Georgia

Let Our Fame be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus
By Oliver Bullough
Basic Books
528pp

In a large grassy field a few kilometers from Georgia’s Black Sea port of Poti lies a Free Industrial Zone that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in 2008 predicted would help transform Georgia into the “Dubai or Singapore” of the Caucasus. Now, more than two years later, the Poti zone is under pressure to meet those expectations.

A lack of reliable data on Georgian migration trends could have a wide-ranging impact on Tbilisi’s ability to adapt government policies to changing population patterns, demographic and migration specialists say.

Just over two years after war drove them from their homes in South Ossetia, hundreds of ethnic Georgians again face displacement with their eviction from a temporary shelter in a government-owned building in Tbilisi. Residents call the action totally unexpected; a group of rule of law monitors claims that the eviction is illegal.

Flamboyant glass-and-steel structures, the brainchildren of Italian and Spanish architects, are causing both shock and awe as they advance on Georgia under President Mikheil Saakashvili’s Grands Travaux campaign. Meant to symbolize a new, transparent Georgia, the buildings have touched off a sharp controversy over whether or not the country’s president should double as its urban-planner-in-chief.

Two years after Georgia’s August 2008 war with Russia, the end of an international food assistance program could put thousands of families displaced by the conflict at risk for hunger, two international aid organizations say.

Two years ago last night, Georgian television broadcast soldiers firing rockets into Tskhinvali, the capital of the pro-Moscow breakaway province of South Ossetia. Tbilisi said it was restoring order in the region and briefly took the city. But a massive Russian response crushed the Georgian military as Russian troops pushed deep into uncontested Georgian territory.