CENTRAL ASIA: Weekly news wrap

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

ANKARA, 19 Aug 2005 (IRIN) - Around 4,000 residents in eastern Tajikistan are to be resettled within five to six years from an area that will become the future Rogun reservoir, the Tajik Avesta news agency reported on Monday. Russian investors in the Rogun hydropower plant will reportedly compensate for the resettlement costs.

The construction of the Rogun hydropower plant started in the 1980s, but was suspended after Tajikistan became independent in 1991 and suffered a subsequent five year civil war from 1992 to 1997. Located some 110 km from the capital, Dushanbe, the plant has a projected height of 335 metres and a capacity of 13.3 billiard cu m of water. Some 65 percent of all Central Asia’s water originates in the mountains of Tajikistan, which cover almost 90 percent of the country.

Staying in Tajikistan, recent heavy rainfalls in the north resulted in mudflows in the Soghd district, according to a report by the Tajik emergency ministry on Monday. Mudflows reportedly washed away crops and roads in the area. In the eastern Jirgital district, high water levels in the local Surkhob river damaged two hundred metres of road linking the region with the capital. The emergency ministry reported that an assessment of the damage and rehabilitation work on the ground were underway.

On Thursday, Tajik border guards seized over 80 kg of heroin after an exchange of gunfire with three Afghan traffickers, AFP reported, citing the national anti-drugs agency. The incident took place 230 km southeast of Dushanbe, the agency's press officer, Avaz Yuldashev said.

According to Yuldashev, it was the largest drugs haul since Russian border guards withdrew in June from the Tajik-Afghan border, which they had patrolled for the past decade. Since the start of the year, more than two mt of drugs trafficked from Afghanistan, including more than 800 kg of heroin, have been seized in the former Soviet republic.

Tajikistan is a key trafficking route for drugs produced in Afghanistan - which accounts for 87 percent of the world's opium crop - bound for western Europe and Russia.

In Kazakhstan, the constitutional court on Friday announced presidential elections in the country would take place on 4 December, putting an end to controversy between some Kazakh officials and the opposition, AFP said. The opposition had insisted the vote should take place in December, while a number of Kazakh officials had wanted it to be postponed by a year.

In Turkmenistan, the country office of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) launched its own dedicated website on Monday to raise the global profile of its work with Turkmen children and to highlight more than 10 years of development collaboration with Ashgabat. The website provides insights into the lives of Turkmen children and into the ongoing work of UNICEF in the largely desert, but energy-rich country.

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 prisoners in Kyrgyzstan's overcrowded and disease-infested prisons will be granted amnesty and released soon under a presidential order, media reports said.

According to newly-elected President Kurmanbek Bakiyev's office, in addition to 1,124 inmates who will be released, 1,500 more will have their sentences reduced under a general amnesty marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, Russian news agency Novosti reported. Parliament approved the amnesty in June. About 17,000 people are imprisoned in the country.

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