All press stories on this controversy note that the oil will be exported to China. But, as we have noted, Russia is racing with China to provide a Pacific outlet for Central Asian oil, and we suspect this is the real geopolitical imperative for this project. From the London Times, March 7:

This doesn't sound very good, does it? From the BBC, March 1:

An opposition leader in Uzbekistan has been jailed for 10 years for economic crimes, a Tashkent court has said. Nadira Khidoyatova of opposition group Sunshine Uzbekistan was found guilty of tax evasion and money laundering.

A very enlightening piece from the Dec. 28 Christian Science Monitor, "Kremlin reasserts control of oil, gas" by Fred Weir, points to Moscow designs to reassert its power in Eurasia, and possibly eventually on the global stage. This, in turn, sheds much light on why the US is really in Iraq...

From the New York Times, Dec. 12 (and apparently little-reported elsewhere):

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan, Dec. 11 - In the remote hamlet of Tamga, residents frustrated by corruption and the sorry legacy of a chemical spill did something that would have been unthinkable in Kyrygzstan not long ago: they rose up.

The current (Dec. 1) issue of The Economist includes a profile of "China's far west"—a region variously known as Xinjiang (to the Chinese), or East Turkestan or Uighurstan to its indigenous inhabitants, the Turkic and Muslim Uighurs. After providing some background on the separatist strife in the Autonomous Region (which readers of WW4 Report will already be familiar with), it notes the recent development of gasfields there and the construction, now underway, of a pipeline to Kazakhstan. We recently noted that Kazakhstan is to be connected with the new trans-Caucasian Baku-Ceyhan pipeline with a link across the Caspian Sea, at the other end of the country. Now, Kazakhstan is a vast place, but it is nearly inevitable the global planners already foresee linking these pipelines. The question, ultimately, is whose control all this infrastructure will fall under. With all eyes on the Baku-Ceyhan route, Japan is seeking a Pacific route for Siberian and (eventually) Central Asian oil and gas—which would, as we have noted, strategically by-pass longtime rival China.

Similar dynamics on both sides of the Caspian Sea. We recently noted unrest over contested elections in Azerbaijan, where the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline has just opened. Now Kazakhstan—slated to be connected to the new pipeline by a link across the Caspian—seems headed down the same path.

Human rights groups have strongly condemned the ruling by Uzbekistan's supreme court finding 15 defendants guilty of terrorism and sentencing them up to 20 years for their role in the May violence in Andijan. "It was expected and some could even have been given the death penalty, but as the case had received such wide international publicity the authorities did not dare to give capital sentences," said Tolib Yakubov, head of the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan (HRSU). "The trial was orchestrated."

Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev defends his use of force to put down unrest in the country's prisons, which cost four lives on Nov. 1. "Police did the right thing when they demanded that suspects and other inmates leave the prison for interrogations," said Bakiev. "[The inmates] refused to come out. [Law-enforcement officers] approached them to meet and they [the convicts] started shooting. Should they have been presented bagels in response?" (BBC, Nov. 2)