Tbilisi-based journalist (and frequent Eurasianet contributor) Paul Rimple has a very interesting take on billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose Georgian Dream party was the big winner of Georgia's Oct. 1 parliamentary elections. How to understand the surprise contender? sit down with him for dinner, suggests Rimple. From an excellent post of his on the Roads & Kingdoms blog:
Dozens of guests are sitting around a table that is at least 20 meters long, piled high with plates of earthy east Georgian dishes. More home-cooked food is coming. I’ve got one eye on a bowl of khashlama that was just set down. So does the billionaire.
We are in Kakheti, the hilly wine region of eastern Georgia, where khashlama is the signature dish. It might look like boiled beef, but that’s like saying wine looks like vinegar. It’s actually a heroic mix of fresh herbs, salt and beef, slow-cooked in an open cauldron. The billionaire, sitting across from me, spoons a chunk onto his plate. He is the only person holding his utensils upright, like a proper European (the English journalist with us might have done the same, I suppose, but he was still holding a pen and notebook). It’s not that I hadn’t expected such upstanding usage of the cutlery—earlier I watched him taste the homemade wine as if it had been corked in France in 1981—but there are plenty of foods, including some of the herbs on the table, that are just expected to be eaten by hand in Georgia. There’s something unsettling about a man, no matter what his tax bracket, using knife and fork at a country table in Kakheti.
As the Justice and Development Party (AKP) -- the Islamic-rooted party he helped build into one of Turkey's most powerful and successful political operations in decades -- approaches its annual congress this weekend, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan remains the undisputed heavyweight champ of Turkish politics. Regardless of what one thinks of Erdogan, his achievements, which include firmly pushing the once-powerful military back into their barracks and opening up a new space for religious expression in Turkey's public sphere, certainly make him one of his country's historically significant transformational figures.
This congress will mark a juncture for Erdogan. Since the AKP's bylaws prevent him from running for another term in parliament, it is widely assumed that the still ambitious PM has his sights set on becoming Turkey's next president (albeit after his party is able to engineer some constitutional changes which would make the presidency more powerful). Reuters sets the stage for the AKP congress, which will be held in Ankara:
The party's September 30 congress is unlikely to offer any sign Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, viewed by many Turks as their strongest leader since Ataturk, is loosening his grip on a heavily-centralized party or on the country as a whole. AK, its initials spelling out the word for purity, is Erdogan's child.
Can culinary tourism play an important role in helping create sustainable development in some of the countries along the ancient silk road? A new report recently released by the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) says that might be the case, suggesting that a growing demand for "experience based" tourism could open the door for countries to earn tourists' dollars by promoting their gastronomy.
The report, though plagued by poorly written language that often reads like it was taken from a tourism ministry brochure, does offer some interesting insights into how countries in Central Asia (and other parts of the world) are trying to capitalize on their culinary traditions, even if those traditions include, as in Kazakhstan's case, the consumption of horse meat.
Like so many other recent political and judicial moves in Turkey, the final verdict that was handed down the other day in the "Sledgehammer" case -- in which more than 300 active and retired military officers, among them some generals, were sentenced to lengthy prison terms on charges of plotting to overthrow the government -- offers little resolution, only further deepening the political divide in the country.
To be sure, the 21-month case and the sentencing of the officers were history-making, the first time that members of Turkey's previously untouchable military found themselves on trial and then convicted for planning to do the kind of thing that their predecessors had done four times in the past. Needless to say, the final verdict makes it clear that the power equation in Turkey has changed for good and that the powerful military has been neutered as a political force. The military's rather tame response to the verdict, saying that it "shares the sorrow" of those were convicted and their family members, is a far cry from the more muscular kind of pronouncements the Turkish generals used to make when they weren't happy with things.
As the Kurdish issue in Turkey continues to heat up, both politically and militarily, the question of how Ankara should deal with the insurgent Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) becomes one that's both more urgent yet also harder to answer.
In a new report released last week, the International Crisis Group steps into the breach, urging both the Turkish government and the PKK to step back from further confrontation and providing some very sensible suggestions that provide a way towards finding settling the long-standing Kurdish conflict in Turkey.
I recently sent Hugh Pope, ICG's Turkey analyst and the report's main author, a list of questions that follow up on some of the paper's observations and recommendations. Pope, a veteran Turkey observers who was previously the Wall Street Journal's correspondent in the country, was kind enough to provide some illuminating answers. Our exchange is below:
1. Many commentators are saying that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in particular, is moving back to a harder, more nationalist stance on the Kurdish issue. Based on your research for your report, do you think this is a correct assessment?
Turkey's already strained relations with Iraq continue to worsen, with the two countries now engaged in open disputes over several issues, with little hope for reconciliation in sight.
The main bone of contention between the two neighbors is the fate of fugitive Iraqi Vice President Tareq Al Hashemi. Recently sentenced to death by a Baghdad court on charges that he ran death squads, the Sunni politician is currently living in self-imposed exile in Turkey. After the verdict was announced, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Hashemi is safe in Turkey. "I'll say it very clearly. We will be willing to host Mr. Hashemi as long as he wants, and we will not hand him over," Erdogan said in Ankara the other day.
It didn't take long for the Shiite-led government in Baghdad to respond, announcing Thursday that it has stopped registering new Turkish companies that want to do business in Iraq for, ahem, "regulatory and statistics" purposes. The move is not a minor one, considering that Iraq has become Turkey's second largest export market, with Iraqis buying some $8 billion worth of Turkish goods in 2011, up from $2.8 billion in 2007. (In response, Ankara summoned the Iraqi ambassador to Turkey to explain his government's move.)
Are elected officials in Yerevan trying to take any local color out of the city's food scene? That certainly seems to be the case. Last year, the city's mayor issued a ban on street vendors -- many of them fruit and vegetable sellers -- in an effort to "clean up" Yerevan. More worrisome for Yerevan residents, it now looks like local leaders are turning a blind eye while the city's well-known indoor market, the now shuttered Pak Shuka, is in danger of being demolished by a businessman cum politician who reportedly wants to turn it into a supermarket.
In a detail-rich report, The Armenian Weekly lays out the whole sordid tale:
Back in February, I wrote an analysis piece for Eurasianet that looked how their differing position regarding the crisis in Syria and political and economic competition in Iraq were helping cool down what had been warming relations between Turkey and Iran. The tension and rivalry between these two regional powerhouses would only sharpen in the coming months, analysts told me at the time, an assessment that is being reinforced by recent events.
For the last week, the Turkish press has carried several front page stories about an alleged Iranian intelligence ring that was captured after collecting information in eastern Turkey's Igdir region. From the Hurriyet Daily News's report about the arrests:
The operation was started in Iğdır after it was revealed that photos of the Iğdır Provincial Gendarmerie Command building were taken by people using a minibus with the license plate “04-D-3759.” Police stopped the vehicle on the outskirts of the city and detained two suspects of Iranian origin. The suspects, Shahram Zargham Kohei and Mohammed Reza Esmaeilpour Ali Malek were determined to have taken photos of strategically important security zones in the region.
During questioning, the suspects revealed that they had demanded information in return for money from a number of important figures from state institutions in Van’s Çaldıran district. It has also been revealed that information was collected about Turkey’s military institutions in Iğdır, the local governor’s office, and a number of firms, daily Radikal has reported.
At this point, it's widely accepted that the 2006 embargo imposed by Russia on the import of Georgian wine ended up being a good thing for Georgia's wine industry. Previously dependent on a Russian market that favored low-quality, semi-sweet wine, Georgian wine makers have been forced to improve the quality of their product as they tried to break into other markets, especially in Europe and the United States.
In a very informative blog post on the website of the Wine Spectator, the publication's associate editor, Robert Taylor, takes a look at how the Georgian wine industry has evolved since the embargo and what its future might look like if the Russian market opens up to it again. From his post:
After independence, despite privatization, Georgian wine did not become better since, like many other industries, it suffered from disorientation, insufficient financing and a lack of regulation, Kaffka said. Russia's declaration of a sanitary embargo "was not completely groundless," he noted. "In the huge flow of what was marketed as 'Georgian wine' in the 1990s, surely there was a large amount of low quality and plain fake product."
But the 2006 embargo forced the Republic's wine industry to improve quality and seek out new markets, competing with—and hoping to join—the world's fine wine regions. Up to that point, more than 90 percent of its wine production had gone to Russia.
The end of summer and the return of cooler weather has traditionally signaled the beginning of fishing season in the waters around Istanbul and the rest of Turkey. These days, this time of the year also means the return of controversy and debate over the future of the country's fishing industry and government efforts to make sure that industry even has a future.
As reported in a previous Kebabistan blog post and in a subsequent Eursianet article, the previous fishing season turned violent after the government imposed a minimum catch-size limitation on certain types of fish. Following the imposition of the new regulations, the head of an Istanbul fisheries union that supported the change was shot in the face last January by a gunman who challenged him about it (the union leader survived, although he did lose an eye).
This year, the Turkish government is proposing more new regulations designed to prevent overfishing, most significantly forbidding dragnet fishing in waters that are less than 24-meters(78 feet) deep and completely banning the use of dragnets in certain sensitive areas, such as the waters around the Princes' Islands near Istanbul.
