Page 64 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine October 2024

64 I Eurasia bne October 2024
Another goal is to provide jobs for the burgeoning population. With an average of age of only 28, Uzbekistan needs to generate decent jobs for its young population.
“The goal is not simply to provide new job opportunities but decent job opportunities,” Turdimov told the summit’s delegates in Samarkand.
The local brands also need to be developed and here Uzbekistan’s Silk Road history can be a big advantage, as cities like Samarkand are already the stuff of legend and its fame has already driven the explosive growth in tourism in recent years.
In the next phase Uzbekistan needs to diversify its markets and embrace new
materials. “Uzbekistan has regional market but there is a ceiling. We have to look at non-traditional markets like North Africa, further afield in Europe and Asia,” Shafei told the delegates at the ITMF event.
“There has been lots of investment into machines with huge factories and state-of-the-art equipment, but Uzbekistan is double-landlocked and logistics remain difficult to manage with the current geopolitical situation. The government has provided support to logistics but it remains a challenge and it is still not fully utilising the closeness to Europe,” Shafei said.
Uzbekistan would love to export textiles to Southeast Asia as well, but currently its southern route into
Asia is blocked by the instability in Afghanistan. Delegates from Asia
to the ITMF annual summit told bne IntelliNews that currently there are no direct textile exports to Pakistan or India, but some Uzbek textiles goods are traveling there via intermediaries like Indonesia.
Delegates at the event also said that
in the next phase Uzbekistan needs to embrace man-made fibres as part of its textile sector. Some polyester is starting to be used, but as bne IntelliNews reported, Uzbekistan’s plastics industry is still in its infancy. But that will change when the very large MTO petrochemical complex in Bukhara comes online in about four years’ time to produce the raw materials to create a variety of man- made fibres for the country.
Nino Dolidze, of Georgia's International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy
Ailis Halligan in Tbilisi
Georgia’s leading election watchdog rejects the ruling party’s foreign agents law and will “defend
the will and rights of Georgian voters”
in next month’s elections, says Nino Dolidze, the executive director of the Tbilisi-based International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED).
“ISFED was created to support Georgia’s free and fair elections. Any money
we’ve received from foreign donors has been for the development of Georgia’s democracy. We are not representing any other country’s interests. We will never call ourselves ‘agents’ – it’s against our dignity”, Dolidze told bne IntelliNews in an interview in the Georgian capital this week.
In the run up to crucial elections which will determine Georgia’s future global allegiance, such an act of public disobedience could jeopardise ISFED’s role as election observer. However, Dolidze is determined the society will continue its work safeguarding the
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democratic process and advocating for real democracy in Georgia, and will resist pressure from the governing Georgian Dream party, which critics say is shifting Georgia away from the West and towards Russia.
“We don’t tell voters which party to support, we just want to make sure that they are voting in free and fair elections. We think the watchdog role and challenging non-democratic steps are important,” Dolidze says.
ISFED is joining the majority of Georgia’s non-governmental and media organisations in a boycott of the “law on the transparency of foreign influence”, passed in May this year. Both critics abroad and the Georgian political opposition have spoken out against
the legislation – dubbed the ‘Russian law’ – which they say aims to stigmatise organisations, stifle voices critical of the government and stir up anti-Western propaganda.
The controversial law requires all Georgian NGOs that receive at least 20% of their funding from abroad to publish voluminous details of their assets in an online portal by September 2nd, a deadline which has now passed. Organisations that failed to comply
are now subject to fines of GEL25,000 ($9,200) and will be forcibly registered by the government.
The “transparency of foreign influence” law has been compared to similar legislation passed in Russia in
2012, which has been used since to systematically eradicate all free and independent media.
Dolidze says the Georgian law serves to discredit, stigmatise and whip up distrust of those organisations that are internationally funded, albeit that that money is spent doing work inside Georgia, and, in the case of ISFED, preserving democracy and protecting voters’ voices.