In this edition of EurasiaChat, Alisher Khamidov shares some insights on his recent stay in the U.S. city of Philadelphia, which he describes as being like a “new Almaty or new Tashkent” for all the Central Asian migrants that have settled there.

Alisher was on a quest to find love, which, unfortunately, ended fruitlessly. What he did find, however, were communities of Kyrgyz, Tajiks and Uzbeks thriving in the service sector. The trucking business has proven a particularly lucrative pursuit for Uzbeks, he explained.

Last week saw the holding of the first-ever in-person Central Asia-China heads of state summit.

But it is the fate of a former president that has occupied many people’s thoughts in Kyrgyzstan of late. Earlier this month, a journalist traveled to Belarus to interview Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was ousted and forced into exile following a deadly uprising in April 2010.

There has been much criticism of this interview amid concerns an exercise in rehabilitating Bakiyev is being covertly attempted by the Kyrgyz authorities.

In October 2021, Uzbekistan appointed a new mufti, which is to say the head of a quasi-governmental body overseeing the country’s Muslims. Nuriddin Kholiknazarov’s agenda since that time has been to restore the paramount status of the muftiate and to contain the influence of increasingly independent-minded imams across the country.

Last week, police in Uzbekistan announced that they had arrested a ring they suspect of running a Telegram channel – or many channels, more likely – that published nude photographs of women as part of a blackmail campaign.  The episode is deeply troubling in how it points to widespread contempt for women’s dignity in some sectors of Uzbek society. The hope is that recently adopted legislation on gender-based crime will go some way to mitigating this phenomenon.

And finally, Tajikistan’s bid to build its giant Roghun hydropower dam received an important fillip last week when it was revealed that a China-based international financial institution is pledging to provide a soft loan worth $500 million to fund continuation of the project.