members to peacefully resolve disputes, resist aggression, promote social progress, and protect human rights. While the Taliban do not currently hold Afghanistan’s seat at the U.N., this is a role to which they aspire, making full recognition and membership one of the final points of leverage by which the international community, under U.N. leadership, could hold the Taliban accountable.

The United Nations could demand clear and measurable steps toward the restoration and protection of women’s rights as a crucial initial step toward engagement. Instead, U.N. leadership has shown it is prepared to treat the fundamental human rights of half of Afghanistan’s population as a mere afterthought, while pandering to one of the most misogynist regimes the world has known. This appears to be a desperate bid to revive the U.N.’s own optics of relevance at a time when it finds itself ill-prepared to address multiple global and regional crises. Despite numerous calls to ensure the participation of women in dialogues to decide Afghanistan’s future, their voices were entirely absent

Currently in Afghanistan, women and girls face numerous abuses of their human rights, systematically brought about through a series of more than 100 decrees targeting their rights to work, attend school over the age of 12 (Afghanistan is the only country on the planet to institutionalize such a policy), access healthcare, engage in political or public life of virtually any kind, or even visit parks, restaurants, or beauty salons. Women have effectively become prisoners in their own homes, with male relatives forced to become their jailers.

As a result, the country is in the grip not only of a widespread mental health crisis, but a humanitarian emergency as well. The economy is in freefall and levels of poverty and food insecurity are skyrocketing, as half the population is barred from contributing their skills and labor to recovery.

Human rights organizations and activists agree the Taliban’s oppression of women constitutes a new form of crime against humanity: gender apartheid. Such violations are not a byproduct of Taliban rule; they are a central facet of the Taliban’s ideology and system of governance. If the U.N. is prepared to sidestep these grave transgressions against its own fundamental values in order to promote such a skewed vision of security, what hope do we women and vulnerable gender groups have in any setting, at a time when rights that we thought inviolable are being chiseled away bit by bit?

Afghans who are living this daily reality could be forgiven for considering, as some Afghan women have, that the U.N. is signifying its willingness to turn course, potentially even negotiating with other extremist terrorist groups – many of whom now flourish in Afghanistan under a Taliban rule that is at best unable to curtail extremist violence and at worst, sympathetic to such elements as the Islamic State.

With this format, the third round of Doha talks reproduced an asymmetrical exchange in which the concerns of the international community and the Taliban – economic stability at all costs – become the drivers of decision-making, while the rights, will and wishes of the Afghan people, particularly women and girls, have been excluded. This interpretation of regional security also ignores the growing body of evidence linking gender-based violence with an increased risk of political violence. The world is all too slowly waking up to the fact that women and girls are often the first victims of violence that later explodes into collective violence.

The Doha process was originally established to support a political pathway for the country’s future, a focus which has become increasingly eclipsed by the economic and security concerns of the international community in their dealings with the Taliban. We are extremely concerned that actors in the international community will grant concessions to the Taliban in the interest of promoting economic recovery and security stability that serves them, at the expense of the people of Afghanistan. This approach is shortsighted in more ways than one.

The Taliban have shown no indications of their willingness to correct course on their misogynistic system of governance. Roza Otunbayeva, special representative of the U.N. Secretary-General for Afghanistan and head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), has offered an unconvincing defense of this position, pointing to the fact that Afghan women were not included in previous Doha talks, and that one specific issue relating to women – drug addiction – is being addressed under the agenda topic of counternarcotic operations.

For its part, the Taliban is content to dismiss those women and rights groups who are condemning this approach. Taliban rhetoric has it that these dissenting views represent an elite, Western-influenced stream of thought, or apply only to women living in the diaspora – another issue on which the U.N. has deferred to Taliban interests. This framing ignores the fact that women leaders were driven into exile as a result of targeting by the Taliban after August 2021. The irony is that until 2021 the Taliban themselves were an exiled entity, and yet this fact was not enough to disqualify them as the single negotiating authority entering into the Doha Accords with the United States. Women who remain effectively trapped inside Afghanistan are well aware of and ready to demand their rights.

U.N. member states, including the G7+ group of countries, as well as the U.N.’s own special rapporteur, have expressed their concerns about the U.N.’s courting of Taliban involvement at Doha III. G7+ members recently issued a letter to the U.N. stating that the approach to Doha III was “entirely tailored to the Taliban’s interests.” Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett released a report at the U.N. Human Rights Council only last month that urged a human rights-based approach in international engagements with the Taliban.

The credibility of the United Nations itself is at risk as we witness total cognitive dissonance from key actors within its system in relation to Afghanistan. What is more, women around the world are watching as a global leadership established to advance peace and human rights abandons this, instead reaffirming an age-old assertion that gender equality can be viewed as a residual concern, perpetually dismissed to a future, post-peace order.

Landmark work led by the U.N. through the Women, Peace and Security agenda had done much to dismantle this patriarchal thinking in the past two and a half decades. Women’s rights must not be an afterthought of political process for peacebuilding, but function as its very core. Will indifference to the Taliban’s dystopian vision of a society in which women become little more than domestic slaves serve as a bellwether for the future defense of our rights globally?
Pakistan
Pakistan has met all requirements for IMF bailout deal, finance official says (Reuters)
Reuters [7/3/2024 2:51 AM, Ariba Shahid, 5.2M, Positive]
Pakistan is looking to clinch a staff level agreement on an International Monetary Fund bailout of more than $6 billion this month after addressing all of the lender’s requirements in its annual budget, its junior finance minister told Reuters.

The South Asian country has set challenging revenue targets in its annual budget to help it win approval from the IMF for a loan to stave off another economic meltdown, even as domestic anger rises at new taxation measures.

"We hope to culminate this (IMF) process in the next three to four weeks," Minister of State for Finance, Revenue and Power Ali Pervaiz Malik said on Wednesday, with the aim of thrashing out a staff level agreement before the IMF board recess.

"I think it will be north of $6 billion," he said of the size of the package, though he added at this point the IMF’s validation was primary focus.

The IMF did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Pakistan has set a tax revenue target of 13 trillion rupees ($47 billion) for the fiscal year that began on July 1, a near-40% jump from the prior year, and a sharp drop in its fiscal deficit to 5.9% of gross domestic product from 7.4% the previous year.

Malik said the point of pushing out a tough and unpopular budget was to use it a stepping stone for an IMF programme, adding the lender was satisfied with the revenue measures taken, based on their talks.

"There are no major issues left to address, now that all major prior actions have been met, the budget being one of them," Malik said.

While the budget may win approval from the IMF, it could fuel public anger, according to analysts.

"Obviously they (budget reforms) are burdensome for the local economy but the IMF program is all about stabilisation," Malik said.

Sakib Sherani, an economist who heads private firm Macro Economic Insights, said a quick deal with the IMF was needed to avoid pressure on Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves and the currency given the country’s maturing debt repayments and the effects of unwinding of capital and import controls that were applied earlier.

"If it takes longer, then the central bank may be forced to temporarily re-instate import and capital controls," he said. "There will be a period of uncertainty, and one casualty is likely to be the rally in equities."

Pakistan’s benchmark share index (.KSE) b rose 1% during trading on Wednesday, reaching a record intraday high of 80,348 points at 0640 GMT.

The index has rallied roughly 10% since the budget was presented on June 12, helped by continued optimism on getting an IMF bailout package to bolster the struggling economy.
Wife of Pakistan’s Imran Khan gets bail in graft case, media say (Reuters)
Reuters [7/2/2024 6:54 AM, Ariba Shahid, 42991K, Negative]
A special court in Pakistan’s city of Rawalpindi granted interim bail on Tuesday to the wife of former Prime Minister Imran Khan in a graft case, media outlet ARY News said.

Khan, in jail since last August, was convicted in some cases ahead of February’s general election, but a U.N. human rights working group said on Monday his arbitrary imprisonment violated international law.

"The special accountability court granted bail," ARY News said in a message on X, referring to the interim bail.

Both Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, deny wrongdoing in the case against them regarding the alleged receipt of financial help from a land developer in setting up an educational institution, Al Qadir University.

However, his spouse will stay in prison as she is also serving a sentence after her marriage to Khan was ruled unlawful.

Khan and his party say the charges were politically motivated to thwart his return to power.

In recent months, Pakistani courts have suspended Khan’s jail sentences for two cases about the illegal acquisition and sale of state gifts, while overturning his conviction on charges of leaking state secrets.

The former cricket superstar is fighting dozens of other cases that continue.
Dozens rally in Pakistan after a Christian man is sentenced to death for blasphemy (AP)
AP [7/2/2024 9:08 AM, Staff, 85570K, Negative]
Dozens of members from Pakistan’s civil society rallied on Tuesday in the southern port city of Karachi against the death sentence handed down to a Christian man on blasphemy charges, nearly a year after one of the worst mob attacks on Christians in the country.

Several Christians also joined the rally which comes a day after a court in Sahiwal in the Punjab province announced the death sentence to Ehsan Shan after finding him guilty of sharing “hateful content” against Muslims on social media.

Shan’s lawyer Khurram Shahzad said on Monday he will appeal the verdict.

He was arrested in August 2023 after groups of Muslim men burned dozens of homes and churches in the city of Jaranwala in Punjab after some residents claimed they saw two Christian men desecrating pages from Islam’s holy book, the Quran. The two men were later arrested.

Though Shan was not party to the desecration, he was accused of reposting the defaced pages of the Quran on his TikTok account.

At Tuesday’s rally in Karachi, a Christian leader Luke Victor, called for Shah’s release.

He also demanded action against those who were involved in burning churches and homes of Christians in Jaranwala.

Blasphemy accusations are common in Pakistan. Under the country’s blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam or Islamic religious figures can be sentenced to death. While authorities have yet to carry out a death sentence for blasphemy, often a mere accusation can cause riots and incite mobs to violence, lynching and killings.
Study: Climate-induced disasters significantly weaken Pakistan’s societal resilience (VOA)
VOA [7/2/2024 1:08 PM, Ayaz Gul, 4032K, Neutral]
A new study has revealed that recent floods in Pakistan have substantially weakened its societal resilience in coping with and recovering from such disasters as the threat from climate change continues to grow.

The London-headquartered independent global charity Lloyd’s Register Foundation said Tuesday the findings are part of the latest edition of their flagship World Risk Poll Resilience Index.

The study also highlighted that the number of Pakistanis who have experienced a disaster in the past five years has more than doubled since 2021, increasing from 11% to 27%.

“This increase has been driven primarily by the extensive floods that hit the country in 2022, affecting regions containing around 15% of the population,” the study said.

The report noted that community and society resilience scores declined sharply in the regions most affected by the floods, particularly in the southern Sindh province.

“These scores declined because people reported losing confidence in the support of the government, community and infrastructure — at a national level, those who said their government cared ‘not at all’ about them and their well-being rose from 60% in 2021 to almost three-quarters [72%] in 2023.”

Meanwhile, the country’s already low individual and household resilience levels failed to improve, with Pakistan ranking in the bottom 10 globally for both resilience scores, according to the report.

Nancy Hey, the director of evidence and insight at Lloyd’s Register Foundation, urged policymakers in Pakistan to prioritize rebuilding and strengthening the resilience of the most affected communities.

She said this would better prepare them to face natural hazards and other potential causes of disasters in the wake of the growing threat of climate change.

“For residents of Pakistan, catastrophic flooding is largely responsible for the doubling in disaster experience since 2021. This may have led to a ‘reality check’ for residents in terms of how prepared they feel for such events, with community and societal resilience particularly negatively affected,” Hey said.

In 2022, Pakistan’s southern and southwestern regions experienced devastating floods triggered by climate change-induced unusually heavy monsoon rains, killing more than 1,700 people, affecting 33 million others, and submerging approximately one-third of Pakistan.

The South Asian nation of about 245 million contributes less than 1% to global carbon emissions but bears the brunt of climate change.

The country’s weather patterns have changed dramatically in recent years, and it officially “ranks fifth among the countries most affected by global warming.”

April was recorded as the wettest month in Pakistan since 1961, with more than double the usual monthly rainfall, killing scores of people and destroying property as well as farmland.

In May and June, Pakistan experienced relatively hotter heat waves, with temperatures in some districts rising to more than 52 degrees Celsius for days. The hot weather prompted authorities in May to temporarily shut down education for half of Pakistan’s schoolchildren to protect them from heatstroke and dehydration.

The United Nations has warned that an estimated 200,000 Pakistanis could be affected by the coming monsoon season and flash floods, as national weather forecasters project above-normal rainfall.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif reviewed preparations for the monsoon season at a special meeting Tuesday and formed “a high-level committee” to handle potential emergencies, his office said in a statement.

National Disaster Management Authority officials told the meeting that all relevant institutions and Pakistani troops remain on “high alert” in vulnerable districts. They were quoted as saying that “adequate stocks” of boats, tents, drainage pumps, medicines and other essential items were available for people in areas prone to rain-related disasters.”
India
Stampede at Religious Gathering in India Kills More Than 100 (New York Times)
New York Times [7/2/2024 4:14 PM, Suhasini Raj, Sameer Yasir, and Hari Kumar, 831K, Negative]
More than 100 people were killed on Tuesday and many others were injured in a stampede during a Hindu religious event in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where thousands of devotees had gathered.

Most of the dead so far have been women and children who appeared to have suffocated in a crush, in the Hathras district, said Ashish Kumar, the district magistrate there.

“As of now, the confirmed death toll is 116 people,” said Chaitra V., a top civil servant in the Aligarh administrative region, which includes Hathras.

Local officials suggested that heat and overcrowding had set off a panic; temperatures in Hathras on Tuesday approached 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with very high humidity. Eyewitnesses, speaking to local news media, said some of the victims had fallen into a drainage ditch on top of one another.

The event, a large Hindu prayer meeting, was organized by a guru locally known as Bhole Baba as well as Sakar Vishwa Hari, who has been leading such gatherings for more than two decades. The crush took place in late afternoon, at the end of the meeting, which was held under a large tent.

“When he finished his preaching and was leaving the stage, his devotees suddenly rushed toward him to touch him,” Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, said in a video posted by his office. “When the volunteers tried to stop the crowd, this incident took place.”

Other officials said the lethal trampling involved people trying to leave the venue.

Mr. Adityanath said that an investigation into the cause of the stampede had been opened.

Close to midnight local time, the muddy ground — on the edge of vast farmland, next to a highway — where the tragedy occurred was largely empty. A unit of disaster responders had finished their search work, and milled around by the highway. Many of the iron poles that had held up the tent for the event still dotted the ground, as did an imposing entrance gate that still bore a poster of Bhole Baba.

Rajesh Singh, a police officer in Hathras, said a permit for the event had allowed for 5,000 people. But initial information from the scene indicated that the crowd was much larger than that, he said in a telephone interview.

More than 150 people have been admitted to different hospitals, he said.

Umesh Kumar Tripathi, a medical officer in the neighboring district of Etah, in western Uttar Pradesh, said that as more victims were taken to hospitals, “the death toll may rise.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was speaking at India’s Parliament when news of the deaths reached him, said that his “administration is engaged in relief and rescue work.”

“I assure everyone through this House that the victims will be helped in every way,” Mr. Modi said.

The guru who led the congregation was a government employee before he became a self-styled spiritual leader and built a large following, according to Indian news media reports. During his sermons he is usually accompanied by his wife on the stage, both seated on large thrones. He is often dressed in white — either western suits with colorful ties or traditional Indian white garb.

Unverified videos on social media showed a large number of dead bodies, mostly those of women, in the courtyard of what looks like a government hospital.

Hathras lies in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, with about 240 million people.

In India, stampedes during religious pilgrimages are relatively common, often because of poor enforcement of public safety measures. In one of the deadliest in recent years, more than 100 people were killed in 2013 in the north-central state of Madhya Pradesh during a Navratri procession, a celebration of the Hindu goddess Durga.

In recent years, the authorities have increased surveillance of large religious gatherings by deploying more police officers and using drones.

“Both the state and federal governments have failed to develop a sensitive approach toward crowd management,” said a member of India’s Parliament, Manoj Kumar Jha. “As a nation we are good at drawing crowds, but not good at managing them.

“Every year, these kinds of incidents keep repeating themselves, and we learn nothing.”
They Came for Spiritual Revival, Only to Be Trapped in a Deadly Panic (New York Times)
New York Times [7/3/2024 2:07 AM, Suhasini Raj, 831K, Negative]
One moment, a crowd of tens of thousands, almost all women, were singing and swaying in devotion to a revered holy man in front of them onstage, all packed under a sprawling tent in northern India.

But as the guru left, people began pushing and shoving to get out from the close quarters and still, stifling heat under the pavilion. Some began falling, onto the muddy field underneath or into an adjacent ditch. There was panic and screaming. Bodies piled on top of each other everywhere.

By nightfall on Tuesday, the toll of the tragedy in Hathras district, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, was devastating: at least 121 people, mostly from poor communities, were dead. Dozens were injured.

For the families, the search for the remains of their loved ones brought them to several hospitals and stretched on past midnight.

At the Bagla Combined District Hospital, where 34 victims were taken, the dead bodies lay on melting slabs of ice that lined the corridor. Faces bore the marks of the ghastly stampede from the afternoon — a blob of mud hanging from hair, dried trickles of blood on skin. The corridor’s green carpet was drenched with slush and mud from the shoes and slippers of distraught relatives.

Outside, on the veranda, dozens more slabs of ice were stacked. Ambulances brought in a steady stream of the deceased. A policeman went from body to body, accompanied by relatives, as he jotted details in a red diary.

A husband, crouched on the wet floor next to his wife’s body, banged his head against the corridor wall. A grandfather clutched at the tiny fingers of his only grandchild. A son stooped over in examination, trying to find his mother’s body.

The hospital’s eerie silence was frequently broken by piercing cries of grief as a victim was recognized.

The holy man — Narayan Sakar Hari, or Bhole Baba, as he is more widely known — was a government employee before he fashioned himself as a Hindu guru and began drawing huge crowds. Villagers said he had become an icon for women of the Dalit community, at the bottom of India’s rigid caste system, who have historically been marginalized as “untouchables” and denied access to temples.

The crowd had arrived for Tuesday’s meeting in buses, trains and taxis before they streamed to a tent erected on farmland near the highway. They had come from all over the state, some walking from neighboring districts. Some had come alone, others with neighbors, friends, children or grandchildren. It was a congregation they absolutely did not want to miss.

Hans Kumari, 40, had arrived in a taxi along with 10 other women. She had began following Bhole Baba in the hope of receiving a cure for her chronic health issues: pain in her knees and trouble sleeping. Some women in the village had told her the holy man could help, so she started going to his meetings regularly.

“Yesterday we got here early to get a good spot to sit,” she said.

Ms. Kumari said a commotion had started after Bhole Baba finished his sermon, left the stage and was driven away in a vehicle.

“People started running like crazy. It was mostly women,” she said. “I slipped in a ditch and waded over what looked like a bed of dead bodies. I could see two dead women and a child below my feet. Body upon body.”

Ms. Kumari said she made it out, with bruises on her skull and all over her body, by keeping “my head down and hands outstretched to keep cutting through.”

Others weren’t so lucky.

“The bus carrying the devotees was back in the village. My mother was not on it,” said Bunty Kumar, 29, disheveled and teary-eyed after she arrived at the government hospital. “We finally found a picture of her laid on an ice slab on the internet. That’s when we realized she was dead.”

Saudan Singh, 62, a farmer, sat quietly next to the body of his only grandchild, Rehanshu, 2, who was laid out on a slab of ice, his short hair shooting out in all directions. A portion of his yellow T-shirt peeked out from below a white sheet. His father was too distraught to be able to come to identify his body.

Mr. Singh said Rehanshu had come on a bus with his mother, who was a devotee and frequently attended the spiritual revivals. He lost both of them.

“He came with his mother on a bus,” Mr. Singh said. “She had attended many of his sermons earlier. I had also attended some. He teaches us about brotherhood, humanity, peace and love.”

His grief was palpable as he described his love for the mischievous child. “My grandson called me ‘baba,’” he said. “He demanded sweets, bananas and biscuits of me.”
More than 100 killed in Indian religious event stampede, officials say (Washington Post)
Washington Post [7/2/2024 2:22 PM, Anant Gupta, Karishma Mehrotra, and Bryan Pietsch, 54755K, Negative]
More than 100 people, most of them women and children, died Tuesday in a stampede at a crowded religious event in northern India, according to local officials, in the country’s deadliest such incident in over a decade.

The circumstances that led to the stampede were unclear, but according to statements by witnesses and local officials to local television news channels, it appeared to be a combination of sweltering heat and religious fervor.

Ashish Kumar, district magistrate of Hathras district in Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India, told local television reporters that the “incident took place when people were leaving the congregation due to excess stuffiness toward the end of the event.”

The district’s inspector general, Shalabh Mathur, told television reporters that 116 people died in the stampede.

The temperature in the area hit 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and humidity levels reached 77 percent, pushing the heat index past 110.

The religious congregation was led by a local Hindu preacher in a tented, open-air venue with women packed together singing and waving their hands above their heads, according to videos of the scene and descriptions of the event by eyewitnesses to local media outlets.

Eyewitnesses told television reporters that the stampede broke out when the preacher was leaving the venue. Devotees rushed toward the exit to get a closer view of him while many were prostrated on the ground to seek his blessings, they said.

Chaitra V, a senior local official who oversees the districts where the stampede took place, told the Aaj Tak news channel that while there was adequate space at the event and the proper permits had been obtained, people got “stuck in the sludge” while they fled the venue toward “a source of water to save themselves from the heat.”

The injured and dead were taken to hospitals in Hathras and neighboring Etah district.

Speaking from the hospital in Etah district, Bablu Kumar said both of his aunts were caught in the stampede. The 38-year-old and his brother rushed from their village two hours away but got trapped in a traffic jam leading into the area.

When they reached the scene, they immediately found the body of one aunt but were still frantically searching for the second among the rows of bodies.

“There are lines of bodies, numbered. There is no one to explain what happened,” he told The Washington Post in a telephone interview. “Why did they allow so many people to gather if they didn’t have the appropriate facilities? It’s a bad situation here. The government should never let this happen again.”

The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, expressed condolences for the victims in a post on X. “Instructions have been given to the concerned officials to conduct relief and rescue operations … and to provide proper treatment to the injured,” he wrote.

He also announced a compensation of $2,400 for the families of the deceased and $600 for each person injured.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi interrupted a speech to Parliament to address the incident, saying: “I want to assure everyone that the victims will be helped in every possible way.”

But Dinesh, who goes by one name, said the government can’t do anything about the loss of his mother, as he prepared to take her body back from the site. Two of his other relatives who sustained minor injuries at the event were traveling back with him.

His mother, Meera Devi, began traveling to see the preacher over the last year, but Dinesh said he had been concerned this event in particular would be too crowded, given the sizable local advertising.

“I told her not to go in the morning, but she didn’t listen,” he said. “I don’t even know if 50 people ran over her or 100.”

The event was hosted by a local preacher named Narayan Sakar Hari, whose name translates to god incarnate. In videos from past congregations, he is seen on a thronelike seat wearing a suit and tie, explaining his ostensibly miraculous powers.

“I go to temples, churches and mosques. I go wherever people seek me,” he said in one video. In another, he rolls his eyes backward, throws his microphone offstage and lifts up one palm toward his devotees.

The stampede is among India’s deadliest in recent years; fatal crushes often occur at religious events and political rallies here. A stampede at an event at a temple in India in 2013 killed at least 110 people.

This summer in India has seen record-breaking heat, killing almost 100 people so far, including election officials, according to Reuters. Northern India has been hit particularly hard, with peak summer temperatures here soaring past 120 degrees.
Stampede at religious event in India kills at least 116 people, mostly women and children (AP)
AP [7/2/2024 10:57 PM, Biswajeet Banerjee and Krutika Pathi, 12885K, Negative]
Thousands of people at a religious gathering in India rushed to leave a makeshift tent, setting off a stampede Tuesday that killed at least 116 people and injured scores, officials said.

It was not immediately clear what triggered the panic following an event with a Hindu guru known locally as Bhole Baba. Local news reports cited authorities who said heat and suffocation in the tent could have been a factor. Video of the aftermath showed the structure appeared to have collapsed.

At least 116 people died, most of them women and children, said Prashant Kumar, the director-general of police in northern India’s state of Uttar Pradesh, where the stampede occurred.

More than 80 others were injured and admitted to hospitals, senior police officer Shalabh Mathur said.

“People started falling one upon another, one upon another. Those who were crushed died. People there pulled them out,” witness Shakuntala Devi told the Press Trust of India news agency.

Relatives wailed in distress as bodies of the dead, placed on stretchers and covered in white sheets, lined the grounds of a local hospital. A bus that arrived there carried more victims, whose bodies were lying on the seats inside.

Deadly stampedes are relatively common around Indian religious festivals, where large crowds gather in small areas with shoddy infrastructure and few safety measures.

Police officer Rajesh Singh said there was likely overcrowding at the event in a village in Hathras district about 350 kilometers (220 miles) southwest of the state capital, Lucknow.

Initial reports said organizers had permission to host about 5,000 people, but more than 15,000 came for the event by the Hindu preacher, who used to be a police officer in the state before he left his job to give religious sermons. He has led other such gatherings over the last two decades.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi offered condolences to the families of the dead and said the federal government was working with state authorities to ensure the injured received help.

Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, called the stampede “heart-wrenching” in a post on X. He said authorities were investigating.

“Look what happened and how many people have lost their lives. Will anyone be accountable?” Rajesh Kumar Jha, a member of parliament, told reporters. He said the stampede was a failure by the state and federal governments to manage large crowds, adding that “people will keep on dying” if authorities do not take safety protocols seriously enough.

In 2013, pilgrims visiting a temple for a popular Hindu festival in central Madhya Pradesh state trampled each other amid fears that a bridge would collapse. At least 115 were crushed to death or died in the river.

In 2011, more than 100 Hindu devotees died in a crush at a religious festival in the southern state of Kerala.
Floods and landslides triggered by heavy rains in India’s northeast kill at least 16 (AP)
AP [7/2/2024 5:40 AM, Wasbir Hussain, 47701K, Neutral]
Floods and landslides triggered by heavy rains have killed at least 16 people over the last two weeks in India’s northeast, where more than 300,000 have been displaced from their submerged homes, authorities said on Tuesday.

The Indian army and air force have been assisting with rescue efforts in Assam, one of the worst-hit states, where a military helicopter flew early Tuesday morning 13 fishermen to safety after being stranded for four days on a small island on the Brahmaputra, one of Asia’s largest rivers, officials said.

The Brahmaputra River, which flows 1,280 kilometers (800 miles) across Assam state before running through Bangladesh, overflows annually. However, this year, increased rainfall has made the river — already known for its powerful, unpredictable flow — even more dangerous to live near or on one of the more than 2,000 island villages in the middle of it.

In neighboring Arunachal Pradesh state, which borders China, landslides have wiped out several roads. Army troopers there rescued 70 students and teachers from a flooded school in Changlang district, police said. Similarly, heavy flooding in the states of Sikkim, Manipur and Meghalaya swept away roads and collapsed bridges.

So far, more than 80 people across six northeastern states have died since the end of May due to floods and mudslides brought on by the rains, according to official figures.

Back in Assam, animals at the famed Kaziranga National Park, home to some 2,500 one-horned Rhinos, are moving to higher ground to escape the floods. Park rangers are monitoring their movements to ensure their safety, the state’s chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said.

Disasters caused by landslides and floods are common in the country’s northeast region during the June-September monsoon season. India, and Assam state in particular, is seen as one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to climate change because of more intense rain and floods, according to a 2021 report by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a New Delhi-based climate think tank.
Kremlin says Modi visit could deepen Russian trade ties to India (Reuters)
Reuters [7/2/2024 6:36 AM, Anastasia Teterevleva and Guy Gaulconbridge, 42991K, Positive]
The Kremlin said on Tuesday that the final details of a visit by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Russia were being worked out, and that deepening trade and economic cooperation would be one of the key themes of the visit.

The Kremlin has yet to announce the dates of the visit by Modi, though a Russian state news agency reported last month that the visit would take place in July.

"I can only confirm once again that the visit is in the final stage of preparation," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. "A very important visit."

Peskov said that regional security and global security issues were always high on the agenda of such meetings.

"In addition, our trade and economic cooperation is also one of the main issues that is being discussed, the most diverse areas of cooperation that we intend to develop, for which there is mutual political will," Peskov said.

"This is the main thing."

Peskov said that Modi and Putin had a "very trusting" relationship.
Women in India Face a Jobs Crisis. Are Factories the Solution? (New York Times)
New York Times [7/3/2024 4:14 PM, Peter S. Goodman, 831K, Neutral]
Before her husband died, leaving her to raise their 2-year-old daughter alone, Sarika Pawar had never imagined working a regular job. Like her own mother and most of the women she knew in rural India, she spent her days confined to her village. Her hours were consumed with looking after her toddler, boiling water to drink and fashioning an evening meal.

But with her husband gone, eliminating his wages as a server, she was forced to earn money. She took a job at a nearby factory run by a company called All Time Plastics in Silvassa, a city about 100 miles north of Mumbai. A dozen years later, she is still there, plucking newly molded food storage containers and other household implements off a conveyor belt, labeling them and placing them in cartons bound for kitchens as far away as Los Angeles and London.

Ms. Pawar earns about 12,000 rupees per month, or roughly $150, a meager sum by global standards. Yet those wages have allowed her to keep her daughter in high school while transforming their everyday lives.

She purchased a refrigerator. Suddenly, she could buy vegetables in larger quantities, limiting her trips to the market and giving her more power to bargain for better prices. She added a stove powered by propane — liberation from the wood fire that filled her home with smoke, and an escape from the tedious work of scouring the ground for branches to set alight.

Above all, Ms. Pawar, 36, described horizons that had expanded.

“When you come out of your house, you see the outside world,” she said. “You see the possibilities, and I feel that we can make progress.”

As international brands limit their dependence on China by shifting some manufacturing to India, the trend holds the potential to generate significant numbers of manufacturing jobs — especially for women, who have largely been excluded from the ranks of formal Indian employment.

“There is a huge reserve army of female labor in India who would work if they were given an opportunity,” said Sonalde Desai, a demographer at the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi. “Whenever jobs open up for women, they take them.”

In many Asian economies over the last half-century, the rise of manufacturing has been a powerful force of upward mobility. Incomes rose, poverty lessened and working opportunities opened. Women were at the center of this transformation.

In Vietnam, where a factory boom has been especially momentous, more than 68 percent of women and girls over 15 are working for some form of pay, according to data compiled by the World Bank. In China, the rate is 63 percent; in Thailand, 59 percent; and in Indonesia, 53 percent. Yet in India, less than 33 percent of women are engaged in paid work in jobs counted in official surveys.

The vital labor of women in India is evident from their homes, where they handle nearly all the chores and child care, to the agricultural fields, where they tend to crops and raise animals.

“You’re raising chickens and raising children, and it all goes hand in hand,” Ms. Desai said. “People find work, but it’s not hugely remunerative work.”

Where Indian women are largely missing is in the ranks of businesses that offer regular wage-paying jobs, covered by government rules that offer protection over pay and working conditions. Their absence partly reflects social factors, from gender discrimination to fears of sexual harassment.

One of India’s most high-profile foreign investments, a factory that is operated by Foxconn and makes iPhones, has avoided hiring married women because of their responsibilities at home, according to a Reuters investigation published last week. Indian agencies said they would look into the reports.

Yet more than anything, the dearth of women in the Indian workplace is a testament to a scarcity of opportunity. For decades, economic growth in India has failed to translate into jobs. What positions exist tend to be monopolized by men. With key exceptions such as the technology sector, jobs open to women frequently pay so little that they are not worth the strain of challenging the social norms that frequently confine women at home.

If jobs were available, more women would confront social strictures in pursuit of economic advancement, economists say. This is especially so as India has, in recent decades, significantly increased investments in education for girls.

“The supply of young women who want to work is very high,” said Rohini Pande, an Indian labor expert and the director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. “In all the surveys we see, women want to work but find it very difficult to migrate to where the jobs are, and the jobs aren’t coming to them.”

The consequences of this reality are stark: the perpetuation of poverty amid a lost opportunity for betterment.

In a pattern repeated in many industrializing societies, when more women gain jobs it prompts families to invest further in education for girls. It also lifts household spending power, fueling economic expansion that prompts investors to build more factories, creating additional jobs — a feedback loop of wealth creation.

This is the dynamic that India missed as it failed to participate in the spread of manufacturing that bolstered fortunes in many Asian economies.

And this is the prospect that is suddenly imaginable as geopolitical forces like trade animosities between the United States and China generate fresh momentum for factory work landing in India.

In the industrial enclave of Manesar, about 35 miles south of Delhi, Poorvi, who goes by one name, spends her days inside a factory that makes toys — kits that children assemble into items like pinball machines — at a fast-growing start-up, Smartivity. She inspects the final products for defects, earning about 12,000 rupees per month.

When she was growing up, her mother stayed home. Recently married, Poorvi views her factory job as a pragmatic way to deal with rising living costs in a fast-growing urban area.

“Now, one income is not enough to run the family,” Poorvi said. “So women are coming out and working. It’s progress, but also a necessity. Women are doing lots of things. Why not me?”

Her bosses, two male graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology, which is something like the country’s version of M.I.T., have a predisposition toward hiring women.

“Some parts of the job women are better at,” said Pulkit Singh, the company’s chief of staff. “Women can concentrate for longer hours than men. They don’t need as many smoke breaks, or breaks in general. Women are definitely more hardworking and productive than men.”

Some 40 percent of the nearly 200 jobs on the factory floor at Smartivity are now held by women, and that percentage may increase as the business grows.

Ashwini Kumar, the chief executive of Smartivity, said the company was in talks with Walmart to sell its products on store shelves in the United States — a development that could more than double the number of jobs.

“They want to diversify,” Mr. Kumar, 35, said. “They want to shift their supply chain to India.”

At All Time Plastics, the company near Mumbai where Ms. Pawar is employed, 70 percent of the roughly 600 factory workers are women. The percentage rose sharply last year, after the local government changed the law to allow women to work on the night shift. The factory runs buses that pick up and drop off women at their homes to alleviate safety concerns.

Among the women working inside the factory on a recent morning was Smita Vijay Patel, 35. A mother of two, she stopped going to school after eighth grade because her parents lacked the money for tuition and books. Her own daughter, 15, remains in school and plans to continue to college, a prospect made possible by Ms. Patel’s factory wages. Her son, 19, is already at university.

Ms. Patel is now effectively working two jobs: She is a quality control inspector at the plant, and she cooks for her family and looks after the house, waking up at 5 in the morning to get to her 7 a.m. shift.

“It’s hard, but good,” she said. “I didn’t get education, so I’m thinking that my children should get education so they will make more progress.”
NSB
Adapt or die: Bangladesh joins the race to climate-proof cities (Reuters)
Reuters [7/2/2024 10:30 PM, Md. Tahmid Zami, 85570K, Negative]
Lashed by torrential rains and scorched by brutal heatwaves, Dhaka’s workers - from rickshaw drivers to those working in clothes factories - are exposed more than most to the reality of the climate emergency.

Bangladesh’s capital, one of the world’s most congested and polluted mega-cities, is home to around 10 million people, including thousands who have fled floods and droughts in other parts of a country that is on the frontline of climate change.

Managing these huge numbers while also climate-proofing the riverside city is a huge challenge but it is an urgent one that city authorities are hoping to address with their first climate action plan, which was launched in May.

"Transforming Dhaka was critical towards making Bangladesh green and climate-resilient," said Environment Minister Saber Hossain Chowdhury at the launch.

The plan will serve as a roadmap to enable the city to become carbon-neutral by 2050 and includes strategies to help it cope with ever more frequent floods and heatwaves.

It includes proposals to switch to renewable energy sources, introduce electric vehicles, increase green spaces, restore natural drainage systems, establish early flood warning systems and ensure a secure water supply by 2030.

Dhaka is just the latest city in the region to seek to face the climate challenge head-on.

Asia was the world’s most disaster-hit region from climate hazards in 2023, including floods, storms and heatwaves, and the region is also warming faster than other areas, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

With around 704 million people living in urban areas in South Asia, the race is on to equip cities for a hotter, more dangerous future.

First of all, cities must set baselines for greenhouse gas emissions and risks so that they can measure progress over time, said Shruti Narayan, managing director at the C40 Cities network, a global network of cities working on climate action.

"Data-driven targets and monitoring is critical to turning the plans into reality," Narayan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The C40 platform helps cities align their climate plans with the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

More than 60 cities have announced such plans under the platform so far, including some of Asia’s biggest urban areas.

The Indian cities of Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru have already adopted climate plans and Karachi in Pakistan is drawing up its own blueprint.

The stakes are high: the Asian Development Bank says that unless planet-heating emissions are cut, the collective economy of six countries - Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka - could shrink by up to 1.8% every year by 2050 and 8.8% by 2100, on average.

Already, the livelihoods of more than 200 million people in these countries are threatened by the rapid loss of snow cover in the Himalayas and rising sea levels, according to the ADB.

FINANCING GREEN AMBITIONS

Cities consume two-thirds of the world’s energy and house 50% of the global population. More than 10,000 cities have committed to cutting emissions and adapting to climate hazards.

As part of its climate plan, Dhaka’s twin municipalities - north and south - established emissions inventories for 2021-22 by identifying most polluting sectors and then set a target of cutting 70% of emissions by 2050.

One challenge is financing the required changes; cities in the Global South have long complained about richer countries not paying their fair share to cover the costs of climate change.

This year’s COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan is expected to focus on setting a goal for the levels of climate finance that will be needed from 2025 onwards to help poorer nations curb emissions, adapt to worsening extreme weather and higher seas, and respond to unavoidable climate "loss and damage".

In the meantime, some cities in the Global South have invested in innovative digital tools, like digital twins, to build climate resilience, while others scramble for resources.

Mumbai - the richest municipality in India with an annual budget of nearly 600 billion Indian rupees ($7.2 billion) in 2024-25 - was able to allocate around 100 billion Indian rupees ($1.2 billion) for various climate actions like expanding tree cover, reviving urban parks, and managing floods.

Mumbai’s climate allocation dwarfs the entire budget of northern Dhaka - 53 billion taka ($450.3 million) in 2023-24 - which means the resource-strapped city must prioritise cheaper actions, said Md Sirajul Islam, chief town planner of Dhaka South City Corporation.

Jaya Dhindaw, head of the South Asian chapter of the World Resources Institute (WRI) that developed the climate plans for several Indian cities, said realistic, achievable actions help set the pace for progress.

For example, in early June, Bengaluru’s deputy chief minister announced extended opening hours for urban parks to provide shade for the city’s people.

"With low-hanging actions like these, you can drive cities’ confidence that climate actions are doable projects," Dhindaw said.

However, Dhaka will need funding to raise the share of renewable power to 85%, treat a massive amount of organic waste to stem methane emissions, and ensure that 95% of vehicles are electric.

The city might need to call on global donors, said Jubaer Rashid, the Bangladesh country representative of ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability, a global network of local and national governments.

"We will work closely with city officials to help them develop proposals for fundraising," said Rashid, who worked with Dhaka’s municipalities on their climate plans.

CITIES REIMAGINED

Urban planners and environmental activists said that another priority must be pushing back against the poor planning that has exacerbated problems caused by the changing climate.

For example, in the northern part of Dhaka, green cover has shrunk by 66% in last three decades alone with canals and fields destroyed to make space for densely populated residential zones.

The city’s rapid, unplanned growth has choked rivers like the Buriganga and blocked drains causing worse flooding, said urban planner Mehedi Ahsan, who represents the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Bangladesh.

The climate action plan aims to restore the canals and expand green spaces to cover 25% of the city by 2050.

But with up to 2,000 people arriving in northern Dhaka every day, including many fleeing floods and droughts in other parts of the country, time is not on the authorities’ side.

"The place we got ourselves into is not created by the climate crisis alone but the city climate plan provides us a hitch to shift away from a predatory pattern of building cities to protecting our ecology as we imagine a different future," said Ahsan.
Sri Lanka to save $5bn from bilateral debt deal (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [7/2/2024 7:10 AM, Staff, 4032K, Neutral]
Sri Lanka will save $5 billion following the restructuring of its bilateral debt, much of which is owed to China, through slashed interest rates and longer repayment schedules, the president said Tuesday.

The island nation defaulted on its foreign borrowings in 2022 during an unprecedented economic crisis that precipitated months of food, fuel and medicine shortages.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe said a deal struck last week had secured a moratorium on debt payments until 2028, extending the tenure of loans by eight years and cutting interest rates to an average of 2.1 percent.

Wickremesinghe said bilateral lenders led by China, the government’s largest single creditor, did not agree to a reduction on their loans but the terms agreed would nonetheless help Sri Lanka.

"With the restructure measures we have agreed, we will make a saving of $5.0 billion," Wickremesinghe told parliament in his first address to the legislature since the debt deal.

Some of Sri Lanka’s loans from China are at high interest rates, going up to nearly 8.0 percent compared to borrowings from Japan, the second largest lender, at less than 1.0 percent.

Sri Lanka struck separate deals with China and the rest of the bilateral creditors, including Japan, France and India.

Bilateral creditors account for 28.5 percent of Sri Lanka’s outstanding foreign debt of $37 billion, according to treasury data from March. That excludes government-guaranteed external loans.

China accounts for $4.66 billion of the $10.58 billion that Sri Lanka has borrowed from other countries.

Wickremesinghe said he expected to complete shortly the restructure of a further $14.7 billion in external commercial loans, including $2.18 billion from the China Development Bank.

Japanese foreign minister Yoko Kamikawa hailed the agreement after a meeting with her visiting Sri Lankan counterpart Ali Sabry in Tokyo, according to a news release from the Japanese foreign ministry.

She said Japan would be prepared to resume lending to existing yen-loan projects once Japan confirms the Sri Lankan government’s intention to work expeditiously towards the conclusion of a bilateral deal on top of the latest debt agreement.

Sri Lanka’s 2022 crisis sparked months of public protests that eventually forced the resignation of then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa after an angry mob stormed his compound.

Wickremesinghe said the nation was bankrupt when he took over and he hoped the $2.9 billion International Monetary Fund bailout he secured last year would be the island’s last.

Colombo had gone to the IMF, the international lender of last resort, on 16 previous occasions and the debt restructuring is a condition of the IMF bailout.
Central Asia
How China and Russia Compete, and Cooperate, in Central Asia (New York Times)
New York Times [7/3/2024 1:47 AM, Keith Bradsher and Anatoly Kurmanaev, 831K, Neutral]
With Russia mired in a long war in Ukraine and increasingly dependent on China for supplies, Beijing is moving quickly to expand its sway in Central Asia, a region that was once in the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.

Russia, for its part, is pushing back hard.

As the leaders of Central Asian countries meet with the presidents of China and Russia this week in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, China’s rising presence is visible in the region. New rail lines and other infrastructure are being built, while trade and investment are rising.

Flag-waving Kazakh children who sang in Chinese greeted Xi Jinping, China’s leader, upon his arrival in Astana on Tuesday. He praised ties with Kazakhstan as a friendship that has “endured for generations.”

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is expected to arrive Wednesday for the start of the meeting in Astana, an annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional grouping dominated by Beijing. The forum was for years focused largely on security issues. But as the group has expanded its membership, China and Russia have used it as a platform to showcase their ambitions of reshaping a global order dominated by the United States.

The group, which was established by China and Russia in 2001 with the Central Asian countries Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, has expanded in recent years to include Pakistan, India and Iran.

Even as China has expanded its economic influence across Central Asia, it still faces challenges to its diplomacy, as Russia seeks to tilt the balance of members in the Shanghai forum in its favor.

The leader of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, is expected to attend the summit this year. He is Mr. Putin’s closest foreign ally, who relies heavily on Russia’s economic and political support to stay in power. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia has said that Belarus would be named a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization at this year’s summit. That would be a minor diplomatic victory for the Kremlin.

A bigger setback for Beijing is that Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is skipping the summit this year. Mr. Modi plans to visit Moscow next week to hold his own discussions with Mr. Putin and is instead sending his minister of external affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, to the summit in Astana.

Coming after Mr. Putin’s recent trip to two of China’s other neighbors, North Korea and Vietnam, that upcoming trip by Mr. Modi to Moscow indicates that Mr. Putin is still able to weave his own diplomatic relationships separate from Beijing, said Theresa Fallon, the director of the Center for Russia, Europe, Asia Studies in Brussels.

“He’s saying, ‘I’ve got other options,’” Ms. Fallon said.

India had joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization at Russia’s behest in 2017, when Pakistan also joined at the encouragement of China. But India’s relations with China have become chilly since then, after border skirmishes between their troops in 2020 and 2022.

While Mr. Modi had favored closer relations when he took office a decade ago, the two countries no longer even allow nonstop commercial flights between them.

India is becoming more concerned about the region’s geopolitical balance of power as China’s clout rises and Russia’s wanes, said Harsh V. Pant, a professor of international relations at King’s College London. China and Russia have also forged increasingly friendly relations with the Taliban government of Afghanistan, which has run the country since the departure of American forces in 2021 and has long sided with Pakistan against India.

“So far as Russia was the dominant player, India was fine with it,” Mr. Pant said. “But as China becomes more important economically and more potent in Central Asia, and Russia becomes the junior partner, India’s concerns would be rising.”

In broader terms, however, Russia’s participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is largely a rear-guard action to counterbalance the region’s seemingly inexorable shift toward China. Mr. Putin relies heavily on China to keep his economy and military production afloat amid Western sanctions, and over the years his government has come to accept Beijing’s growing ties to Central Asia’s former Soviet Republics. The massive gap between Russia’s and Beijing’s economic muscle makes direct competition in Central Asia futile for the Kremlin.

Instead, the Kremlin has sought to maintain a measure of leverage in its former satellites on issues that remain vital to its national interests, including by attending largely symbolic events like the Astana summit. On Wednesday, Mr. Putin will hold six separate meetings with Asian heads of state in Astana, according to Russian state media.

Russia wants to maintain access to Central Asian markets to circumvent Western sanctions. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has obtained billions of dollars’ worth of Western goods by using Central Asian intermediaries. These include consumer goods like luxury cars, as well as electronic components that have been used in military production.

Russia also relies heavily on millions of Central Asian migrants to prop up its economy, as well as to rebuild the occupied parts of Ukraine.

Finally, Russia wants to cooperate with the governments of the largely Muslim nations of Central Asia on security, and the threat of terrorism in particular. These threats were laid bare earlier this year, when a group of Tajik citizens killed 145 people at a Moscow concert hall in the deadliest terror attack in Russia in more than a decade. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.

Russia and China do not just compete in Central Asia. They often cooperate, because they perceive a shared interest in having stable regimes in the region that have little or no coordination with Western militaries, said Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, a research group.

“They see regional stability anchored in authoritarian regimes that are secular, non-Muslim and, to a degree, repressive at home,” he said.

William Fierman, a professor emeritus of Central Asian studies at Indiana University, said that Beijing also faces deep-seated public concern in Central Asia that China may use its huge population and migration to overwhelm the sparsely populated region. Soviet authorities fanned those suspicions for decades, and even a younger generation that did not grow up under Soviet rule now appears to share these concerns, he said.

In Astana, the elephant in the room is likely to be the war in Ukraine. Few experts expect much public discussion of the war at a forum dominated by Beijing, given its indirect support for the Russian war effort.

Mr. Xi will also use his visit to push his vision of building better transportation links across the region, said Wu Xinbo, the dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. After the summit, Mr. Xi is scheduled to make a state visit to Tajikistan, where the U.S. State Department recently estimated that over 99 percent of foreign investment comes from China.

Many of China’s investments in Central Asia are in infrastructure. China concluded an agreement with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan last month to build a new rail line across both countries. The rail line will give China a shortcut for overland trade with Iran, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, and beyond them to the Mideast and Europe. China has tried for the past 12 years to expand rail traffic across Russia to carry its exports to Europe, but now wants to add a southerly route.

“From a long-term, strategic perspective, this railway is very important,” said Niva Yau, a nonresident fellow specializing in China’s relations with Central Asia at the Atlantic Council, a Washington research group.
Beijing and Moscow Go From ‘No Limits’ Friendship to Frenemies in Russia’s Backyard (Wall Street Journal)
Wall Street Journal [7/2/2024 9:00 PM, Sha Hua, 810K, Neutral]
When Vladimir Putin visited this arid capital as part of a recent jet-setting charm offensive in Asia, local officials decorated the boulevards with posters of the Russian leader’s face—an expected tribute in a former Soviet republic where Moscow still casts a large shadow.

But beneath the posters was evidence of a shift with gloomy implications for Moscow’s international heft: More and more cars with Chinese brand names such as BYD and Geely are zooming around the streets of Uzbekistan as the number of Russian Ladas dwindles.

Relations between China and Russia are at a historic high as the authoritarian powers band together to confront what they see as a Western campaign to hem them both in. But in Central Asia, which Moscow regards as its backyard, the friendship that Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared as having “no limits” is colliding with Beijing’s global ambitions.

That tension hovers in the background with Xi and Putin both in Kazakhstan this week for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional political and security bloc. Xi is scheduled to continue on to Tajikistan as part of his eighth visit to Central Asia since becoming China’s president in 2013.

China has seized on the Ukraine invasion to chip away at traditional Russian spheres of influence. In Central Asia, as in the Arctic, Moscow’s reliance on Beijing to sustain its war machine forces it to acquiesce to the encroachments.

Across the strategically situated region, Beijing is drawing local economies into its orbit. Chinese investments are diverting the region’s young workers away from Russia. A Chinese-funded railroad promises to connect it with Europe, bypassing Russian territory. Chinese renewable energy projects are helping reduce its reliance on Russian gas.

Sanjarbek Qulmatov, a 29-year old worker at a Chinese factory in central Uzbekistan, said Chinese money had dramatically changed the job prospects for him and his countrymen.

Roughly 1.3 million Uzbeks were working in Russia in 2023, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration, down from 1.45 million in the year before. The reasons for the drop are complex, but Qulmatov attributes part of it to the rise of Chinese-funded alternatives.

“Anyone who is unemployed can find a job here instead of having to go to Russia,” he said.

For Tsarist Russia, Central Asia was akin to what the West was to American pioneers: a supposedly wild territory to expand into, modernize and extract resources from. The exploitation and modernization continued under the Soviets, who jealously guarded the borders of their empire against Chinese encroachment.

The power shift in the region has been in the making for years but accelerated after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was seen by many in the region as a blithe and ominous violation of the territorial integrity of a fellow former Soviet republic. Instead of supporting Moscow, all five Central Asian states opted to stay neutral on the invasion.

“China provides an image of the future for Central Asia. Russia is a shortsighted political regime that doesn’t invest in Central Asia’s own strategic goals,” said Temur Umarov, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

For China and Russia, two land-based powers, Central Asia is an increasingly important thoroughfare. It gives Putin more direct access to markets in South Asia. And it is central to Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, the vast infrastructure project that aims to connect China through various land and sea routes with the rest of the Eurasian continent.

The U.S., too, has recently increased efforts to regain its influence in Central Asia, dispatching a string of senior-level officials to the region, though its focus has been mostly limited to fighting any resurgent terrorism from Afghanistan.

For years, Russia and China have had a tacit division of labor in the region: Russia is the main security provider while China focuses on development and investment.

Now, Beijing is tipping that balance by leaning harder into its role—using its enormous economic clout to increase its political sway. Trade between China and Central Asia rose to $98 billion last year, more than tripling since 2016.

In Uzbekistan, the most populous and industrialized of the five post-Soviet Central Asian nations, China knocked Russia from the top trade partner spot in 2023, according to official statistics. The country has been trying to integrate with the global economy after two decades of isolationism.

The Peng Sheng Industrial Park, where Qulmatov works, was launched with Chinese funding near the central Uzbek city of Sirdaryo in 2009. With a recent influx of investment, it is now home to more than a dozen Chinese companies.

Qulmatov said he likes to take his son to a park, also built with Chinese money, next to the industrial zone and hopes to send the child to a new kindergarten there that teaches in Chinese and English.

“I’d like to see even more Chinese companies here,” he said.

One newly arrived Chinese company, electric-vehicle company BYD, started production on Thursday at a new factory in Jizzax, the province where Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev was born, with the aim to make 50,000 vehicles per year. Batteries and other key components will be shipped from China, while local workers handle anything from welding and painting to car assembly.

In 2023, nearly 80% of the more than 73,000 vehicles Uzbekistan imported came from China, according to official statistics. Russia exported around 4,500 cars to Uzbekistan in 2021, but demand has fallen so low that the country’s cars are now pooled under the “other countries” category.

A new 12-mile Chinese-built tunnel opened a path for the first ever direct rail connection between the Fergana Valley, in far eastern Uzbekistan, and the rest of the country. A Chinese-built highway linking northern and southern Tajikistan has cut travel time by eight hours.

In the past, most of the rail lines and highways the Soviets had built in Central Asia led to Moscow. A lack of connections internally and with the rest of the world made Central Asia one of the world’s most isolated places.

Bigger changes could be coming. In early June, the presidents of China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan signed a key agreement for the construction of a railroad line meant to connect their countries that had been in discussion since 1997. The project would shorten travel between East Asia to the Middle East and southern Europe by hundreds of miles by circumventing Russia.

For years, Russian has used its influence on Kyrgyzstan, a member of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, to slow down the progress of the route’s development, according to Mirshohid Aslanov, founder of the Tashkent-based think tank Center for Progressive Reforms, who previously worked as an Uzbek diplomat. But sanctions related to the Ukraine war have changed the dynamics around running trade through Russia.

China is also challenging Russia in energy, a sector Moscow has traditionally dominated. Uzbekistan signed a deal to buy Russian gas in 2023 after a string of blackouts, but limited the contract to two years so far in what analysts say is a hedge against Russia using gas as political leverage.

Meanwhile, trucks and trains carrying solar modules and wind turbines from Chinese renewable champions LONGi and Goldwind can be seen crisscrossing the country—part of Tashkent’s push to get at least 40% of electricity production from renewable energy sources by 2030.

“We are friends with Russia but at the same time, we are looking for opportunities,” said Aslanov. “Very eagerly, we are looking eastwards.”

China can’t fully usurp the role of Russia. The careers and networks of the region’s elites are deeply intertwined with Moscow, and Russian remains the lingua franca. People across the region still tend to view Russia more favorably than China, according to a 2022 survey by the nonprofit Central Asia Barometer.

China’s reputation has been hurt by its treatment of Turkic Muslim Uyghurs, with whom many in Central Asia share a similar culture and language, and by anti-Chinese sentiment fanned by some Russian-language media.

But there are already signs China is making inroads with a new generation of Central Asian elites.

Nodirxon Mahmudov, a 19-year-old business student who graduated from an elite high school in Uzbekistan, said three of his 26 classmates went to China to study and none went to Russia. In the past, he said, many would have applied to Russian universities.

Mahmudov, who says he covets a BYD, also works as a marketing manager at Hong Kong Academy, a private language-tutoring company. On a summer afternoon, eight students between the ages of 11 and 21 were diligently cramming Chinese characters in a beginners’ class.

Government officials and business people were also coming to the academy in search of Chinese tutors for professional advancement, according to Mahmudov. “They all think China is the future,” he said.
Leaders of Russia and China to meet in Central Asian summit in a show of deepening cooperation (AP)
AP [7/3/2024 4:41 AM, Emma Burrows, 456K, Neutral]
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping will be meeting for the second time in as many months as they visit Kazakhstan for a session of an international group founded to counter Western alliances.

Putin and Xi last got together in May when the Kremlin leader visited Beijing to underscore their close partnership that opposes the U.S.-led democratic order and seeks to promote a more “multipolar” world.

Now they’ll be holding meetings amid the annual session of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on Wednesday and Thursday in the Kazakh capital of Astana. A look at the summit:

What is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization?

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization was established in 2001 by China and Russia to discuss security concerns in Central Asia and the wider region, Other members are Iran, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Observer states and dialogue partners include Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Who’s attending this year?

Besides Putin and Xi, and summit host President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, other leaders there will be Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan, President Emomali Rakhmon of Tajikistan, and President Sadyr Zhaparov of Kyrgyzstan. President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus will attend because his nation is becoming a full member.

Iran is still choosing a successor to President Ebrahim Raisi, killed in a helicopter crash in May, with a runoff election Friday, so acting President Mohammad Mokhbar will attend.

Other guests of the SCO include President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan.

Also present will be U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who is visiting Central Asia. Guterres wants “to position the U.N. as an inclusive organization that’s talking to all the big clubs,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

What SCO leaders won’t be there?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is sending his foreign minister. Indian media reports speculated the recently reelected Modi was busy with the parliament session that began last week. He attended the recent Group of Seven summit in Italy, and some reports also speculated he wants to balance India’s relationship with Russia and the West.

What are their goals?

Putin wants to show that Russia is not isolated over Western sanctions from the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

An arrest warrant has been issued for him by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, accusing him of personal responsibility for abductions of children from Ukraine. Kazakhstan is not party to the Rome Statute and thus is not obliged to arrest him.

For Putin, the meeting is about “prestige and the symbolic optics that he’s not alone,” Gabuev said.

The meeting is another chance for Putin and Xi to demonstrate the strong personal ties in their “strategic partnership” as they both face soaring tensions with the West. They have met more than 40 times.

Putin’s meeting with Xi in May showed how China has offered diplomatic support to Moscow and is a top market for its oil and gas. Russia has relied on Beijing as a main source of high-tech imports to keep its military machine running.

The SCO helps China project its influence, especially across Central Asia and the Global South. Xi called for “bridges of communication” between countries last week and wants to further promote China as an alternative to the U.S. and its allies.

Erdogan could use the meeting to hold talks with Putin, who has postponed several visits to Turkey. The leader of the NATO member has balanced relations with both Russia and Ukraine since the war began, frequently offering to serve as a mediator.

For host Kazakhstan and the other Central Asian nations, the meeting is a way to further their cooperation with bigger, more powerful neighbors. Kazakhstan, for instance, frequently engages with both neighboring Russia and China, while also pursuing links with the West, with visits this year from U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and British Foreign Secretary David Cameron.

What will be discussed?

Countering terrorism is a key focus. Russia had what it has called two terrorist attacks this year, with more 145 people killed by gunmen at a Moscow concert hall in March, and at least 21 people were killed in attacks on police and houses of worship in the southern republic of Dagestan in June. In the March violence, the U.S. warned Russian officials about the possibility of an attack — information that was dismissed by Moscow.

The SCO is not a collective security or economic alliance, and there are “significant security differences between its members,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and a former British ambassador to Belarus. The “principal value” of the organization lies in the optics of non-Western countries gathering together, he added.

Gabuev agreed, saying the SCO is a place for conversation rather than a platform where “collective decisions are made, implemented and have an impact.”

This year, close Moscow ally Belarus will become a full member of the organization, and its admission indicates how Russia wants to bolster blocs of non-Western countries. Gould-Davies said the SCO is raising its profile “by growing its membership rather than by deepening its cooperation.”

Are there tensions within the SCO?

Political differences among some of SCO members — such as India and Pakistan over disputed Kashmir — also make it difficult to reach collective agreement on some issues.

China has backed Moscow amid the fighting in Ukraine, but at a meeting of the SCO in 2022, Putin referred to Beijing’s unspecified “concerns” over the conflict. India’s Modi then called for an end to the fighting without voicing explicit disapproval of Moscow’s action.

The Central Asian countries balance relations with Russia and China while also remaining on good terms with Western nations. None of the five former Soviet republics in Central Asia have publicly backed the war, although all abstained on a U.N. vote condemning it.

Guterres may use the meeting to talk to Putin about how Russia is “disrupting the coherence of the U.N.,” Gabuev said. Russia has vetoed U.N. Security Council sanctions on monitoring North Korea and a vote on stopping an arms race in outer space.

With Guterres unlikely to visit Moscow, the Astana meeting is likely his best chance to speak to Putin, Gabuev added.

Will Ukraine be discussed?

Neither Ukraine nor any of its Western backers are attending, and major talks — or breakthroughs — on the war are not expected.

But because it’s rare these days for any meeting to include the heads of Russia, China, Turkey and the U.N., the possibility of talks about the war might be raised, at least on the peripheries of the summit, probably behind closed doors.

There could be “a lot of sideline discussions on Ukraine, as it is a big issue which concerns all of us,” a senior Kazakh official told The Associated Press. The official was not authorized to talk publicly, and thus spoke on condition of anonymity.

Gabuev said Putin will try to show there’s a “big club of countries” that are “ambivalent” toward the war in Ukraine.
China supports Kazakhstan joining BRICS, President Xi says (Reuters)
Reuters [7/3/2024 4:34 AM, Joe Cash, 5.2M, Positive]
China’s President Xi Jinping said he supports Kazakhstan joining the BRICS bloc, Chinese state media reported on Wednesday, as the group of developing nations mulls further expansion to rival a Western-dominated world order it sees as outdated.

Speaking to the press alongside Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev following a meeting in the Central Asian state’s capital, Xi encouraged Kazakhstan to "play the role of a middle power on the international stage and make its due contribution to global governance," while endorsing Astana’s accession.

China and Russia are pushing for the expansion of the BRICS grouping, which also includes Brazil, India and South Africa, as they seek to counter Western economic dominance.

Originally an acronym coined by Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill in 2001, the bloc was founded as an informal four-nation club in 2009 and added South Africa a year later. Last August, the BRICS bloc agreed to admit Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. However, Saudi Arabia has not yet joined the group.

Argentina had planned to join BRICS, but President Javier Milei withdrew his country soon after taking office in December.

Xi is in Kazakhstan to attend a heads of state meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization from July 3-4.

During his meeting with Tokayev, China and Kazakhstan also agreed to double their two-way trade as soon as possible, the report added.
Kazakhstan to hold referendum on building nuclear power plant (EurasiaNet)
EurasiaNet [7/2/2024 4:14 PM, Almaz Kumenov, 57.6K, Neutral]
Kazakhstan’s power sector is at a crossroads, a point where the government wants to diversify and reduce CO2 emissions. Nuclear power is viewed as at least a partial solution to existing challenges, and officials have taken the first step toward building a reactor by scheduling a nationwide referendum.

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced the referendum in late June without scheduling a specific date for it. The country has abundant oil and natural gas reserves, but the president stressed a need to develop other energy sources to power economic growth. He went on to reassure his audience that the government was committed to developing its nuclear energy potential in a well-considered manner.

“The country has great opportunities for the development of nuclear energy; it is important to use them correctly and effectively. The final decision on this issue will be made by the people,” the presidential press service quoted Tokayev as saying in an address to journalists.

The immediate question on most people’s minds is who will help Kazakhstan build a reactor? There are four entities from Russia, France, China and South Korea under consideration for the job. Officials say the choice will be made after the referendum, provided the issue receives a popular endorsement. Given that Kazakhstan has a tightly controlled political environment, a “yes” vote seems likely.

But many fear that geopolitics will prompt Kazakh authorities to award the construction contract to Rosatom, the Russian state-controlled firm. Some even believe it’s already a done deal, just waiting for the right time to announce it. That likelihood is fueling unease about safety and sovereignty risks.

Aset Nauryzbaev, an economist and a former top official at KEGOC, the company operating Kazakhstan’s electricity grid, believes a Russian-built reactor will undermine Kazakhstan’s long-practiced foreign policy of multi-vectorism, in which Kazakhstan balances relations among global and regional powers so that none exerts controlling influence on Astana’s policy choices.

“By building its own nuclear power plant here, Russia will be able to keep Kazakhstan in its field of influence – we will depend on their production technologies, fuel, specialists, and they will certainly use this leverage when necessary,” Nauryzbayev told Eurasianet.

Vadim Nee, director of the Social and Environmental Fund, an environmental non-profit, is also concerned about the prospect that Astana, by deepening its nuclear partnership with Moscow, could face geopolitical risks. “While developing green energy, the United States, the European Union, Japan and South Korea are at the same time trying to limit Russia’s role in the nuclear industry, and we could find ourselves caught between two fires,” Nee told Eurasianet.

Timur Zhantikin, general director of the Kazakhstan Nuclear Power Plant company, said that the uranium needed to fuel a nuclear plant would be domestically sourced, thereby limiting Russia’s ability to exert pressure on Kazakhstan once the reactor starts operations.

Social media chatter among Kazakhstan’s commentariat appears firmly against Rosatom’s involvement in any nuclear power plant project. The legacy of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, as well as the close calls at the Zaporizhzhiya nuclear plant during the Russia-Ukraine war, have imprinted on many the impression that Russia is lax when it comes to nuclear safety. Kazakhstan has its own complicated nuclear “history,” with nuclear power, linked to the legacy of Semipalatinsk, one of the Soviet Union’s main nuclear test sites.

Presently, about 80 percent of electricity in Kazakhstan is produced by burning coal, another 15 percent is generated via hydropower, and the rest comes from renewable energy sources. Meanwhile, Soviet-era energy infrastructure is prone to frequent breakdowns that cause extended power outages across the country. Adding nuclear power to the current mix is seen by officials as a quick fix to existing problems.

At the same time, nuclear energy should not be seen as a “green” energy source capable of replacing coal-fired plants without entailing risks, said Nee. “We must not forget that nuclear power plants produce hazardous waste,” Nee said. “And if an accident occurs, we risk losing one of our strategic water bodies – Lake Balkhash.”

Since late last year, Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Energy has been conducting a promotional campaign that has shown signs of swaying public opinion in favor of nuclear energy. A poll conducted by Demoscope, an independent research firm, found that 47 percent of those polled favored construction of a nuclear plant, and 38 percent were against.

Skeptics believe the referendum’s outcome is already settled, but authorities want to hold it to provide political cover, in case of a future mishap. “Such strategic issues are decided from above, and a popular vote allows the authorities to shift responsibility to the people,” said Olzhas Beksultanov, an activist with the political reform movement Oyan, Qazakstan.
Kazakh dissident dies following Kyiv assassination attempt (Al Jazeera)
Al Jazeera [7/2/2024 6:06 AM, Staff, 20871K, Negative]
A Kazakh dissident has died in Ukraine, two weeks after being shot outside his home last month.

Kyiv-based journalist Aydos Sadykov was shot in the head while seated in a car with his wife on June 18. Ukrainian prosecutors suspect that the “carefully planned” attack was carried out by a pair of suspected assassins from Kazakhstan.

Sadykov’s wife, Natalya Sadykova, blamed Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev for the death of her husband, who was an outspoken critic of the Central Asian country’s leadership.

“My beloved husband, father of our three children, great son of the Kazakh people. Aydos dedicated his life to Kazakhstan and suffered martyrdom at the hands of killers,” Sadykova said in a Facebook post.

“His death is on Tokayev’s conscience,” she declared.

Who are the suspects?

According to the office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general, two Kazakh citizens, one of them a former policeman, are suspected of shooting Sadykov. Both left the country on the same day, they say, escaping to Moldova.

While Kazakhstan has since detained one of the suspects, named as Altai Zhakanbayev, it has said it would not hand him over to Ukraine. The second suspect remains at large.

President Tokayev instructed Kazakh law enforcement agencies to cooperate with Ukraine to locate the suspects, his spokesperson said last month, according to Russian news agencies.

“Astana is ready to cooperate with Ukraine, including through Interpol,” the spokesperson was cited as saying.

‘Bring them to justice’

Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation into the shooting of Sadykov, who ran a YouTube channel often critical of Kazakhstan’s former president Nursultan Nazarbayev and then his successor Tokayev.

“The news of the attack on Sadykov during broad daylight in the Kyiv city centre is deeply disturbing,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch last month.

“Ukrainian authorities should ensure Sydykov’s safety, identify the attacker, bring them to justice, and determine who ordered the attack. Kazakhstan should show it is committed to the rule of law during this process.”
UN Secretary-General Hopes Kyrgyz-Tajik Border Issues Will Be Resolved Peacefully (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [7/2/2024 5:34 AM, Staff, 1530K, Neutral]
The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has expressed hope that Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan will be able to resolve all border issues via peaceful means.

During his talks with Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov in the resort city of Cholpon-Ata on the shores of the Lake Issyk-Kul on July 2, Guterres called on Kyrgyzstan to be "a symbol of peace."

"You make great peace-building efforts, be it border issues or others. I have been to the Ferghana Valley twice and know how difficult it is to settle border issues. It’s like a puzzle there. It takes effort to understand and solve everything. We believe that the border issue with Tajikistan will be resolved diplomatically, peacefully, through negotiations, as it was with Uzbekistan," Guterres said.

The delimitation and demarcation of the Kyrgyz-Tajik border has been an issue for decades, but it gained added urgency in recent years after several deadly clashes took place along disputed segments of the frontier.

In spring 2021, an armed conflict along one segment of the border left 36 people dead, including two children, and 154 injured on the Kyrgyz side.

Tajik authorities said that 19 Tajik citizens were killed and 87 were injured during the clashes. However, local residents told RFE/RL’s Tajik Service at the time that the number of people killed during the clashes was much higher.

The border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is 972 kilometers long, most of which have now been agreed upon.

Many border areas in Central Asian former Soviet republics have been disputed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The situation is particularly complicated near the numerous exclaves in the volatile Ferghana Valley, where the borders of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan meet.

Tensions in those areas have led to clashes between local residents and border guards of the three countries.

Guterres arrived in Kyrgyzstan from Uzbekistan on July 1. He is expected to continue his Central Asian tour by visiting Kazakhstan on July 3.
‘Slow Death Of Journalism’ Alleged Amid Uzbek Crackdown On Karakalpaks (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [7/2/2024 9:25 AM, Staff, 1530K, Negative]
Press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has warned of the “slow death of journalism” in a largely Turkic-speaking autonomous region of northwestern Uzbekistan amid a violent crackdown since local protests two years ago.

RSF said in a July 1 alert that those protests in Karakalpakstan “remain such a taboo topic that journalists who recall the facts today are arrested, imprisoned, and falsely accused of separatism.”

It condemned jail sentences and detentions, including that of a British reporter for The Economist, and said such “censorship…threatens to turn the region into an information desert.”

“RSF is alarmed by this blanket of repression on a subject so vital to public interest and by the criminalization of the work of journalists -- who must be released immediately,” Jeanne Cavelier, the head of RSF’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk, said.

Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev abruptly abandoned plans for a constitutional change to abolish the Karakalpakstan Autonomous Republic’s right to secede after the protests erupted in Karakalpakstan’s capital, Nukus, in July 2022.

The authorities said at least 21 people were killed in the unrest.

Calls for independence have persisted in the region, which is home to around 2 million people.

Dozens of people including journalists have faced trial since the unrest, with some sentenced to lengthy prison terms on security and other charges. Students and others have reported abuse and threats during detention, and a wave of school expulsions followed.

Karakalpaks are a Central Asian Turkic-speaking people whose region near the Aral Sea used to be an autonomous area within the Kazakh and then the Russian Soviet republic in 1930, before becoming part of the Uzbek Soviet republic in 1936.

The government had proposed eliminating any mention in the Uzbek Constitution of Karakalpakstan’s long-standing right to seek independence.
Why the Mongolian President’s First State Visit to Uzbekistan Matters (The Diplomat)
The Diplomat [7/2/2024 9:16 AM, Sophia Nina Burna-Asefi, 1156K, Positive]
For the first time, the president of Mongolia paid a state visit to Uzbekistan. On June 23, President Khurelsukh Ukhnaa, arrived in Uzbekistan for a three-day visit. As part of the visit, Khurelsukh discussed greater trade cooperation with Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, and also visited Khiva. Alongside the president, a delegation of more than 40 Mongolian leaders of small and medium-sized enterprises also arrived in Uzbekistan to explore new market opportunities. During the trip, Khurelsukh inaugurated the new Embassy of Mongolia in Tashkent as part of efforts to develop closer diplomatic ties.

Khurelsukh’s meeting with Mirziyoyev was an opportunity to strengthen bilateral trade relations ahead of two important events: the Mongolia Economic Forum on July 8-9 and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Heads of State Meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, on July 3-4. Mongolia has been an observer in the latter since 2004.

The trip yielded some important deliverables and the two leaders covered a lot of ground in their discussions, including aiming to increase trade by five to ten times in the coming years, developing joint trade houses, and exploring cooperation in the mining, energy, transport, education, and technology sectors. According to Mirziyoyev, “Mongolia is our traditional and reliable partner in the Asian region. Uzbek-Mongolian relations are built on the principles of friendship, mutual respect and support, and do not depend on the situation.”

The Mongolian Foreign Ministry says that Uzbekistan is currently one of the largest markets for Mongolia in the Central Asian region, the first being Kazakhstan. The volume of bilateral trade between Uzbekistan and Mongolia reached $10.4 million in 2022.

Prior to the trip, Mongolia and Uzbekistan have been increasing the pace of their diplomatic meetings. On June 18, an Uzbek delegation led by the Uzbek Minister of Mining and Geology B.F. Islamov went to Mongolia to meet with representatives of the National Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Mongolia and discussed issues of bilateral economic cooperation. Last year both sides agreed to simplify transit to and from China via Mongolia and upgrade road and air transport.

From a geopolitical point of view, the two countries have a similar strategic position and mutual opportunities in the international arena – both landlocked countries are sandwiched between China and Russia, either physically or politically, and also seek to balance with the West as a “third neighbor.” Russia and China are also the largest trading partners of Mongolia and Uzbekistan, although Tashkent has relatively more options to play with.

Current developments such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine and continued instability of Afghanistan suggest that the demands placed upon Mongolia and Uzbekistan are changing. One answer lies at the intersection of their capabilities. The value, vulnerability, and priority of Uzbekistan and Mongolia in terms of their worth to Russia, China, and the West must be carefully assessed. Competition is to be expected.

Indeed inter-state competition has intensified substantially between the two landlocked countries and the region as a whole. A key area of competition is the export of raw materials, in particular products of the mining and agricultural sectors, which makes them serious competitors in the global raw materials markets. Another obstacle to expanding cooperation is logistics. There is no direct railway connection between Mongolia and Uzbekistan, as well as the other Central Asian states of the region; basically all trade from Mongolia to the Central Asian states runs through Novosibirsk, Russia.

Nevertheless, there is an opportunity for Uzbekistan and Mongolia to assume more responsible roles in the region and their similar geopolitical situation could be the catalyst for the formation of like-minded partnerships to navigate the conflicting priorities of Russia, China, and the West. Both countries’ “bridge-building” and transit position is an important element to balancing these large powers. Their efforts to appeal to the West as key reliable partners that can help bring stability to the region in terms of economic development, institution building and resolution of humanitarian crises.

Russia’s and China’s size, power, and geographic proximity to Mongolia and Uzbekistan mean that they can never be dismissed as dominant and potentially aggressive actors in the region. Russia and China will both without doubt continue to be a major political and economic force in Mongolia and Uzbekistan. But their dominance is far from inevitable or assured.

What is more certain is that the wider Central Asia region will be one of the greatest battlefields of the growing Russia-China-West competition. In a sense, this is potentially one way in which superpower competition is not entirely negative for the Central Asian region. Many countries in Central Asia are likely to play one camp off the other, in the process attempting to win for themselves greater attention, influence, financing, and economic opportunities. Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and the wider region that languished in a unipolar world, deprived of leverage, can now have their voices heard and respected.

Mongolia and Uzbekistan must work together and learn from each other’s mistakes and successes as they craft new foreign policy strategies and solutions to the evolving situation. Achieving that goal, however, will require some new thinking in Mongolian and Uzbek foreign policy circles and their approach to these competing powers.

Indeed, policymakers in Ulaanbaatar and Tashkent should not waste this opportunity to redefine their East and West relationship. Both leaders should learn from their pasts and chart a different trajectory. In particular they should acknowledge that different interests exist, focus on economic areas where interests align well, and pragmatically maximize efforts to align commitments. This playbook now needs to become the cornerstone of their foreign policy agenda.
Uzbekistan continues to run up big deficits with leading trade partners (EurasiaNet)
EurasiaNet [7/2/2024 4:14 PM, Staff, 57.6K, Negative]
The Uzbek Statistics Agency reports that the total volume of trade increased modestly during the first five months of 2024, compared with the same period the previous year. But the country’s deficit is continuing to grow.

Trade turnover during the January-May period this year reached $26.7 billion, a 3 percent increase over 2023’s total for the same timeframe. Imports accounted for about three-fifths of that total, and the growth rate of imports (3.7 percent) outpaced that of exports (1.9 percent). China was Uzbekistan’s largest trade partner during the period, accounting for 19 percent of overall volume. Russia was Tashkent’s second-ranking trade partner. Uzbekistan registered substantial deficits, in the billions of dollars, with both countries.

Uzbekistan’s statistics contain some glaring differences with those compiled by the Chinese Customs Agency, according to an Uzbek source. The Spot.uz outlet noted that Beijing’s data pegged the value of Uzbek gas exports at $153.9 for the first five months of the year. Meanwhile, Uzbekistan reported $59.9 million in gas export sales to China during the same period.

It’s worth noting that Uzbekistan in 2023, for the first time in its history as an independent nation, imported more gas than it exported, significantly increasing purchases from Turkmenistan and Russia.
Reviving Energy Interdependence in Central Asia (The Diplomat)
The Diplomat [7/2/2024 8:25 AM, Peter Krasnopolsky, 1156K, Neutral]
In late May, Tajikistan’s government yet again announced that the country’s energy system would reconnect to the Central Asian Integrated Power System (IPS or CAPS), a network allowing states in the region to exchange electricity based on seasonal fluctuations in supply and demand. The technical process of reconnection, funded by the Asian Development Bank, was first announced back in 2018, and is already two years past the stated deadline. A response to an informal inquiry suggested that the connection, which is delayed for technical reasons, should now be completed by July 2024.

Central Asian deadlines are fluid and stretchy, like the riverbed of Amu Darya, which flows down from the Pamiris and separates the great deserts of the region. Nevertheless, Tajikistan’s intention to reconnect to the common power system, whether it takes place this summer or is postponed again, offers a strong indication of the realization by Central Asian leaders that the region’s potential can only be achieved through cooperation.

Common rhetoric goes that Stalin drew the administrative borders of the Central Asian republics ignoring ethnic borders with the simple intention to “divide and conquer.” A more accurate historic interpretation suggests that the choice for the borders was made after careful deliberations by Soviet planners with the intention to create functioning economic units. However, as the economic resources in the different republics were often complementary, it was logical to design and develop trans-regional transportation energy and communication networks that would traverse administrative borders for the sake of benefits derived from synergy.

In this sense, physical geography defined the direction of the energy network based on the seasonal electricity and water needs of the industrial and agricultural areas of the region. Mountainous Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan provided hydro-generated electric power and water to downstream Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. The latter three sent coal- and gas-generated electricity to the upstream countries when water levels were not sufficient to produce electricity.

The Central Asian IPS was a sophisticated network that connected the power grids of the Soviet republics. Its main circular section, referred to as Central Asian energy ring, transported electricity produced by Kyrgyzstan’s multiple hydropower stations through the Fergana Valley, traversing populous sections of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and southern Kazakhstan before reentering Kyrgyzstan from the north. Tajikistan’s hydropower plants serviced southern Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. During winters, upstream Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan stored water and relied on electricity generated by the thermal power stations of their neighbors. During the agricultural season the two upstream states would release water for the irrigation needs of their downstream neighbors while simultaneously generating electric power.

Considering the interweaving nature of the region’s borders, various internal subregions served as energy suppliers for their neighbors and vice versa. For instance, energy abundant southern Tajikistan used to supply electricity to neighboring Uzbekistan, while energy deficient northern Tajikistan received its electricity from other sections of Uzbekistan. Similarly, southern Kyrgyzstan supplied electricity to the Fergana Valley area of Uzbekistan, while northern Kyrgyzstan obtained its electricity from central regions of Uzbekistan using Kazakhstan section of the grid for transit. The frequency of the electric power flow was controlled through the Toktogul reservoir in Kyrgyzstan, which due to its upstream location had the most capacity to store and release water as necessary. Centrally located Uzbekistan played a crucial role in the IPS. The whole hydro-energy complex required a great amount of coordination and was managed by the Central Asian United Dispatch Center in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent. Above all, during the Soviet period the water-energy balance was calculated and controlled by the USSR’s Ministry of Energy in Moscow.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, multiple disagreements about the power generating and transit complex and water sharing arrangements resulted to states disconnecting from the system. Turkmenistan left in 2003, but its abundance of hydrocarbon resources and peripheral location accounted for a relatively smooth withdrawal. However, after 2006, the Central Asian IPS dealt with numerous power outages originating in the national power grids. Tajikistan, in need of power during the cold winters, occasionally overloaded the system. Subsequent discord was used as a motivation for Uzbekistan to leave the IPS in 2009, significantly affecting the rest of the system. Because Tajikistan’s section of the ring lay between the borders with Uzbekistan, the former became disconnected from the Central Asian IPS. Tajikistan could no longer continue exporting energy to Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan because Uzbekistan had withdrawn. Furthermore, the utility of exchange with Kyrgyzstan remained limited because of the non-complementary needs of the two upstream countries.

The dismantlement of the regional network mirrored fragmentation of the region in other sectors. Weary of large non-titular nationalities present in almost every republic, the newly established states placed heavy emphasis on nation-building. The young states severed ties in farming and industries, eliminated train services between major cities, limited educational opportunities for non-nationals, and in rare cases instituted visa regimes and sealed off borders, ignoring road networks that had long connected the region. A trip through Central Asia is not complete without dead-ending into a block of concrete in a border area.

Fast-forward 15 years and the region, which sits on massive reserves of hydrocarbons and exports significant amounts abroad, is afflicted by continuous disruptions in power supply. Blackouts in major cities have become common and public discontent about energy has become a major concern. Hence, the recent efforts to reconnect Tajikistan to the IPS and thereby reinvigorate the trans-regional synergy of hydrocarbons and hydropower.

The efforts to revive energy interdependence reflect, this time around, cooperative rhetoric, which has been more apparent in recent years. Numerous diplomatic exchanges between regional leaders provided solid results in resolving sensitive territorial disputes, which for a long time bred distrust and prevented cross-border commerce and people’s exchanges. This cooperative trend is driven by economic pragmatism, but has emerged in within a more conducive regional and geopolitical climate.

First of all, Central Asia’s present leaders have increased confidence, both in their states’ sovereignties but also in their individual power. They have come to realize that the main risk to their regimes emanate from social instabilities caused by economic concerns, rather than from separatist movements allegedly supported by their neighbors. The ethnic Uzbeks in Osh, Kyrgyzstan do not want to join Uzbekistan; they want to be able to visit their relatives in Andijan by driving two hours across the border, instead of detouring for 10 hours.

Nowhere in the region has there been evidence of separatist movements supported by neighboring states. Admittedly, interstate conflicts, such as the border war between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in 2022, remain a risk, but these have often been contained to sparsely populated regions. Instead, the greatest shocks of recent years, such as unrest in Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan and violent protests in Kazakhstan in 2022, were driven by economic concerns, such as unemployment or high prices for essentials. Interethnic conflicts that flare up, such as those between Kazakhs and the Dungan minority, between Tajiks and Pamiris, and during the recent Bishkek riots of 2024, which targeted foreigners, are also grounded in animosity driven by economic frustrations.

The region’s present leaders seem to appreciate the importance of economic prosperity for the stabilities of their regimes, and recognize the fact that they can move toward this prosperity through increased interstate cooperation.

Thirty years of independence increased their confidence as individual leaders, in part with the passing of most of the Soviet-era cohort. No longer does personal competition for leadership, such as between Islam Karimov and Nursultan Nazarbayev, define regional dynamics. Instead, Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirzoyayev, who patiently waited for the death of his isolationist predecessor before coming to power in 2016, has acted as a leading force for cooperation, opening the center of Central Asia, Uzbekistan, to the rest of the region once again.

His counterpart in Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, a career diplomat who became president after Nazarbayev’s 2019 resignation, appreciates the importance of continuous communication for healthy interstate relations.

In resource-deficient Kyrgyzstan, good relations with the neighbors are essential for economic survival and for the regime stability of current President Sadyr Japarov.

The only remaining post-Soviet strongman, Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan, also sees the benefits of cooperation, particularly as he is preoccupied with orchestrating a power transition to his, allegedly somewhat pro-Western, son. Local elites joke, “while knyaz’ya (dukes in Russian) fight, bayi (Central Asian landowners) will always find an agreement.” This time around the saying might actually hold ground.

Second, the current cooperative dynamics emanate from within the region itself. Such cooperation had been attempted in the 1990s, with an exclusively Central Asian grouping, the Central Asian Cooperation Organization (CACO). But it quickly became dysfunctional due to the young states’ bickering and lack of enforcement mechanisms, and was eventually absorbed by the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Community.

Generally, the key regional organizations of Central Asia have long been initiated by powerful neighbors. Russia has aimed to promote economic integration through the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), a grouping that has occasionally worsened the conditions for interstate commerce between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and which Uzbekistan has been politely declining to join.

Another key regional grouping, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), initiated by China and originally designated to resolve border disputes, has gone through significant organizational development to expand its functions, extended its membership outside of the region, and yet maintained its basic function as a discussion forum with little institutional capacity.

Both Russia and China are still strongly grounded in Central Asia. However, Russia is bogged down in Ukraine, and projects sponsored by Russia have often aimed to fill gaps in the region’s deteriorating infrastructure rather than to recover and enhance regional potential. China, in turn, has often been prevented from completing initiatives of regional significance due to regional apprehensions about potential Chinese regional dominance, emanating both from the region and from Moscow. Central Asian leaders might have as well decided that god helps those who help themselves, and do so without burning any bridges.

The trend to work together within Central Asia is still fragile, as it depends on top-down diplomacy defined by the personalist regimes of the region. It was the same nature of the regimes, plagued by the insecurities of the previous leaders, that facilitated Central Asian fragmentation three decades ago. Nevertheless, as long as the leaders continue talking, there is indication that the electricity, as well as goods and people, will eventually begin to flow among the Central Asian states again, like the tumultuous waters of the Amu Darya river.
Twitter
Afghanistan
Yalda Hakim
@SkyYaldaHakim
[7/2/2024 5:12 PM, 219.7K followers, 338 retweets, 801 likes]
Women and girls in Afghanistan continue to be banned from getting an education and have been pushed out of public life. Now they’re missing from UN backed talks with the Taliban in Doha about the future of the country. A devastating outcome for Afghan women and girls who not only feel abandoned by the international community but remain excluded from talks about their future.

Yalda Hakim
@SkyYaldaHakim
[7/2/2024 5:39 PM, 219.7K followers, 27 retweets, 73 likes]
“I will simply refuse to be tokenised in a show of inclusion by the UN”. The UN met today with women’s groups outside of the official Doha summit. Many women chose not to go. Rayhana Karim, CEO of the Khadija Project and an affiliate of @WomenforWomen was one of these women.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[7/2/2024 2:08 PM, 211K followers, 5 retweets, 20 likes]
My thoughts on the recent UN Afghanistan talks in Doha are cited here. I argue the Taliban got what they wanted—they discussed the issues that mattered to them the most, and the meeting excluded those they didn’t want at the table. https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-meeting-doha-576aae23eaf821db75bbba4b426107d9

Jahanzeb Wesa
@JahanzebWesa
[7/2/2024 6:50 AM, 2.5K followers, 2 retweets, 3 likes]
UN Representative Rosemary DeCarlo said in a press conference that in today’s meeting, she discussed the rights of women and minorities, girls’ education, the third Doha meeting and other related issues. She called this meeting important and useful. #Afghanistan #Women #UN #HRW

Sara Wahedi
@SaraWahedi
[7/2/2024 8:48 PM, 80.1K followers, 5 retweets, 38 likes]
So far, every woman who I can recognize from the Doha talks are dual-passport holders. I cannot emphasize my disappointment. As @Laila_Haidari said, rip up your passports. When you know you can escape, your priorities do not align with the majority of Afghan women.

Heather Barr
@heatherbarr1
[7/2/2024 4:32 AM, 62.8K followers, 67 retweets, 126 likes]
Human Rights Watch described the decision to exclude women as “shocking”. https://msnbctv.news/what-to-expect-as-taliban-joins-third-un-held-talks-on-afghanistan-in-qatar-taliban-news/
Pakistan
Government of Pakistan
@GovtofPakistan
[7/2/2024 3:04 PM, 3.1M followers, 6 retweets, 33 likes]
Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif meets the President of the Republic of Tajikistan H.E. Emomali Rahmon Both leaders exchanged views on a wide range of issues of bilateral cooperation, as well as regional and international issues of mutual interest. On the bilateral front, the two leaders discussed the entire range of bilateral cooperation between Pakistan and Tajikistan, including trade and economy, investment, connectivity, culture, education, science & technology, defence, humanitarian assistance, parliamentary exchanges, and people-to-people contacts. They expressed satisfaction on existing fraternal ties and reaffirmed to continue their joint efforts to further strengthen Pakistan-Tajikistan ties. To further deepen and diversify bilateral relations, the two sides signed a number of Agreements/MoUs in the fields of aviation, diplomacy, education, sports, people to people linkages, industrial cooperation, tourism, etc.

Government of Pakistan
@GovtofPakistan
[7/2/2024 1:20 PM, 3.1M followers, 7 retweets, 17 likes]
Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif is on a two-day official visit to Tajikistan on the invitation of the President of Tajikistan. The visit of the Prime Minister has reinforced the continuation of regular bilateral engagements at the highest-level and marks a significant step towards elevating the longstanding and multifaceted relationship between the two brotherly countries, to the next-level.

Government of Pakistan
@GovtofPakistan
[7/2/2024 1:16 PM, 3.1M followers, 6 retweets, 21 likes]
Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif visits the Navruz Palace in Dushanbe. Tajik President H.E. Emomali Rahmon warmly welcomed the Prime Minister upon his arrival at Navruz Palace and guided him on a tour of the palace. He also hosted a dinner in honour of the Prime Minister and the Pakistani delegation.

Government of Pakistan
@GovtofPakistan
[7/2/2024 12:44 PM, 3.1M followers, 9 retweets, 32 likes]
Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif addresses the media during a press conference at Qasr-e-Millat, Dushanbe.

Shehbaz Sharif
@CMShehbaz
[7/2/2024 1:33 PM, 6.7M followers, 132 retweets, 379 likes]
Excellent meeting with my dear brother H.E. Emomali Rahmon, President of Tajikistan. We discussed bilateral cooperation across a wide range of areas, including trade, investment, energy, agriculture, and security. Our meeting also focused on prospects for enhanced regional connectivity. We also witnessed signing of several MoUs/agreements between both sides. I appreciate President Rahmon’s personal commitment and leadership to strengthen Pakistan-Tajikistan friendship. I also extended to him a warm invitation to visit Pakistan at his earliest convenience.

Shehbaz Sharif
@CMShehbaz
[7/2/2024 8:13 PM, 6.7M followers, 166 retweets, 472 likes]
Thank you for the warm welcome to Dushanbe Prime Minister H.E. Qohir Rasulzoda. Looking forward to my meetings with the leadership of Tajikistan. Together, we will take Pakistan-Tajikistan ties to newer heights by expanding the scale of cooperation between our two brotherly countries.
India
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[7/2/2024 12:21 PM, 99.5M followers, 4K retweets, 19K likes]
My thoughts are with those bereaved in Hathras. Prayers with the injured. The UP Government is working to assist those affected.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[7/2/2024 12:20 PM, 99.5M followers, 5.5K retweets, 27K likes]
Our government is taking every possible action to punish those who have attempted to play with the future of our children.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[7/2/2024 1:53 PM, 3.2M followers, 318 retweets, 2.9K likes]
Prime Minister @narendramodi’s reply to motion of thanks on Rashtrapati ji’s address in the Lok Sabha was a powerful exposition of the country’s firm faith in him and in the NDA Government. It is an assurance to the nation. Repaying the trust of the people for giving us the opportunity for the third time, the Government will leave no stone unturned in working 24x7 for 2047. Laying a strong foundation will help fulfilling the aspirations of future generations as we move towards Viksit Bharat.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[7/2/2024 1:53 PM, 3.2M followers, 83 retweets, 897 likes]
Deeply distressed by the tragic loss of lives in a stampede in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh. Sincere condolences to the bereaved families. Pray for the speedy recovery of the injured.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[7/2/2024 1:06 PM, 3.2M followers, 172 retweets, 1.2K likes]
Delighted to meet DPM & FM Murat Nurtleu of Kazakhstan in Astana today. Thanked him for the hospitality and arrangements for the SCO Council of Heads of State Summit. Discussed our expanding Strategic Partnership and India’s increasing engagement with Central Asia in various formats. Also exchanged views on regional and global issues.

Rahul Gandhi
@RahulGandhi
[7/2/2024 6:35 AM, 26.2M followers, 22K retweets, 82K likes]
Dear Prime Minister, I am writing to request for a debate in Parliament on NEET tomorrow. Our aim is to engage constructively in the interest of 24 lakh NEET aspirants who deserve answers. I believe that it would be fitting if you were to lead this debate.
NSB
Awami League
@albd1971
[7/2/2024 10:58 AM, 639.1K followers, 27 retweets, 83 likes]
The Vice President (South, Central and West Asia) of @ADB_HQ Mr. Yingming Yang paid a courtesy call to HPM #SheikhHasina today at her Parliament office. Photo: Saiful Kallol

Awami League
@albd1971
[7/2/2024 7:08 AM, 639.1K followers, 20 retweets, 50 likes]
The net #Forexreserve of #Bangladesh now stands at $16 billion, surpassing the $14.7 billion target set for June by the @IMFNews, while, the gross reserve stands at $21.83 billion, up from $19.4 billion on 26 June. https://tbsnews.net/economy/net-reserve-now-16-billion-surpassing-imf-target-bb-889791

Ambassador Julie Chung
@USAmbSL
[7/2/2024 10:47 AM, 95.5K followers, 8 retweets, 52 likes]
Throughout our meetings this week with diverse economic and political leaders and Sri Lankan government officials, @USTreasury’s Deputy Assistant Secretary Kaproth and I discussed continued progress toward implementation of the IMF program and reiterated U.S. support for the Sri Lankan people. As partners like the U.S. work closely with Sri Lanka to strengthen the economy and put the country on a healthier and more sustainable trajectory, economic reforms that increase transparency and accountability, and engage all stakeholders, are essential.
Central Asia
António Guterres
@antonioguterres
[7/2/2024 12:00 PM, 2.3M followers, 98 retweets, 269 likes]
Today in the Kyrgyz Republic, I commended President Sadyr Zhaparov for his leadership in advocating for sustainable mountain development. The @UN & Kyrgyzstan are strong partners on regional peace & security issues, the mountain agenda & the implementation of the #GlobalGoals.

António Guterres
@antonioguterres
[7/2/2024 3:52 PM, 2.3M followers, 94 retweets, 286 likes]
The Kyrgyz Republic stands on the frontlines of the climate crisis despite its negligible contribution to the problem. My gratitude to the local communities & young climate advocates I met today, for sharing their experiences, ideas & solutions for #ClimateAction.

António Guterres
@antonioguterres
[7/2/2024 10:24 PM, 2.3M followers, 54 retweets, 165 likes]
I thank Kyrgyzstan for the honour of naming one of the peaks of the Tian Shan mountains after the @UN. The naming of “UN Peak” reflects our links with mountain communities and the mountain agenda around the world, and our efforts to protect these fragile ecosystems.

Joanna Lillis
@joannalillis
[7/3/2024 12:18 AM, 29.3K followers, 2 likes]
Putin arrives in #Kazakhstan ahead of SCO summit in Astana, also to be attended by Xi

Furqat Sidiqov
@FurqatSidiq
[7/2/2024 8:41 PM, 1.4K followers, 1 retweet, 5 likes]
Had a productive meeting with Mr. Benjamin Todd, VP for Global Business Development at EXIM Bank. We discussed strengthening #economic ties between #Uzbekistan and the #USA through collaborative projects. Excited for future growth opportunities! #EXIMBank #USUzbekRelations

Furqat Sidiqov
@FurqatSidiq
[7/2/2024 8:34 PM, 1.4K followers, 1 like]
Today’s virtual roundtable w/ US&Canada-based companies, associations, & officials, alongside reps. of the Ministry of Mining Industry & Geology of UZ was a great success. We reviewed UZ’s mineral wealth & discussed potential p’ship. Thanks to #AUCC for their invaluable assistance.

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[7/2/2024 5:06 PM, 23.5K followers, 3 retweets, 13 likes]
Karakalpakstan: The only place in Uzbekistan where you see two domestic/national flags side by side. I admire how people easily switch between Karakalpak and Uzbek, speaking them equally beautifully.

{End of Report}
To subscribe to the SCA Morning Press Clips, please email SCA-PressOfficers@state.gov. Please do not reply directly to this email.