This article was updated at 2:20am EST on October 4.
After a solid victory over President Mikheil Saakshvili’s United National Movement in Georgia’s October 1 parliamentary elections, billionaire
Bidzina Ivanishvili and his nine-party coalition may feel like they are living the Georgian Dream. But keeping the coalition together and governing effectively may prove a challenge.
This summer, a 32-year-old musician with Uzbek citizenship was visiting her mother in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. For the last decade, the musician has lived in the Tajik capital Dushanbe with her husband, an ethnic Uzbek, and their 10-year-old daughter.
Stunning parliamentary election results are sending Georgia into uncharted territory for a post-Soviet state: two relatively equally balanced political forces now must learn the art of legislative give-and-take.
In Kyrgyzstan, if a man kidnaps a woman to make her his wife, he runs little risk of prosecution. Should he steal sheep, however, there’s a good chance he’ll go to prison.
For weeks, there have been fears of protests, civil disorder, even a Russian attack. But, in the end, October 1, the day of Georgia’s parliamentary elections, proved relatively quiet, held amid summer-like weather. Yet the broad discrepancy of exit poll numbers seemed sure to fuel controversy in the coming days and weeks.
Democratization activists in Kyrgyzstan are worrying about a roll-back of basic freedoms after a Bishkek court prohibited a film festival from screening a Dutch documentary about homosexual Muslim men.
Anyone in Ust-Kamenogorsk, a city with a large ethnic Russian population in northeastern Kazakhstan, will tell you their city isn’t just a mining hub. It’s a hockey town.
Armenian officials tend to be quick to voice concern over the destruction or deterioration of Armenian churches and monasteries in neighboring Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. But conservationists complain that the same officials who sound the alarm about sites abroad, often are reticent about preservationist challenges within Armenia itself.
