It might have been advice the Red Queen herself would have proposed. As did the Queen to Alice in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili essentially advised his ruling United National Movement party on June 15 that they can run fast to stay in the same place, but need "to run at least twice as fast as that" to "get somewhere else."
"We have no moral right to slow down the reforms we have launched," Saakashvili said. Without being "very successful," he claimed, "there will be no Georgia."
Singapore appears to serve as the model for this race against the clock. By emulating Singapore’s experience, Saakashvili continued, Georgia could not only solve its economic woes, but resolve problems with Russia, which continues to occupy two rooms in “our apartment.”
Singapore has in the past solved its problems with China by conducting sweeping reforms and becoming an attractive, developed place, he said, Georgia, Saakashvili pledged, will solve its problems with Russia in the same way.
An irreverent novella in Tbilisi has provoked a culture war that has Georgians fighting over the limits of individual freedom.
The work, titled Saidumlo Siroba (Holy Crap), takes swipes at the Georgian Orthodox Church, Georgian patriotism and Georgian mothers. It has become a William Burroughs-style bizarro bestseller, generating more shock and outrage than literary acclaim.
Ukraine wants to join the project, which could provide a shortcut to Europe for Azerbaijani gas exports, and leave aside both Turkey and Russia. Under the proposed itinerary, liquefied gas would travel from a Georgian terminal on the Black Sea across to Romania, to be turned back into gas. Ukraine, which has had more than a few gas supply worries of its own, proposes another re-gasification terminal, near its Black Sea port of Odessa, to receive the gas from Georgia for its own needs as well.
Just one catch: Ukrainian Energy Minister Yuri Boiko is hoping that the European Union will pony up the $1 billion estimated needed to build the terminal.
Forget about the dangers of France selling Russia high-end helicopter carriers. It is apparently the French plans to sell Georgia two helicopters that pose a real threat to regional security, claims one member of the Russian Defense Ministry's Public Council.
The French company Eurocopter plans to sell two of it Super Puma helicopters (a series with both military and civilian versions) to Georgia, a roughly $30 million sale that could run the risk of Russian sanctions against the firm, warned Igor Korotchenko, head of the recently formed Center for the Analysis of World Military Trade. In the wake of its 2008 war with Georgia, Moscow called for an international ban on selling arms to Tbilisi and vowed to punish embargo breakers. Korotchenko reminded Eurocopter that Russia is a VIP client and Georgia is not worth risking Russian sales.
Georgian Foreign Minister Grigol Vashadze called the warnings a bluff. The Georgian government claims that the helicopters will be used for high-altitude emergency operations and to carry tourists into the mountains.
By contrast, the French-made Mistral helicopter carrier in Russia's shopping bag is capable of transporting 16 attack helicopters, dozens of armored vehicles and around 450 soldiers. Russian Navy commander Vladimir Vysotsky claimed that the carriers would have allowed Russia to complete its 2008 war with Georgia within "40 minutes."
The Obama administration's Russia strategy is all about decoupling areas where the White House and the Kremlin can cooperate, such as nuclear disarmament and Afghanistan, from unrelated areas, said McFaul. “We are deliberately not pushing for the end of the occupation of Georgia to resubmit” to Congress a nuclear treaty with Russia, he said.
But this “does not mean that we are ignoring Georgia” and not working to secure the withdrawal of Russian troops from the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, he claimed. “We are doing these things in parallel, but we are not linking them.”
Russian approval of sanctions against Iran may have chilled relations between the two countries, but there is still enough room left for diplomacy to swing a cat. Iran plans to send a pair of Caucasus leopards to Russia to help efforts to repopulate the big cats in the Caucasus area.
Hunting and poaching have brought the Caucasus leopard to the brink of extinction; environmentalists rejoice at every occasional sighting of the animal in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. Some claim that the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh has also got in the way of the leopards’ migration routes.
The Iranian gift will be placed in the Russian city of Sochi's zoo. Russia plans to start dispersing the cats on the northern flanks of the Caucasus ridge, hoping that the leopards will spread throughout the Caucasus area. Russia, in turn, is helping Iran restore the population of tigers in its northern province of Mazandaran.
There may be little love lost between Russia and Georgia, but the quarrelsome neighbors now have something in common -- their low ranking in the Global Peace Index, a scale of countries' peacefulness assembled by the Sydney, Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace, and the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Out of a group of 149 countries, the Index gave Russia's degree of peacefulness a 143rd place finish, while Georgia appears just a notch calmer in 142nd place.
Conflict with neighbors? Check. High number of deaths from organized conflict? Check. Too many weapons? Check. The list of peacefulness criteria goes on.
The countries ranked as more ill-tempered than Russia and Georgia include Israel, Pakistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.
Within the South Caucasus, Armenia carries the peace torch, finishing in 119th place, while New Zealand is deemed the world's least trigger-happy country.
Baku has categorized as persona non grata a top official from one separatist Caucasus region for having observed elections in another. The Kavkazsky Uzel news site reported that South Ossetia's de facto Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Yuri Dzitsoity is not welcome in Azerbaijan anymore.
The same goes for several Russian parliamentarians, who had the indiscretion to travel to Nagorno Karabakh to monitor recent legislative polls there.
Baku, which called on the international community to give Karabakh's May 23 elections the miss, argues that Dzitstoity and other observers violated the state borders of Azerbaijan and flouted international law.
Even shoe designer Mahnolo Blahnik is agog. The world's oldest leather shoe, found in the mountains of Armenia, bears an "astonishing" resemblance to the footwear of today, Blahnik told National Geographic.
The lace-up, cowhide shoe was left behind by a person some 5,500 years ago and corresponds to a modern woman’s US size seven.
The gender of the foot is not known, but Irish biological anthropologist Ron Pinhasi, who led the research, believes that it is more likely to have been worn by a woman. (The shoe is a second "world's oldest" find for the
University College Cork scientist. Pinhasi last
year unearthed remains of the world's oldest brain as well. )
The Carrie Bradshaw of the time apparently took good care of her
footwear -- the shoe has been tanned with vegetable oil and stuffed with
grass. Found in a cave along with a child’s skull, containers of barley, wheat and apricot, the shoe offers a glimpse into pre-historic life and fashion in what is now Armenia. Scientists have a thick cover of sheep dung to thank for the shoe's preservation.
A recent letter from President Obama, sent via a high-profile courier, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and a promise that Hilary Clinton will drop by one of these days, seem to have made the difference.
Washington, for its part, appears to blame geography for Azerbaijan's anger. Azerbaijanis, declared Gates during his visit to Baku, live in a "rough neighborhood."
