Child beggars have long been part of the social fabric in Ashgabat, where some families acknowledge that they depend on such income for survival.

However, Ashgabat police have begun clearing the streets of those children as the Turkmen capital gears up for the Asian Indoor And Martial Arts Games (AIMAG) in September, according to residents and parents interviewed by RFE/RL.

Police officers, raiding the city in vans, order such children home and warn them not to return to the streets, said Ashgabat resident Amanmyrat Bugaev. 

An Ashgabat police officer within the juvenile-affairs department, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, described the process as rounding up repeat offenders, taking them home in police vans, and warning the parents that forcing children to beg is a criminal offense.

The officer said that in some cases the department summons the parents and issues official warnings.

He acknowledged that the “main” goal was to preserve the country’s “image,” although he said the measures were also aimed at safeguarding children.

Only source of income

“A disabled person in a wheelchair begging for money damages the image of any country,” the officer said. “The main goal is to fight something that might damage the [national] reputation.”

Some parents who acknowledge benefiting from alms collected by their children complained that the government’s effort deprives their families of their only source of income.

Turkmenistan is a mostly rural, post-Soviet country whose jobs and economy are heavily dependent on the state. The wealth from its sizable natural-gas and other exports, including cotton, has largely failed to trickle down to its 5 million or so people.

RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service spoke with four parents — all Ashgabat residents — who said the money their children made on the streets helped the family survive.

“Apart from my disabled son, there are three other small children in our family,” said one unemployed woman whose disabled child spends hours in the streets every day seeking handouts from strangers. She said the family also “depends on the monthly social allowance he gets from the government.”

“We would work, but there are no jobs, so we send our children to the streets, hoping for kind people’s donations,” said the woman, who didn’t want to give her name.

Widespread unemployment

None of the parents would say how much their children made in a day on Ashgabat’s streets.

Unemployment is widespread in Turkmenistan, although the government doesn’t release official figures. Regional media have put the jobless rate in the country at around 50 to 60 percent. 

Turkmenistan wants to use the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games, the brainchild of President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, to boost its image as a regional sports hub. The isolated nation expects tens of thousands of foreigners to visit during the September 17-27 event. 

In the months leading up to the games, authorities have restricted the movement of provinces’ residents to the capital, ordered former inmates to stay away from the games’ venues, and tried to clear the city of stray dogs and cats.

Farangis Najibullah wrote this article, based on a report by RFE/RL’s Turkmen service.
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Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Saturday it was suspending its migrant rescues in the Mediterranean because it felt threatened by the Libyan coastguard and the Italian government’s policies have made its job harder.

The aid group’s decision is the latest development in mounting tensions between Rome and NGOs as migration dominates Italy’s political agenda ahead of elections early next year.

“We are suspending our activities because now we feel that the threatening behaviour by the Libyan coastguard is very serious … we cannot put our colleagues in danger,” the president of MSF’s Italian arm Loris De Filippi told Reuters.

Almost 600,000 migrants have arrived in Italy over the past four years, the vast majority setting sail from lawless Libya in flimsy vessels operated by people smugglers. More than 13,000 migrants have died trying to make the crossing.

Charity boats have played a growing role in rescues, picking up more than a third of all migrants brought ashore so far this year against less than one percent in 2014.

However, Italy fears the groups are facilitating people smuggling and encouraging migrants to make the passage, and it has proposed a Code of Conduct governing how they operate.

Some groups, including MSF, have refused to sign the code.

They object to a requirement that Italian police officers be on their boats and that the boats must take migrants to a safe port themselves, rather than transferring them to other vessels to allow smaller boats to stay in the area for further rescues.

MSF operates one rescue ship in the Mediterranean, the Prudence, currently docked in the Sicilian port of Catania.

In the last six weeks the number of migrant arrivals in Italy has slowed sharply and Rome has begun collaborating more closely with the Libyan coastguard, which De Filippi said was threatening the NGOs and preventing them from working.

He said the Libyan coastguard had demanded the NGOs should leave an area of up to hundreds of kilometres around its coast, whereas previously they had been allowed to conduct search and rescue operations as close as 11 nautical miles to the mainland.

“Last year the coastguard fired 13 shots on our boat and that was in a situation that was much calmer than the present one,” said De Filippi.

He said MSF would continue its collaboration with another aid group, SOS Mediterranee, which operates a rescue ship in the Mediterranean with MSF doctors on board.

De Filippi said the Rome government’s Code of Conduct for NGOs and its support for the Libyan coastguard showed it was now mixing the humanitarian goal of saving lives with “a political and military intention” of reducing arrivals.

“We refuse to be co-opted into a system that blocks people from seeking safety and protection,” MSF tweeted, adding that the European Union’s immigration policies showed it was “determined to trap people in Libya.”

Oscar Camps, the founder of Proactiva Open Arms, another aid group active in the Mediterranean, also took aim at the EU, tweeting: “the first NGO out, this is just what the EU wants.”

An Italian government spokesman was not immediately available to comment, while Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-immigrant Northern League, said MSF’s move meant there would be “thousands fewer illegal immigrants for Italians to maintain.”

Last week Italy began a naval mission in Libyan waters to train and support its coastguard, despite opposition from factions in eastern Libya that oppose the U.N.-backed government based in Tripoli.

General Khalifa Haftar, a commander aligned with an Eastern-based parliament, told Italian daily Corriere della Sera on Saturday the presence of Italian military vessels in Libyan waters was unacceptable but he would not attack them.
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The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is appealing to the government of Ukraine in Kyiv and Russian-backed authorities in eastern Ukraine to provide basic services and pension benefits to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people struggling to survive in the rebel-held parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions.  

With the conflict in Ukraine in its fourth year, more than 10,000 people have been killed as sporadic fighting continues between Russian-backed rebels and government forces in eastern Ukraine, and the death toll continues to mount.

Among the living, those who are suffering the most include nearly 1.6 million internally displaced in eastern Ukraine.  The U.N. refugee agency says they are struggling to find safety, adequate housing and employment.

UNHCR spokesman Andrei Mahecic says more than 580,000 retired and elderly people residing in the conflict zone have lost access to their government pensions and are having great difficulty making ends meet.

“This has affected the most vulnerable groups, as many of them depend on pensions and social [subsistence] payments as their sole source of income.  Those living in non-government controlled areas are required to register as internally displaced people with Ukrainian authorities in order to have access to their rightful pensions and social payments.”

Mahecic says these benefits should be de-linked from the place of residence.  Regardless of the political situation, he tells VOA these pensions belong to the elderly retirees and they should not be withheld.  

“That is why we are appealing that they have full access to their rightful pensions and social [subsistence] payments and other benefits that they have and that they have acquired during their working life,” Mahecic said.

The UNHCR says displacement is causing extreme hardship for more than 50,000 people with disabilities who have been forced to flee their homes.  It says they lack access to services and often face difficulties and discrimination based on their disability, ethnic or religious background.

It says one of its major concerns is the use of civilian houses along the frontline of the conflict zone for military purposes.  It says stationing combatants and weapons in residential areas puts civilians at great risk during fighting.
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Sixteen months after deadly clashes erupted in Azerbaijan’s autonomous breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, international mediators are saying it’s time for all parties to undertake confidence-building measures to jump-start the political settlement process.

Russia led mediation to settle the four days of shelling and rocket strikes between Azerbaijan’s military and Armenian-backed separatists over Nagorno-Karabakh. The clashes were the deadliest incidents since a 1994 cease-fire established the current territorial division. The brief but intense fighting of April 2016 claimed dozens of lives.

Since then, the United States, Russia and France, which co-chair the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Minsk Group for conflict mediation, have continued advocating diplomacy to secure a binding peace resolution.

Steps toward demilitarization are essential to deterring accidental flare-ups of violence between the groups, said Ambassador Richard Hoagland, U.S. co-chairman of the Minsk Group.

“When you have two armed groups facing each other in difficult terrain not very far apart, there is always the chance for some kind of accident to happen that then spirals out of control,” he recently told VOA’s Armenian and Azeri services. “I know that at this point it will be difficult to ask for total demilitarization, although that would be good, so what we have to do is to look for those things that can help to reduce the possibility of some kind of military accident that then gets out of control.”

Removal of snipers along both sides of the Karabakh line of contact, which separates Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan, would be a logical first step, Hoagland said.

Allowing the presence of international observers and installing new electronic equipment that traces cease-fire violations, he said, would be a second realistic benchmark to achieve.

“There is an actual document [that maps out the peace process], and it’s a very comprehensive, but there are steps and steps and steps, and stages and stages,” he told VOA. “So I would hope that in the next highest level of negotiations, the two sides will look very seriously and say even if they can’t come to a final conclusion, here are things we can accomplish.”

U.S.-Russian coordination?

Although some observers describe the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as a rare point of shared strategic interests between the U.S. and Russia, others are skeptical.

Hoagland, however, struck an optimistic tone, saying the United States was continuing to work with Russia on this issue despite deteriorating relations between the two countries.

“I have seen absolutely no change in how we work together and how we regard each other,” he told VOA. “Just because sometimes the politicians are bumping up against each other, for us, the work continues and we do it arm in arm.

“Maybe at the top the headline news doesn’t look good, but when you get down to specific issues, specific problems to work on together, where we do cooperate, that continues and it continues today on Nagorno-Karabakh,” he added.

Although the conflict has yet to come under the focus of the President Donald Trump’s administration, former Ambassador John Herbst, director of the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, told VOA that might change in the coming six to 12 months.

While a planned U.N. General Assembly meeting between Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev may signal a loosening of tensions between the groups, Herbst said, “I still do not see any grounds for a reasonable settlement of the conflict.”

“Everyone knows that the overwhelming majority of the population of Karabakh are Armenians and they will have substantial autonomy, and this should be the basis of the settlement,” he said.  

Competing interests

The main obstacle to full settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is the fact that there are too many interests involved in the problem, said analyst Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy research group.

“If the problem was only about the two countries, it would probably have been settled, but states like Russia want to maintain the conflict,” he said.

Echoing that sentiment, Anna Borshchevskaya of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said Armenian officials have complained that a Nagorno-Karabakh settlement has been hampered by Russian arms sales to both sides.

“Russia wants to play a serious role in this conflict, and if there is no conflict, there will be no such role,” she said.

Although Russian weapons deliveries to Baku remained a contentious issue throughout Armenia’s 2017 parliamentary elections, most political forces steered clear of the topic and the question of whether Armenia is more secure with Russia as an ally.

Russia plays an important role in the region as its former imperial and Soviet-era overlord. It is also the main seller of weapons to both Armenia, a close Moscow ally, and Azerbaijan, which has developed warm relations with ethnically kin Turkey.

The Kremlin has consistently stated that it intends to continue selling arms to both camps while supporting peaceful resolution of the conflict.

On July 17, Armenia’s president called Russian arms sales to Baku “the most painful side of Armenian-Russian relations.”

Baku

Armenian political scientist Suren Sargsyan said Baku officials need to assume a more proactive role in securing the front lines, touching on Hoagland’s calls for demilitarization as an example.

“Such an agreement has been reached between the parties,” she told VOA. “But the Azerbaijani side has not taken any practical steps in that direction for a long time. That is why the negotiation process goes to a deadlock.”

Fighting between ethnic Azeris and Armenians erupted in 1991 and a cease-fire was agreed to in 1994. But Azerbaijan and Armenia regularly accuse each other of carrying out attacks around Nagorno-Karabakh and along the Azeri-Armenian border.

On July 5, an Azeri woman and child were killed and another civilian wounded by Armenian forces near the boundary with Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s defense ministry said Wednesday.

Sporadic exchanges of fire in the fight for control over the region — inside Azerbaijan but controlled by ethnic Armenians — have stoked fears of a wider conflict breaking out in the South Caucasus, which is crossed by oil and gas pipelines.

This story originated in VOA’s Armenian service. Some information came from Reuters.
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