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bne November 2021 Eurasia I 65
that Kazakh customs officials have been playing with data on commodity sales to China for years.
"There are several reasons” for the inconsistencies, Svoik told Eurasianet. “On the one hand, they have different methods of accounting for commodity groups. On the other hand, there is corruption and smuggling.”
Transparency Kazakhstan, the local branch of the international anti- corruption watchdog, has reported on such data discrepancies with other countries as well, also blaming graft in the customs agency.
There is one thing the data agree on: Kazakh coal is a drop in the bucket for China, which imported 308mn tonnes in 2019, according to the IAE, three times Kazakhstan’s total production. (China is also the world’s largest coal producer.)
But for Kazakhstan, which is struggling to wean itself off the climate-warming fuel, its neighbour’s crisis creates new opportunities. For now, 90% of coal mined in Kazakhstan is used locally, where it is sold at state-regulated prices, which are one-third lower than export prices.
As Kazakhstan switches from coal to
gas and some renewables to meet its emissions targets, it will free up coal supplies to sell abroad, the Association of Mining and Metallurgical Enterprises, a lobby group, told the Kursiv business newspaper on October 4.
With higher coal prices, sending this dirtiest of fuels straight across the border by rail becomes more economical, even if the net warming effects on the global climate remain the same.
Almaz Kumenov is an Almaty-based journalist.
This article originally appeared on Eurasianet.
Taliban and Tajikistan engage in sabre-rattling
Eurasianet
While it is trying to burnish its legitimacy in the eyes of the global community, the Taliban is engaging in an open battle of words with a neighbour to the north: Tajikistan.
Over a handful of days, representatives of the new regime in Afghanistan have made public statements condemning the Tajik government over what it has described as meddling in internal Afghan affairs.
The verbal barbs are in part a response to repeated demands from Dushanbe that a future Afghan government include more ethnic Tajiks in its ranks.
Tajik President Emomali Rahmon doubled down on his criticism of the Taliban in an address to the UN General Assembly on September 23, warning that “various terrorist groups are actively using the unstable military-political situation in Afghanistan in order to strengthen their positions.”
“We are seriously concerned and regret that Afghanistan is once again on its way to becoming a platform for international terrorism,” he said.
Taliban patience has been strained by those asides and also, most likely,
a steady trickle of reports about Tajikistan offering a haven and assistance to exiled Afghan groups opposed to the new government in Kabul.
In an interview with Qatar-based broadcaster Al-Jazeera, acting Afghan deputy prime minister Abdul Salaam Hanafi at the start of this week warned Tajikistan not to meddle in Afghanistan’s affairs.
“We will not allow any neighbouring nation to interfere in the internal matters of Afghanistan,” he said.
The exact same message reportedly came this week from another deputy head of the Taliban government, Abdul Ghani Baradar.
A more junior Taliban figure, Inamullah Samangani, who has been described as a cultural envoy for the group, took an even cruder swipe at Rahmon on Twitter on September 29.
“He’s been president for 27 years, maybe he will be so for another six, or even more,” Samangani said, using the observation to note that Afghanistan would not take lessons on democracy from Tajikistan.
Tajikistan and its security partners have been mounting demonstrative military exercises since even before the Taliban marched into Kabul on August 15. There has been no let-up on that front.
Russia’s Central Military District on September 30 declared that troops from its 201st base had been conducting yet more drills in the mountains of Tajikistan to simulate an incursion by an “unlawful armed formation moving along a mountain serpentine towards a village.”
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