US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright concluded a three-country tour of Central Asia on April 19. During stops in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Albright focused talks with regional leaders on a variety of security-related issues, including drug trafficking, counter terrorism and border control.
"What you are witnessing is the explosion of a free medium in a closed society," said Ufuk Guldemir, whose site, Haberturk (www.haberturk.com), has become the standard bearer of the news portals.
Conservative clerics are not inclined to stand in the way of Iran's transition to democracy, Olivier Roy, an author and expert on the region, told those attending a Central Eurasia Projects-sponsored meeting.
Over 700,000 people have left Armenia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The same number might leave over the next five to 10 years, some observers suggest.
Torture is the western world's dirty little secret. In a new report, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) identified torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment as one of the OSCE region's most wide-spread problems.
The occasion of Georgia's presidential elections on April 9 [See Eurasia Insight], as well as the first anniversary of its accession to the Council of Europe on April 27, provides an opportunity to evaluate the country's compliance with its obligations.
Crimean Tatars have been the traditional Muslims of the lands of today's Ukraine for six hundred years. Their "Khanat" state lasted for centuries. It is well-known that they had been decimated and deported by Stalin in 1944 and were allowed to return only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
A 1600 year old statue of a sleeping Buddha - uncovered by archeologists from the former Soviet Union 35 years ago and never before seen by the outside world - will soon be on display in Dushanbe, the capital of the Central Asian Republic of Tajikistan.
In the Soviet era, water allocations for Central Asia were set in Moscow (at the Ministry for Land Reclamation and Water Resources, or Minvodkhoz). State planners' aim was to maximize cotton yields.
The ramifications of the October attack on the parliament are still being felt in Armenia. Filling the power vacuum created by the assassinations of six MPs, including Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkissian and Parliament Speaker Karen Demirchian, is proving difficult. As a result, domestic politics remains enveloped by a mood of uncertainty, damaging prospects for regional stability.
