Page 79 - bneMagazine March 2023 oil discount

bne March 2023
Opinion 79
“These people today, they called for violence. What is that idea about the violence, who do you want to kill? When we spoke in the parliament that the violence is their [the opposition’s] only argument, when it becomes clear that they don’t have ideas or arguments, then they “spilled” the violence to the streets,” said Vucic in his address.
He added that citizens should not worry and that the “state will secure peace, security and safety for everyone”.
Although the extremists were shouting insults at Vucic during the protest, Aleksandar Popov from the Centre for Regionalism NGO, also speaking to Voice of America, said that the authorities have not lost control over the far right, and speculated that the protest would only have gone ahead
CENTRAL ASIA BLOG
Taliban’s lousy power deals exposed as Uzbekistan pulls plug in deadly cold
Fuad Shahbazov
Beware the fair-weather friend. Recent weeks saw Uzbekistan plunge large parts of Afghanistan into darkness as, faced by its coldest winter weather in 50 years and suffering energy shortages and disruptions, Tashkent opted to put its own citizens first and pull the plug on electricity supplies to the Afghans.
Afghanistan too suffered the severe cold snap and, with its power provision gone, crippling outages led to the deaths of at least 160 people left without heating, including babies, as well as the hospitalisation of hundreds of others.
Nobody can have been taken aback by Tashkent’s decision to declare force majeure and look after its own first. And there’s also the rather pertinent fact that the Taliban militants, who once more rule Afghanistan, became known for attacking vital infrastructure during their two-decade-long insurgency, preventing the completion of big power generation projects. Afghans reap what they sow.
The blackout situation was, though, even more galling for Kabul given that it was only very recently that the Taliban
with official endorsement. He also gave the example of the Pride parades that have gone ahead in the country for several years.
“Since President Vucic came to power, Gay Pride parades started to be organised with much less security since the hooligans and far-right stopped making problems, at least significant ones.
“One of the Gay Pride parades, that was ‘blessed’ by the state, was like we are in Holland. It was totally peaceful without extremists. So, obviously someone told them: stay at home; don’t make problems. Are they powerful enough to do this protest on February 15 by themselves? I sincerely doubt that,” concluded Popov.
Afghanistan's decrepit power infrastructure is plain for all to see in this scene from Kabul. / Peretz Partensky from San Francisco, cc-by-sa 2.0
proclaimed a new electricity supply agreement signed with the Uzbeks.
Some credit where credit is due. Since the US pulled out
of Afghanistan in August 2021, leaving behind a country that has since remained perilously close to an out and out humanitarian and economic catastrophe, it has in fact
been Uzbekistan, of all Afghanistan’s neighbours, that has appealed to the world to recognise that working with the Taliban is the only existing option for stabilizing the country and giving its imperiled people some kind of workable future.
The 450-megawatt power deal between Tashkent and
Kabul – specifically with Afghanistan’s power utility
Da Afghanistan Breshna Shirkat (DABS) – was announced after the Taliban's Acting Energy and Water Minister, Mullah Abdul Latif Mansour, at the start of January paid an official visit to Uzbekistan. With Tashkent a rare voice declaring significant commitment to intraregional cooperation involving Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the time was ripe
to strike a new energy deal.
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