For a group of prospective North American parents whose attempts to adopt Kyrgyzstani children wound up on the wrong side of a 2009 moratorium on foreign adoptions, the last four years have been a harrowing education in the cut and thrust of Kyrgyz politics.
Rooted in long-standing historical, religious and economic differences, Georgian animosity toward neighboring Turkey, Georgia’s fifth-largest investor, appears to be growing in the Black Sea region of Achara. Recently, politicians eager for votes in Georgia’s October 1 parliamentary elections have brought the sentiments to a steady boil.
As a young Turkmen woman who was deeply influenced by interaction with Peace Corps volunteers in the 1990s, I was filled with a wide spectrum of emotions upon hearing about the Peace Corps’ departure from Turkmenistan.
Most countries in the world have an emergency telephone number for the police. But in Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, an emergency telephone line has been launched for victims of police violence.
When members of Team Uzbekistan returned from the London Olympic Games last month, they were hailed at the airport by cheering crowds and enthusiastic television news coverage. But sports fans are grumbling, complaining that Tashkent’s lumbering, centralized way of managing sports is to blame for a disappointing medal harvest.
You could call them the yin and yang of Azerbaijani politics. For nearly the past 20 years, whenever an Aliyev has been president of Azerbaijan, poised against him have been 55-year-old Isa Gambar and 47-year-old Ali Kerimli, leaders of the country’s two largest opposition forces, the Musavat Party and the Popular Front Party of Azerbaijan.
When Charles Hornung lost his finance job in London three years ago, he’d never heard of Tajikistan. Now, the CEO of Silverhill Resources is one of a handful of Western mining magnates who call this impoverished Central Asian country home.
“The prospects here are great,” Hornung said at a Dushanbe café this month. “But so are the hurdles.”
Tajikistan’s President Imomali Rahmon has promised he will soon visit Gorno-Badakhshan, the mountainous eastern region where government security forces carried out a secretive military operation this summer.
A government-backed campaign to strip nine Kurdish MPs of their immunity from prosecution could take Turkey back to the future in its decades-long conflict over Kurdish rights.
Turkmenistan has pulled the plug on an expensive – and tardy – Iranian construction project. Even so, Ashgabat’s action is unlikely to cause a significant breach in bilateral relations.
