After a tip-off by U.S. intelligence officials and only a few hours left Austrian police made swift arrests. The plot seems too bizarre not to be true. Abul Baraa, aka Ahmad Armih, the German based hate-preacher in Berlin radicalized via Tik-tok or Istagram a 19-year Beran A. to swear the oath of alliance to the Islamic State. 

U.S. officials have confirmed their role in identifying a suspected terrorist plot planned for a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna this weekend. During a Friday briefing, White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby said the U.S. provided information to Austrian authorities, who have made several arrests in relation to the alleged foiled attack.

The plan was to take a car, pack it full of explosives and drive it to the Vienna venue of the Ernst Happel stadium at the time packed with 65,000 “Swifties” and detonate the car bomb causing mass casualties. Bomb-making instructions and machetes were also found.

The Heeresnachrichtenamt got the tip-off and passing it on to the newly reconstituted Directorate of State Security and Intelligence (DNS) who swung into action. The DNS who are still fighting the ghosts of scandals took over from the foreign intelligence service. 

Breaking the whatsapp application police worked out the communication traffic, and Beran A. and Luca were arrested in Ternitz, a small village in the south of Vienna. Three other suspects were detained. Beran A., who lived still in the residence of his parents was partly assembling the bomb in the garage of his parents’ residence when police moved in. 

The shock of the planned attack was felt by the “Swifties”, the countless fans of the American pop legend. On the back of the pro-Islamic demonstrations German agitation is manifested. Although current media coverage does not bring the undercurrent of Germany laws will be replaced by Sharia law into the debate terror experts foresee a radicalization of youth. “We will wait and see”, says one expert contacted. “Dissatisfaction is expressed by knowing what we don’t want but being unclear what we want”, says another expert. Roughly 200,000 people were scheduled to attend the sold-out Vienna shows. 

The Alpen republic struggles with online monitoring since the laws of the country do not permit surveillance. Political parties argue that the laws of the country must be changed. 

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Russia lost a staggering 1,740 troops in a single day, the highest tally of casualties for Moscow since the start of the invasion in 2022, according to Ukraine.

In the previous 24 hours, Ukraine also claimed Russia had lost 30 tanks and 42 armoured vehicles.

Death toll and military hardware statistics are difficult to assess with both sides giving different or little information.

However, Ukraine‘s armed forces have claimed Russia has so far lost an eye-watering 484,030 men during the course of the ongoing war.

Earlier this month, the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) estimated Russia‘s casualties have likely reached 465,000.

French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné recently suggested this figure would be closer to 500,000. The BBC reported that at least 50,000 Russian soldiers had been confirmed dead.

Russia last gave an update on its losses in September 2022, saying 6,000 soldiers had been killed.

Both sides have suffered huge losses in the fighting. Russia is currently advancing in the vicinity of Kharkiv, Ukraine‘s second-largest city.

In recent days, Moscow’s soldiers reportedly took control of nine villages near the city.

Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine‘s military chief, said on Monday: “Units of the defence forces are fighting fierce defensive battles. The attempts of the Russian invaders to break through our defences have been stopped.”

“The situation is difficult, but the defence forces of Ukraine are doing everything to hold defensive lines and positions, (and) inflict damage on the enemy.”

Ukrainian soldiers are still lacking supplies and key ammunition.

Kharkiv regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov, has added: “The enemy is trying to deliberately stretch it (front line), attacking in small groups, but in new directions, so to speak.”

Source: Daily Express

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Shares surged past $70 in early trade, giving the firm a market value of more than $9bn. They ended the day at about $58, still up more than 16%.

The long-awaited moment will inject more than $200m into Trump Media & Technology Group and hands the former president a stake worth more than $4bn.

Analysts say that is far more than the firm’s performance warrants.

Trump Media’s Truth Social, a Twitter-like service, brought in just $3.3m in revenue in the first nine months of last year and lost nearly $50m.

It says 8.9 million accounts have been created since the platform launched to the general public in 2022 as an alternative to mainstream sites such as Facebook, but it is not clear how many are active.

By comparison, the recently-listed Reddit currently has a market value of about $11bn. It boasts more than 70 million users and brought in $800m in revenue last year.

Kristi Marvin, chief executive of SPACInsider, compared Trump Media – which trades under the ticker DJT for Mr Trump’s initials – to a meme stock, in which prices are untethered from the business prospects.

Interest in Trump Media has also been fuelled by individual investors, as opposed to Wall Street firms, many of them apparently Trump supporters.

“Everybody expected to trade a little bit crazy today, which it has,” she said. “The real question is how does it trade a week from now, two weeks from now and nobody really knows.”

The deal to list Trump Media was first announced in 2021.

The move was accomplished via what is known as a SPAC, a merger with a publicly listed shell company, Digital World Acquisition Corp, which was expressly created to buy a company and take it public.

The deal was delayed by government investigations and other hurdles, but regulators cleared it earlier this year and Digital World shareholders voted in favour last week.

Ahead of the listing on the Nasdaq exchange, Trump Media officials called it a “pivotal moment” for the firm – and the wider media landscape.

“As a public company, we will passionately pursue our vision to build a movement to reclaim the Internet from Big Tech censors,” said Trump Media chief executive Devin Nunes, a former congressman.

“We will continue to fulfil our commitment to Americans to serve as a safe harbour for free expression and to stand up to the ever-growing army of speech suppressors.”

The debut comes at a critical moment for Mr Trump, who has been scrambling for cash to pay legal penalties and owns more than half of the firm’s shares.

He is currently barred from selling his holdings for about six months, making it difficult for him to tap the windfall immediately.

The company’s board, which is stocked with allies including one of his sons, could potentially change that rule, but analysts have said they think that would be unlikely to happen immediately.

If Mr Trump were to sell a significant chunk of his shares, it could hurt the share price.

Investors face other risks as well, tied to Mr Trump’s political fortunes and his 2024 presidential campaign.

A loss might be expected to hurt the share price, but a win could have the opposite effect, especially if it generated further demand from buyers hoping to curry favour with Mr Trump, said Michael Ohlrogge, a law professor at New York University.

However, Prof Ohlrogge said the current share price is “far, far elevated above what anyone would consider its fundamental value”.

Source: BBC

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Reflecting on the Soviet Union’s collapse 32 years ago and attempting to draw any sort of conclusion is often a matter of perspective. In his new book, “Moscow’s Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR,” Dr. Isaac McKean Scarborough, an assistant professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Leiden University, writes of the collapse from one of the Soviet Union’s most distant peripheries — Dushanbe. In doing so, he highlights a perspective not often taken into account in Western understanding of the collapse, charting how Moscow’s reforms — glasnost and perestroika — played out in the far-flung Tajik context and ultimately resulted in rapid change, economic collapse, and violence, as they did elsewhere.

But the violence did not end with the collapse in Tajikistan. As Scarborough told The Diplomat’s Catherine Putz, “In Tajikistan, moreover, this collapse was made longer and more visceral by the civil war that followed, and I think we need to keep in mind that for the majority of the citizens of Tajikistan, there is no clear line between the two. The collapse of the USSR became the civil war; one moved smoothly and quickly into the other.”

In the following interview, Scarborough explains the state of affairs in Soviet Tajikistan in the years leading up to the collapse, discusses the effects of reforms on the Tajik economy, the republican government’s reliance on and loyalty to Moscow, and how Tajikistan continues to wrestle with the unresolved tensions of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Your book “Moscow’s Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR” focuses on the collapse of the USSR from one of its most distant peripheries: Soviet Tajikistan. In this corner of the Soviet Union in 1985 as Moscow was starting to push reforms you note that  “Tajikistani politicians and average citizens alike” viewed the Soviet economic and political system with a “modicum of satisfaction.” For readers who may be surprised by that assessment, can you explain what you mean?

I think there is a general feeling in the West that life in the USSR was fundamentally bad – poor, dirty, devoid of modern amenities – and that most Soviet citizens essentially wished for the Soviet system to collapse. But this really wasn’t the case. Although significantly falling behind European or American standards of living, life in most parts of the USSR was in fact quite decent by the 1970s and 1980s. As the economic historian Robert Allen has shown, for example, if compared to almost any country outside of Europe or the “West,” the economic outcomes achieved by Soviet citizens in this period are amongst the world’s best. Dissatisfaction, then, was driven not by actual economic degradation – but rather by the sense that life was no longer improving by the late 1970s in ways that it previously had.  And in Moscow, or Leningrad, or perhaps Kiev, this was true: Soviet economic life had reached a certain plateau, beyond which the state seemed unable to provide much more in terms of goods, or services, or basic entertainment.

For people in Tajikistan, however, this saturation point had not yet been reached. Life into the mid-1980s was continuing to improve, and the basic amenities of life, such as refrigerators, or cars, or air conditioning units, or children’s theaters, were still spreading and providing tangible and real improvements to standards of living. There were, of course, endemic problems – from the lack of housing available in cities to the cotton monoculture retarding economic growth to Tajikistan’s pitifully low standing in the USSR – but there was no denying that life was all the same getting better, year after year. And this, I think, is what drove the general sense of sanguinity: it wasn’t that things couldn’t have been better – they certainly could have been – but that as it was, the system worked, and there was no obvious reason to change it.

How were Gorbachev’s reforms — glasnost and perestroika — carried out in Tajikistan? What were some of the initial economic and political consequences of the reforms?

One key distinction that should be made between “perestroika” and “glasnost” is that these were legally quite different processes, although in retrospect we tend to clump the two together. Perestroika, in the sense of economic reforms meant to restructure the Soviet Union’s enterprises and consumer sector, was made up of a series of laws that changed the rules governing state-owned production and private enterprises. Glasnost, on the other hand, constituted a more amorphous series of changes – legal amendments changing the legislative system in Moscow, but also informal directives and administrative shifts in policy and tone that were aimed at fomenting criticism of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and promoting social change. 

Perestroika’s legal backing meant that changes to production and enterprise activity were unavoidable, and the leadership of the Tajik SSR had no choice but to implement them across Tajikistan. Loyal to Moscow, they did so very thoroughly, which led to factories lowering production (to save roubles), private businesses being founded, and, by 1989, the initial signs of recession. 

With glasnost an administrative policy, however, there was much more room for local interpretation. Individuals like Kahhor Mahkamov, the leader of the Communist Party of Tajikistan in the late 1980s and a generally conservative figure, used this to their advantage, avoiding any criticism of the state and promoting their own candidates in the new electoral system. When change did occur in terms of political liberalization, it was often the result of direct intervention from Moscow: when Gorbachev’s advisor Aleksander Yakovlev visited Dushanbe in 1987 and caused a local Communist Party shakeup, for example, or when he later helped to push through Tajikistan’s Law on Language in 1989. But the overall situation in Tajikistan by 1989 and early 1990 was both paradoxical and confusing: on the one hand, perestroika’s reforms had led to economic change and even inflation and recession, while on the other the republican government was avoiding glasnost as much as possible and trying to pretend like life was continuing as before.  

In Chapter 5, you discuss the unexpected and bloody riots that took place in Dushanbe in February 1990 and remark that “the idea that the events could have been spontaneous or uncontrolled is frequently dismissed outright.” I see parallels to that in modern Tajikistan, and elsewhere in Central Asia. Why do you think it’s so difficult to digest the idea that a situation, or a series of cascading events, might not have some specific hand behind them?

There’s an understandable temptation, I think, both in Tajikistan and elsewhere (and in fact in the West, too), to find a simple and identifiable cause of political violence or negative political outcomes. And it’s always much simpler to point to particular “bad actors,” or “organizers,” or “outside forces” directing the actions of crowds, rather than to pick apart the motivations of the many people involved and the ways in which their actions came together to instigate violence. This also helps to avoid giving legitimacy to the motivations of those involved, which is emotionally easier – we don’t generally want to justify violence, or to ascribe violent motives to average citizens. So instead of considering how economic recession or the loss of jobs can lead to frustration, mass action, and ultimately violence in a collective way, we blame some unseen individuals. Someone lied to the rioters, someone misled them – they themselves are not to blame, nor do we have to deal with their actual motivations or frustrations.

Immediately after the February 1990 riots, this was the dominant discourse in Dushanbe about the riots: from all sides, politicians found it much simpler, emotionally preferable, and politically more useful to blame each other or outsiders than to ask the rioters why they had been on the square, or how the violence had begun. But by refusing to ask these questions, they unfortunately not only failed to undermine the roots of conflict, but in practice tipped the situation even closer to the edge.

Tajikistan’s Soviet leadership seemed to be in denial that the union was collapsing, but ultimately declared independence as did the other republics. What was the root of the Tajikistani leadership’s reluctance to let its connection to Moscow go? And in what ways did that shape the circumstances which gave rise to the civil war?

A number of years ago, Buri Karimov, the former head of Tajikistan’s State Planning Committee (Gosplan) was kind enough to grant me a long interview in Moscow. I asked him then how he had experienced the move to Russia in the early 1990s after his loss of political power during the February 1990 riots – to which he just shrugged. “We were already here every week,” he said, explaining that government work in Dushanbe essentially meant coordinating nearly everything through Moscow; there wasn’t much for him to adjust to afterwards.

I think this is very representative of how the leadership in Dushanbe viewed their positions of power: as an extension of Moscow’s. Because of the place of the Tajik economy in the Soviet Union as a provider of raw materials (primarily cotton, of course), the state relied even more than most republics on centrally organized financial flows. Institutionally, there was also a clear culture of deference to Moscow – much more than in other small Soviet republics, such as Lithuania, where the historian Saulius Grybkauskus, for example, has done important work demonstrating the local party’s independence and sense of local identity. But the Communist Party of Tajikistan and government leaders in Dushanbe could hardly conceive of operating outside of the Soviet remit – it just didn’t compute.

This didn’t change even after the collapse of the USSR, as the new president of Tajikistan, Rahmon Nabiev, continued to defer to Moscow and largely failed to develop important elements of statehood, including any semblance of a military. No one, in fact, seemed to have developed a clear notion of what the independent Tajikistani state should look like at that point – a muddled situation that created additional space for populist mobilization in the face of non-existent state capacity to oppose it.

In some ways, your book serves as a prologue for the Tajik Civil War — we see the advent of some of the major players and the roots of the conflict to come. How does the history as you’ve laid it out, contrast with the narrative in modern Tajikistan about the civil war?

Curiously enough, there is less of an active debate about the civil war in Tajikistan than might be expected, a few decades after it ended. During and immediately after the civil war in the mid-to-late 1990s, there were a number of memoirs/political treatises published by those involved in the war, which were often largely focused on blaming the opposing side for the war’s initiation and extremes. In the years after 2000, moreover, some very important work was done by Tajikistani scholars to delve into the structural and social causes of the war, and I would highlight the work of the historian Gholib Ghoibov and the journalist Nurali Davlat, upon which I draw extensively. For the most part, though, the narrative has gone fallow since then, leaving an incomplete discussion about the causes, start, and course of the war – but one that tends, in some ways similar to my own work, to situate the war in its immediate context of perestroika, reform, and Soviet collapse. Which exact factors – Gorbachev’s reforms, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the breakdown of political authority – then led to war are argued over to this day, but most people in Tajikistan, I think, would also associate the war with this period immediately prior. 

So in many ways where my work may differ, I think, is more with the established Western narratives of the Tajik Civil War. These tend to look for causes either in earlier history – for example, in the experiences of forced resettlement and larger socialization in Tajikistan’s south from the 1930s to the 1950s – or in the “particularities” of life in Tajikistan, from its relative religiosity to local norms of honor and masculinity. By returning to the historical and archival record of the years immediately before the civil war and first months of war itself, however, I found that these elements of unusualness were neither terribly present nor particularly helpful in terms of explaining politicians’ behavior or the reactions of the people who then participated in violence. As Ted Gurr has argued, it can be quite tempting to appeal to “aggressive instincts” or elements of otherness to explain one or another example of political violence, but in practice war is largely the result of human commonalities across time and geography.  In the case of the Tajik Civil War, I found that the common experience of Soviet collapse and populist mobilization led to violence – in fact as it did in many other parts of the former USSR. I’m hopeful that this is a story that will resonate with people in Tajikistan, who know far better than I the cost of this violence.

How can this history help us understand modern Tajikistan?

Like much of the former USSR, I think, Tajikistan is still living out the consequences of the Soviet collapse, in the sense that not all the final choices seem to have yet been made about what the proper status quo ante should be. In Tajikistan, moreover, this collapse was made longer and more visceral by the civil war that followed, and I think we need to keep in mind that for the majority of the citizens of Tajikistan, there is no clear line between the two. The collapse of the USSR became the civil war; one moved smoothly and quickly into the other. The civil war then defined the country’s political order in both the 1990s during the conflict and in later decades, notwithstanding the formal end to the war in 1997. Violence in fact continued for many years in a variety of forms, and the state’s moves to first incorporate former opposition fighters into the government after 1997 and then remove most of them in the following years meant that the resolution of the conflict started in 1992 stayed immediate for decades.

Where this has left Tajikistani society today, I think, is in a continuing quandary about how to deal with the unresolved tensions of the late 1980s and early 1990s. There has essentially been no opportunity to collectively decide on matters like language policy, or city development, or the privatization of industry, or broad economic modernization, and there remains a great deal of debate and disagreement on all levels about these matters. Should Dushanbe be rebuilt in steel and glass in an attempt to remove the vestiges of colonial Soviet material culture? Should Russian be encouraged in Tajikistani schools as a way of helping the country’s labor migrants in Russian workplaces? When people tell the stories of their lives since 1992 in Tajikistan, it comes out rushed and running together – “in a single breath” (na odnom dykhanii), as they say in Russian. Tajikistanis haven’t had time to breathe since 1992, let alone to answer these questions or to try to comprehend everything that has changed since the collapse of the USSR. 

Source: The Diplomat

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Prabowo Subianto, a former-general-turned-defense minister, is set to become Indonesia’s next president after taking a huge lead in unofficial results and declaring victory in Wednesday’s general election.

This is the third attempt for 72-year-old Subianto at the presidency, having lost to current President Joko Widodo twice, in 2014 and 2019. Widodo, popularly known as “Jokowi,” is leaving office as a hugely popular leader with an 80% approval rating after serving the maximum two terms.

Subianto joined Jokowi’s government as defense minister in 2019 and has since tried to emphasize that any bitter rivalry with the president is a thing of the past. He aligned his campaign with Jokowi’s popularity by promising continuity with the president’s agenda, including populist domestic programs, and economic modernization.

Subianto also controversially named Jokowi’s eldest son, 36-year-old Gibran Rakabuming Raka, as his running mate, after the minimum legal age to hold office was lowered from 40. Although Jokowi did not formally endorse any candidate, Subianto has widely been considered as Jokowi’s implicit preference to become president.

However, it remains to be seen what shape Subianto’s policy takes after these preliminary results become official and he takes office.

“The key thing here is that Prabowo’s alignment with Jokowi has very much been an electoral strategy, not necessarily a governing strategy,” Doug Ramage, an analyst with BowerGroupAsia, told Reuters news agency.

What were Subianto’s campaign promises?

Subianto’s election manifesto was based on a platform titled “Developing Indonesia,” which included pledges of an 8% economic growth target and improvements to the palm oil production chain.

His campaign also ran on promises to raise salaries for civil servants, police and military officers, and provide more affordable housing, along with a pledge to eradicate extreme poverty in two years.

Subianto also pledged to continue working on a project to move Indonesia’s capital from Jakarta to a planned city called “Nusantara” in the province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. The plan, known as the Nusantara Capital City (IKN) project, had been ratified by Jokowi in 2019.

Aditya Perdana, a political scientist at the University of Indonesia, told DW it is likely that Subianto will be able to fulfil the promise to continue work on the IKN, although “balancing the interest and the investment from the West and China in the new capital project will be a challenge.”

“The next government has to be able to manage it so that it will not heavily favor one side,” he said.

Another cornerstone campaign promise by Subianto was a free lunch program for schoolchildren and free extra nutrition for pregnant women to combat stunting.

Indonesians wait and see

Bhima Yudhistira, director of the Jakarta-based think tank Center of Economic and Law Studies (Celios), said Indonesians will be watching to see whether a Subianto government “will run their policies and populist programs during the first year in office and whether the state budget will support it.”

One of the public’s immediate concerns is food prices and the availability of staples like rice and sugar. “Market players are also looking forward to know who will take over the offices of ministry of agriculture and trade, as this will play an important role,” Yudhistira said.

On the global economic front, Yudhistira said the next administration will face headwinds, as overall economic growth around the world is expected to slow over the next two years.

“The Chinese economy as our largest trading partner is also facing problems domestically. There is a property crisis, there is a slowdown, retail domestic consumption is also weak in China, this will certainly provide challenges” for Indonesia’s government in the future, he said.

Trying to soften strongman image

Subianto has tried to soften his public image, including with a recent social media campaign portraying him as a “cuddly grandpa.”

However, the image makeover belies his murky past with links to Indonesia’s Suharto dictatorship, which ended in 1998. For 15 years, Subianto was Suharto’s son-in-law.

Subianto is accused of involvement in several human rights violations while operating in Timor-Leste in the 1980s and 90s as commander of an Indonesian special forces unit during Indonesia’s occupation of the now-independent country. Subianto has denied those allegations.

He is also accused of commanding a unit that was allegedly involved in the kidnapping and torture of pro-democracy activists during the end of the Suharto dictatorship in the late 1990s.

Although he was never formally charged, Subianto was dishonorably discharged from the military after the incident and went into exile.

For two decades until he became defense minister in 2019, Subianto was banned from entering the United States because of the alleged Timor-Leste human rights abuses.

But it appears Indonesians are willing to leave Subianto’s past behind, as one voter told DW: “Give him a chance, why not, he’s already elderly.”

Source: DW

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AKIPRESS.COM – The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic and the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland held consultations on December 4.

The delegation of Kyrgyzstan was led by Deputy Foreign Minister Aibek Moldogaziev.

The delegation of Switzerland was led by Deputy Secretary of State, Head of the Eurasia Section of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs Muriel Peneveyre.

The countries discussed bilateral relations, interaction in the framework of international organizations and exchanged views about international agenda.

The current state of bilateral relations and planned bilateral events were reviewed.

A special attention was paid to cooperation in trade, economic, investment, water and environmental spheres.

The parties expressed readiness to continue an active cooperation in the framework of international organizations, including UN and OSCE.

The sides also confirmed readiness for joint efforts in development of bilateral relations via attraction of investments, strengthening of political dialogue, establishment of B2B contacts and expansion of the regulatory framework.

The heads of delegations noted a successful implementation of the Program Cooperation for 2022-2025.

Source: Akipress

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Conversations have focused on key roads and access to remote settlements.

The heads of the security services of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have dropped fresh hints that a border demarcation deal may be coming into focus, raising the prospect of an end to decades of violence-prone unease between the two nations.

Kamchybek Tashiyev, the head of Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee for National Security, or GKNB, and his Tajik counterpart, Saimumin Yatimov, met on December 1 in the Tajik town of Buston for talks that reportedly produced “key decisions” on how to resolve differences over the border. 

In remarks to journalists following negotiations, Tashiyev spoke in vague generalities, although he ventured that “we are very close to settling all matters.”

Yatimov was more discursive.

He said that a breakthrough solution had been agreed on how to manage use of the Vorukh-Khojai A’lo road, which crosses Kyrgyz territory and links the mainland of Tajikistan to the densely populated Tajik enclave of Vorukh. 

The point where the Kyrgyz and Tajik roads intersect has long served as a flashpoint for confrontations between local residents. When clashes broke out in the past, Kyrgyz communities have been able to dangle the threat of placing Vorukh under a blockade as leverage. 

Yatimov gave no details on what had been agreed. 

The Tajik security services chief continued, again without dwelling on specifics, to say Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have agreed that both countries will enjoy “permanent and uninterrupted” access to lands belonging to them but lying within the confines of the other country. 

While for Tajikistan this is a clear allusion to Vorukh, it is less obvious which Kyrgyz territory falls under this description. Possible candidates are Kyrgyz towns such as Arka and Borborduk, which can be reached on winding and uneven Kyrgyz roads that Tajik border troops have periodically threaten to block. 

The Kyrgyz-Tajik border extends approximately 980 kilometers. Fraught negotiations on establishing the exact contours of that line have been ongoing since December 2002. At present, around one-third of the border remains undefined.

Some of the strongest indications that this might change soon arrived when the presidents of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan met in October and subsequently intimated that a breakthrough in border delimitation negotiations was imminent. A press release on those talks from Tajik President Emomali Rahmon’s office asserted that “special attention was paid to the issues of determining the state border line” and that “agreements were reached on this matter some time ago.” 

This sustained positive dialogue marks an important de-escalation from events 2021 and 2022, when incidents that began as localized skirmishes escalated into outright armed conflicts. Dozens of people were killed over four days of fighting in September 2022. 

In the wake of that last bout of unrest, the armed forces of both countries have with pointed demonstrativeness worked on increasing their military capabilities, prompting concerns that any future combat could prove even more deadly. This fits a broader historic pattern. Where the kinds of cross-border skirmishes that took place in the 1990s through to the 2010s typically saw the deployment of light firearms at worst, more recent episodes have seen border forces target one another with heavy artillery and even rockets fired from unmanned drones.

Source: Eurasianet

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Baku, AZERTAC

A delegation led by head of the Apparatus of the Senate of Uzbekistan’s Oliy Majlis Kudrat Nurullayev has today visited the Alley of Honors to pay tribute to National Leader, architect and founder of the modern and independent Azerbaijani state Heydar Aliyev, and laid flowers at the Great Leader`s tomb.

The delegation then visited the Alley of Martyrs to commemorate Azerbaijani heroes who gave their lives for the country’s independence and territorial integrity. The Uzbekistani delegation also visited the Eternal Flame monument.

They enjoyed a panoramic view of Baku and were informed about the history of the Alley of Martyrs and redevelopment works carried out in the city.

Source: Azertag

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As recently as the early 1980s, central bankers around the world could be heard moaning and groaning about having to hold physical gold reserves to back up their currencies. The trouble, expense and potential loss of picturesque cast metal in a world of infinite fiat money and digital bytes reflecting off satellites. It’s a trend: citizens would be amazed to learn that only around 8% of the money working as the lifeblood of economies around the world is in the form of coins and banknotes. Folding money is considered old-fashioned.

A banker might roll his eyes and joke to a colleague: “Imagine, we are continuing to pay out good money to pile up these shiny precious metal ingots in a vault, with armed guards. What is this, the Roman Empire?”

You do not hear that in the new Millennium. Disparagement of gold bullion has quieted, in an age of terrifying global debt overhang and failing trust in eqforeign counterparts and fiat currencies. As the world’s economies glide past an estimated one quadrillion dollars in debt instruments, and inflation eats away at everyone’s assets (but not those of the gold bugs and their holdings, notably, as gold, as recently as the 1970s going for US$ 32/oz., zips past US$ 2,000) the usefulness and credibility of the so-called “petrodollar” look increasingly unappetizing.

This would have been unthinkable had it not been for the foundation of the BRICS Group of nations. Its most unlikely beginning was with avaricious Goldman Sachs – of all people – who proposed a grouping of China, India and Russia, in mutual economic interest, pointedly excluding the USA, the “center of everything” since the end of World War II in 1945.

Hu Jintao, Manmohan Singh and Vladimir Putin got together on the sidelines of the 2008 Group of 8 (G8) meeting in St. Petersburg. Russia, now blackballed because of its “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine, was a G8 member, while India and China attended the gathering as part of a purported G8 “outreach” to emerging economies.

In 2009, the first summit of “BRICs” countries (excluding South Africa) took place in Russia. In 2010, at a foreign ministers’ meeting, the initial four agreed to invite South Africa, a formidable economic power on the continent.

By 2011, now a five-country organization—with the “S” now standing for South Africa— formed up, mostly in aversion to the increasingly inconvenient burden of dealing in dollars. Joining together with a BRIC Currency could alleviate the heavy burden incurred by US dollar-denominated debt, in a zero-sum game, always favoring the wealthy western economies: interest rates soared, as the US Fed struggled against inflation.

About this time, certain countries quietly started selling their USD reserves and stowing away tons of shiny gold bars. Note that it was not simply the “mavericks” who did not care for the damage inflicted on their economies by the Fed: the Finance Minister of Norway, never thought of as “anti-American” nation, publicly belly-ached about having to sell his country’s precious hydrocarbon reserves in dollars.

The other alarming factor was the lethal weaponization of the dollar. With the ignominious ouster of the Shah of Iran and the subsequent hostage crisis, billions of dollars of Iranian assets were “frozen” in the USA. When the Federal Republic of Germany went to reclaim their gold bullion from the Bank of New York they were first brushed off and later found many bars had been melted down and recast.

Around the planet, Uncle Sam began to be perceived as an unreliable, if not unscrupulous relative, who would turn on you and pocket your valuables if you did not behave his way. Whatever happened to Khaddafi’s tons of gold, spirited off by NATO pirates?

The buzzword was “dedollarization”. Appealing though the notion might be to those whose billions are locked away by Washington, it is worthwhile to pause and consider how much time went by and effort was expended in setting up the Euro. The EU, certified in 1957 by the “Luxemburg Treaty”, took a full forty-two years of hard work, before Maastricht was hammered out, in 1999.

The most recent BRICS Summit, hosted by President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in August of this year, received endorsement from outliers like Algeria, Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Member countries might be active in their economics, trade, and finance relationships, including payment protocol, but it is an unbalanced interdependence, pitting a behemoth like the PRC against, say, Argentina. An advanced economy cannot create a common currency with a primitive one, as one is too dependent on the other: interdependence implies balance. Politics alone won’t do the job.

Bear in mind that with all the grunting and shoving toward de-dollarization, currency trading in USD still constitutes 88 per cent of the total. Global reserves sit at 60 per cent in USD, 20 per cent in Euros and only 2 per cent in Renminbi. National debts are mostly in USD. It was amusing to watch Argentina hurriedly swap their Renminbi, disbursed after a recent large purchase from the PRC, for billions of dollars.

ASEAN gave it a shot, looking to set up the “Asian Currency Unit” (ACU); that yielded nothing, except for a convenient swap facility, eventually known as “Local Currency Settlements” (LCS), still functioning as of this writing.

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In Kazakhstan, greenhouse owners are facing bankruptcy as the majority of cucumbers and tomatoes are being imported from Turkmenistan at low prices. Consequently, Kazakh farmers with greenhouses struggle to sell their produce at a fair price, leading to financial distress.

Deputy Prime Minister Zhumangarin responded to the issue, stating, “There is such a problem. We have established standards for farm greenhouses. Now, we want to create accreditation. They will receive government assistance, such as subsidies for gas, electricity, and so on. From January, farmers begin planting vegetables in greenhouses.”

He acknowledged the alarming situation and highlighted measures taken to protect the domestic market. Zhumangarin explained that closing the border is challenging due to mutual agreements, but contingency plans exist if the share of imported products rises.

One reason for the increasing prices of greenhouse products in Kazakhstan is due to the issue of fuel and coal. Turkmen authorities reduced gas prices for their greenhouses, making their produce less expensive. Meanwhile, Kazakh greenhouse owners purchase coal at the same price as many others, leading to increased expenses.

Source: Horti Daily

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