On the eve of US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's whistle-stop July 4-5 tour of the South Caucasus, an American civil rights watchdog has issued a report that indicates that democratic reform is going nowhere in Armenia and Georgia, and is in reverse in Azerbaijan.
Freedom House's Nations In Transit 2010 report, which gauges democratic progress in former Soviet bloc countries on a scale from one to seven, says that Georgia and Armenia have made no democratic strides for the past two years, while Azerbaijani democracy, never in good health, has deteriorated further. Georgia and Armenia scores remained unchanged at 4.93 and 5.39, while Azerbaijan’s annual score slipped 0.25 down to 6.50.
Rowdy 2008 elections and limited input by NGOs on policy formulation dogged both Armenia and Georgia, while provisions for an extended presidential term, a crackdown on new media and civil society has further worsened the situation in Azerbaijan, the report found.
Armenia’s first president has taken his fight with the country's second president about the controversial 2008 election of Armenia's third president to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The court has agreed to review the complaint by Levon Ter-Petrosian’s Armenian National Congress against Ter-Petrosian’s successor, former President Robert Kocharian.
The multi-pronged suit, billed “Armenian Citizens versus Robert Kocharian,” mainly focuses on ANC accusations against Kocharian for his handling of the deadly March 2008 violence that followed the election of current President Serzh Sargsyan. The 4,500-page suit, which includes reams of testimonies, video and audio evidence, was sent to The Hague some three weeks ago.
It is unclear, however, whether the International Criminal Court will launch a trial about the case. Armenia is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court; hence, critics say the complaint has little more than PR value. The ANC, though, seems to hope that the scale of the case would still warrant a full trial.
Two subsidiaries of Russian Railroad placed bids to construct the 400-kilometer line, a job with an estimated cost of anywhere from $1.7 billion to $4 billion. The terrain is mountainous, making it difficult and cost-consuming to clear the roadbed, but Yerevan says the link will offer a vital gateway for Armenia's exports.
The furthest Armenians can now travel by train is to the Georgian Black Sea port city of Batumi. The dispute over the breakaway region of Abkhazia and the Nagorno-Karabakh War long ago put paid to railway connections to Russia.
After completing a feasibility study, Tehran said it will pay its own money to build the Iranian section of the railroad and will co-sponsor the Armenian section.
While reporters were still on a scavenger hunt for Joseph Stalin’s grand statue in his Georgian hometown of Gori, a smaller and lesser known monument of the Soviet dictator was removed from its pedestal in a smaller and lesser known Georgian town.
Far removed from the controversy that surrounded the towering Stalin monument down the road in Gori, the dictator's monument in the western mining town of Tkibuli, further west, had managed to escape the limelight. When Georgia broke away from the USSR, the Tkibuli monument was removed, but reinstalled later. Now, sometime during the night of June 26/27, it was removed again, Vesti.ru reported.
The big Stalin is expected to reappear in Gori’s museum on the Soviet leader, but the fate of the smaller Stalin is still unknown.
A character from the Georgian film "Repentance," a cult movie shot in the dying days of the Soviet Union, repeatedly exhumes the body of her family's tormentor, a dictatorial mayor styled after Adolf Hitler, Stalin and KGB boss Lavrenty Beria. Similarly, many in Georgia have long thought that Stalin’s bronze presence helped perpetuate the Soviet mentality.
The question remains whether by removing the Stalin statue(s) Georgians will be able to forget that past.
When your gas bill is past due and the supply is turned off, having a friend with cash is priceless. With a Russian bill collector at his neck and faced with a gas brownout in Europe, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko phoned his well-heeled counterpart from Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, to ask if he could spare a couple of hundred million dollars. No worries at all, Aliyev said.
“I asked Ilham Aliyev and within 24 hours, or even less, he lent me $200 million,” Lukashenko told Euronews on June 25. “We paid 187 million of that to Gazprom.” The multimillion-dollar check from Baku settled a politically charged Moscow-Minsk dispute that had briefly put part of Europe on a low-hydrocarbon diet.
“The Russian side has finally found the time . . . to satisfy Grigol Vashadze’s application for cancellation of his Russian citizenship," Deputy Foreign Minister Davit Jalagania told a June 28 briefing.
Following the 2008 war with Georgia, Russian parliamentarian Semion Bogdasarov asked Russia's State Duma to deprive Vashadze of his Russian citizenship because of his close association with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who tops the Kremlin’s persona non grata list. The Duma denied the requested, but then Vashadze himself ditched his Russian passport. Vashadze is married to Georgian prima ballerina Nino Ananiashvili, a former Bolshoi Ballet star who is a godmother of Saakashvili’s younger son, Nikoloz.
"It would have been better for me to become a doctor than do this ungrateful work," sighed embattled Armenian Education Minister Armen Ashotian in a June 23 interview with Hetq.am.
Critics, who interpret "foreign language" as "Russian language," fear a return to Soviet-era days when Armenian-language schools lagged far behind Russian-language schools in quality.
Rebuking Ankara for allowing its cultural cousin and strategic ally Azerbaijan get in the way of Armenian-Turkish reconciliation, Sargsyan claimed that Turkey’s relations with Azerbaijan undermine regional security and reconciliation. “A pair of pipelines going to your neighbor is not going to bring you the security and welfare you want,” reasoned Sargsyan in reference to Azerbaijani energy exports, a trump card in Baku’s dealings with Ankara.
Sargsyan was not reported as addressing Armenia’s own role in the failure of the talks with Turkey.
When it comes to failure, no South Caucasus country can hold a candle to war-survivor Georgia in the estimation of the 2010 Failed State Index.
Foreign invasion, little ability to exercise control over its borders and 2008-war-related domestic grievances keep the country's total score (91.8) high on a 120-point scale. Georgia fell between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the Index, assembled by Foreign Policy and The Fund for Peace, a Washington, DC-based research organization.
Criteria such as Refugees and Delegitimization of State as well as Uneven Development bring Azerbaijan (84.6) up on the failure list, where it landed slightly ahead of Israel.
Armenia was ranked as the least "failed" of the three South Caucasus states with a score of 74.3.
As seemingly always, Norway is ranked as the world's most successful country.
