EurasiaNet Civil Society - Change Begins at the Border

CIVIL SOCIETY

CHANGE BEGINS AT THE BORDER
Joshua Kucera 5/10/07

The first in a series

My last night before entering former Soviet territory, I was in a restored 16th-century coffee house in Trabzon, Turkey, listening to a local band play Ozgun music. "Finish your coffee � I’m going to tell your fortune," said Aysegul. She was a doctor in Ordu, further west along the Black Sea coast, and had come to Trabzon for the weekend to see her friends from medical school. I met her on the bus and she invited me out to the club. The headscarves and long skirts she and her friends wore distinguished them from the hip crowd of university students, who were more often clad in tight jeans and sneakers.

After I drank up she told me to put the saucer on top of the cup, swish the remaining grounds around and flip the cup over to let the grounds seep out on to the saucer. While we waited for the cups to cool � a necessity for proper fortune-telling, Aysegul insisted � a group of ethnic Cherkez university students got up and did traditional dances.

The only music was an accordion and the bystanders’ clapping. A line of guys faced a line of girls. The guys would push one forward, and then a woman would come forward. And they would start to dance. The guys’ moves were aggressive but precise, with complicated patterns of leg kicks and claps. They would stare intensely at the women, who would look down demurely. The women’s upper-body moves were more flowing, with quick little foot steps. Sometimes it looked like the women were following the men, but sometimes it was the other way around.

I thought of my ancestors, the Czechs and Slovenes, and our traditional dance: the polka. I was a little jealous.

After the Cherkez finished and the crowd around them dispersed, we went back to our table and looked at my coffee grounds. "I see a road � that means you will go on a long trip. And I see that your heart is light. And there is a horse, which means you have a dream and you’re going to achieve it," Aysegul said.

Of course, she knew the first rule of fortune-telling: tell the customer what he wants to hear. But she was right: I was excited about the trip I was about to embark on.

For the last year, I’ve written for EurasiaNet from Washington, covering US policy toward Central Asia and the Caucasus and the views of American experts on the region. I’ve become fascinated by the great power machinations in Eurasia, and by the stories I heard about the societies and the changes they had undergone since the collapse of the Soviet Union 16 years ago. But I had never been to the area myself. Although I’ve visited over 40 countries and reported from more than a dozen, I had never set foot in the former Soviet Union.

Now, I’m starting on a several-month journey across the Caucasus and Central Asia, looking at the great power politics here, the competition for oil and gas, military bases and geopolitical influence, and the opening of Eurasia to restore trade routes that have lain dormant since the days of the Silk Road. While many of the big decisions about this region are made in Washington, Moscow, Beijing or Brussels, I knew that reporting from distant capitals couldn’t tell me everything. I wanted to see how people here experienced these developments themselves, how it looked on the ground.

So after saying goodbye to Aysegul and her friends, I got on the bus going east to Batumi, Georgia. The road hugged the Black Sea to the north, and on the south side steep hills planted with tea rose directly from the side of the road. As we got closer to Georgia, the towns got poorer and the quality of the road worsened. The highway median was filled with trash. There was almost no traffic, and I got the sense Turkey didn’t care much about this border. We passed a Turkish army barracks with a shooting range and weight sets outside, and the passengers on the bus � mainly Georgians working in Istanbul � sent their last text messages on their Turkish phones.

At the border, almost everyone was Georgian � Turks apparently have little reason to go to Georgia. The Turkish border station was derelict, with stray dogs and aggressive flocks of pigeons. But we got off the bus and walked through quickly.

I had heard horror stories about Georgian border crossings: that shakedowns, long lines and other sorts of hassles were common. But that was when Ajara, a Georgia region bordering Turkey, was little more than a fiefdom of strongman Aslan Abashidze, who was forced from power by central Georgian authorities in 2004. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

Now everyone at the border is friendly and efficient. I noticed that the immigration officer � who spoke English � used a computer that had stickers indicating it was part of a US Department of Homeland Security program.

After clearing customs, I went to the bank to change money. The bank was an almost completely bare room, cold but with a space heater behind the front desk. "Where are you from?" the guy at the front desk asked me. When I told him the United States, he cheerily shouted to the back, "Nino, we need to change money," in English. A minute later I was out the door with my Georgian lari.

Unfortunately, our bus had a harder time making it through than we passengers did, and I had to wait three hours on the border. I killed the time chatting with Zurab, who was manning a tourist information booth filled with brochures in English and Russian advertising seaside hotels and casinos in Ajara. There was a photo of President Mikhail Saakashvili above his desk, and Zurab said the office was opened last year to help prevent tourists from being taken advantage of at the border. "Since the [2003] Rose Revolution the situation is so much better here," he said. His cell phone rang, and he proudly pointed out that his ring-tone was the Georgian national anthem. "I have offers to go to the USA, to Great Britain, to Germany � people tell me �you can make a much bigger salary.’ But I tell them I will not leave my country for money, and when our salaries are as big as in Germany, we will have a better country."

I didn’t have to prod him to get him to start talking about Georgia’s geopolitical situation. "If we become part of NATO, we will have a lot more tourists. We have security now but if we are in NATO, it’s a sign we’ll be secure forever," he said.

Eventually the bus came through, and I had to say a hasty goodbye to Zurab to go catch it. The road now was narrow and the bus had to frequently slow down to dodge cows. But the villas near the sea were freshly painted and the orchards along the road were well tended. The bus driver put on a video of Russian pop singer Victor Petlyura. The road ahead was long, and my heart was light.

Editor�s Note: Joshua Kucera is a Washington, DC,-based freelance writer who specializes in security issues in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East.

The Central Eurasia Project aims, through its website, meetings, papers, and grants, to foster a more informed debate about the social, political and economic developments of the Caucasus and Central Asia. It is a program of the Open Society Institute-New York. The Open Society Institute-New York is a private operating and grantmaking foundation that promotes the development of open societies around the world by supporting educational, social, and legal reform, and by encouraging alternative approaches to complex and controversial issues.

The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent the position of the Open Society Institute and are the sole responsibility of the author or authors.