The December 26 trial of arrested Turkish journalists Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener has pushed a shadowy organization known as the Gülen movement to the forefront of public attention in Turkey. The group’s influence has long been an open secret. Now, its weight is being felt at a time when the country’s democratic credentials are increasingly being called into question.
With the recent arrest of a leading academic, concern is spreading among intellectuals in Turkey that they will have to think twice before voicing criticism of the government in the future.
With nine months to go before Baku hosts the Eurovision pop-music competition, transparency concerns are arising about Azerbaijani government expenditures on the event.
Facebook may be best known in Azerbaijan as a tool for mobilizing government critics, but a new generation of Azerbaijani civil society activists is relying on the social networking site for quite a different purpose -- promoting animal welfare.
In only six months, the Baku-based Helping Stray Animals group has grown from a few isolated animal activists to a group of thousands.
Like the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia also suffers from poverty, corruption, heavy-handed governments, widespread unemployment, and scant opportunities for the young. All too aware of the similarities, governments there are already taking measures to prevent public upheaval of the kind that has shaken the Arab world.
Serzh Sarkisian on April 20 urged Armenia's law enforcement agencies to intensify their efforts to shed light on the circumstances surrounding the post-presidential election clashes in Yerevan on March 1-2, 2008 in which 10 people died . The clashes and the events that led up to them have been the subject of massive obfuscation.
The Azerbaijani government has quietly stopped the operations of two international non-governmental organizations in what some local observers claim is a further attempt to clamp down on the country’s relatively weak civil society. The government counters that it is merely following the terms of its NGO registration requirements.
Following the suicide of a 15-year-old boy, police in the Armenian capital Yerevan are cracking down on adolescent fans of emo music, a derivative of punk rock that is known for angst-ridden lyrics. Armenian officials contend that emo aficionados undermine social stability.
Georgia’s journalists have undergone media training for nearly 20 years, but whether or not that instruction is making for better news coverage remains open to debate. Despite the millions of dollars spent on improving the quality of Georgian reporting, no clear way to judge the effectiveness of training programs exists.
