Two Armenian-American descendants of victims of Ottoman Turkey's 1915 pogroms of ethnic Armenians have filed what is described as the first lawsuit against the Turkish government for damages suffered by their families during the massacre.
Lawyers for Garbis Davouian, a resident of Los Angeles, and Hrayr Turabian, a resident of New York City, could ask for billions of dollars in reparations for property and associated incomes that they claim were expropriated illegally in connection with the crackdown. Lawyers hope to recover property and profits records to make their case.
Turkey’s Central Bank and its largest commercial bank, Ziraat, are also named as defendants.
Georgia has come knocking on separatist doors with a basket full of promised grants, investments and social welfare perks, but de facto Abkhaz and South Ossetian officials, wary of Georgians bearing gifts and mindful of Moscow and their own declarations of independence, show no sign of interest in the offering.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s pick of 28-year-old Canadian-Georgian Vera Kobalia for the key post of minister of economy and sustainable development raised many questions about her qualifications, which did not seem to go beyond working at a family bakery in Vancouver. But Russian media, always game to rip on Saakashvili, argue that a nightclub photo, which reveals the playful side of the young minister, sheds more light on her credentials.
Russian news outlets seized on a Facebook photo of Kobalia, which portrays her posing suggestively with dancing show girls on a bar counter. After the photo surfaced, Russian-language websites erupted in headlines such as “Stripping Baker Becomes the Head of Georgian Economy Ministry."
The photo, which Kobalia says was taken some 10 years ago in Florida, sparked a happy banter on Facebook in Georgia, where many users said they were impressed by how the minister did her “field research.” Looking on the bright side, one commentator suggested that Kobalia seems well fit to bring much-needed foreign investment to Georgia.
Soap opera lovers sit tight: American sex symbol Pamela Anderson, who once patrolled Los Angeles beaches in the Baywatch series, may soon be sighted on Georgia’s Black Sea coast to guest-star in a summer romantic comedy.
Georgian film producer Davit Imedashvili, who worked on the Renny Harlin action flic that brought Andy Garcia to Georgia to play President Mikheil Saakashvili, is now eyeing Anderson for a supporting role in a film tentatively titled "The Sea of Love," news magazine Liberali reported.
Georgian singing beauty Sofo Nizharadze, who cinched ninth place in this year’s Eurovision, the continent’s pop-glitz festival, will play the lead in the Cinderella story. It is yet unclear what may be Anderson’s role.
But this is not all. Mexican-born movie star Gael Garcia Bernal, known for his role as Che Guevara in "The Motorcycle Diaries" and as a transvestite in "Bad Education," has come to the mountains of Kazbegi to shoot a thriller, The Loneliest Planet. The film tells the story of a couple, lost in the Georgian mountains, on "a twisted backpacking trip" that tests their relationship.
Looks like Georgian movie producers are going to town with their plans to turn Georgia into a hip new setting for the Western film industry -- just call it a progression from Spaghetti Westerns to Khachapuri Dramas.
The pending return of Washington’s Bush-era Caucasus man, Matthew Bryza, has touched off so much buzz in the region that one might as well turn his last name into a verb.
Following the 2008 Georgian-Russian war, critics both inside and outside the Caucasus charged that Tbilisi, emboldened by an easy bonhomie with the White House Caucasus envoy, ended up challenging Moscow. Now, Armenia is concerned that Baku may be "Bryza'd" as well.
With his appointment as US ambassador to Azerbaijan up for a vote in the US Senate's Foreign Relations Committee on July 22, Azerbaijan and Armenia have headed to Capitol Hill to lobby for and against, respectively, Bryza’s Caucasus homecoming.
The Armenians worry that Bryza, who co-chaired the US-France-Russia mediatory group on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, puts territorial integrity above a nation’s right to self-determination; two conflicting directions that shape the Karabakh peace talks.
Describing Bryza as biased against Armenia and overly positive about Baku, an influential Armenian Diaspora group in the US called for a careful review of the diplomat's credentials. Armenian lobby groups, in particulary, believe that the man got a little too chummy with Turkish and Azerbaijani officials while pushing for US-backed energy projects in the region. For this camp, the fact that Bryza’s wife is an ethnic Turk also does not help matters.
Members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) face a delicate task late next month when they meet in Yerevan for one of their regular pow-wows -- how to explain why the CSTO declined to send forces to member-state Kyrgyzstan in June to quell ethnic bloodshed.
The refusal sparked accusations that the organization, intended as an FSU version of NATO, is useless.
Speaking at a July 21 press-conference in Yerevan, the CSTO's Russian secretary-general, Nikolai Bordyuzha, had a ready response to that one: “We have all deemed it inexpedient to invade another state as it would only aggravate tensions,” Bordyuzha explained.
Such considerations, however, did not stop Russia from invading non-CSTO member Georgia in 2008.
But not only Georgia will be keeping a cautious eye on the CSTO shindig to its south.
Good news from Italy for fans of the Nabucco pipeline, the project designed to end Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas. Plans by Italian energy behemoth ENI to ship gas from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan comes as a demux ex machina solution for the pipeline, which skeptics believe Azerbaijan alone cannot fill.
After meeting Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, ENI CEO Paolo Scaroni told The Wall Street Journal on July 20 that he plans to ship between two to three billion cubic meters of compressed natural gas across the Caspian Sea to feed the Azerbaijan-Turkey transit pipeline. The pipeline begins in Azerbaijan and ends in the Turkish city of Erzurum, the proposed launch pad for Nabucco.
The news is of potential interest for Georgia and Romania, which are both looking to set up a similar arrangement across the Black Sea. Unlike ENI’s project, Georgia hopes to start shipping Azerbaijani gas to Romania in a liquefied form -- deep-pocketed investors depending.
Could the South Caucasus come full circle from pre-Soviet federation to post-Soviet confederation?
Georgia this weekend suggested building near-confederative relations with neighboring Azerbaijan to create a one-stop layover point for Asia-Europe energy and cargo transits. Earlier on, Tbilisi made a similar proposal to Armenia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili believes that the future of the South Caucasus lies in the creation of a single space to cope together with economic and political challenges.
The ongoing push for integration is reminiscent of the late 1910s when the South Caucasus, an area better known for its penchant for separatism than for integration, had its first fleeting exercise in federalism.
With a capital in Tiflis (today's Tbilisi), the Trans-Caucasian Democratic Federative Republic proclaimed its independence from Russia in 1918, giving its members a brief chance to tackle together the triple whammy of Ottomans, Bolsheviks and Tsarists.
The union soon collapsed and saw its members roll on the ground, fighting, until the Bolsheviks scooped them up, one by one. The break-up created “rivalries over territory and identity that would return to haunt the new, post-Soviet countries some seventy years later,” wrote American historian Charles King in his book "The Ghost of Freedom, a History of the Caucasus."
Now, a few wars and fits of ultra-nationalism later, Georgia has rediscovered the merits of integration, but more than a few ongoing differences stand in the way of the hoped-for post-Soviet reunion. Armenia and Azerbaijan have their 22-year Karabakh complaint, while Armenia and Georgia -- the one looking toward Moscow, the other toward Washington -- are kept at odds over an eons-old rivalry for regional cultural superiority.
It could be a case of dissociative identity disorder. The Singapore-worshipping Georgian government has long promised to lead Georgians into a brave new economic world, where taxes are low, government is meek and the free market reigns supreme. The government even proposed to subject tax hikes to a referendum. Proposed amendments to Georgia's tax code, however, suggest that the government may be gravitating away from its libertarian moorings.
With vital foreign investment on the wane and entrepreneurs' mood sluggish, the government changed its mind about reducing income tax rates from 20 to 15 percent, and proposed to cancel tax privileges for the education and non-governmental sectors.
When teachers fought back, the tax increase was cancelled for schools.
Now NGOs, which enjoy a privileged 12 percent income tax rate, say that plans to increase income taxes to a general 20 percent will hamstring the development of civil society.
Can they prevail? Stay tuned. Parliament will discuss the code changes again on July 21, but a final vote is not expected until the fall.
[Editor's Note: EurasiaNet.org operates under the auspices of the Open Society Institute, a part of the Soros Foundations network. The Open Society Georgia Foundation is a Tbilisi-based non-governmental organization that is a separate part of that network.]
A bleep censor might come in handy for France when Russia and Georgia open their post-Soviet mouths. Since taking on the thankless job of mediating between Moscow and Tbilisi, mannerly French envoys have found themselves in the unlikely world of rapster-style dissing.
Two years ago, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy was trying to convince Vladimir Putin to abort the Russian invasion of Georgia, the Russian prime minister reportedly startled his French guest by sharing plans to hang Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili by his private parts. Now that French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has instructed Tbilisi to make nice with Russia, Saakashvili has cautioned that Georgia will not “lick" its giant neighbor "in one place as some have proposed that we do."
That said, the French must have known that they would be dealing with people who call ‘em as they see ‘em. Putin once famously offered to "wipe out" terrorists in a toilet, while Saakashvili in 2007 suggested that his old-guard domestic critics had been “flushed down” the toilet.
Neither side has patience for French exhortations on restrained conduct because both believe the Paris-brokered cease-fire deal left key issues unresolved. Russia still maintains a tight grip on breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia, while Russian hopes of regime change in Georgia never materialized. That means more PG-13 diplomacy coming soon . . .
