The move does not jive well with Tbilisi’s hopes for closer ties with the EU and increased European involvement in Georgia’s conflicts and domestic politics. Tbilisi often looks to the EU’s point man for the Caucasus, Peter Semneby, to help mitigate problems with Russian-backed separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. With plans afoot to relegate Semneby’s functions to a lower-ranking functionary in Brussels, Georgians now may have to look elsewhere for intercession.
As RFE/RL writes, the move "signals another lurch toward big-power politics within the EU." And one in which the South Caucasus and Moldova -- with their complicated, long-running separatist conflicts -- look likely to pull significantly lesser weight.
For several days now, Armenian National Congress (ANC) activists have been vainly trying to access the newly renovated central square to call for the release of alleged political prisoners and return ofopposition-minded A1+ television channel to the air. But the city authorities say they did not refurbish Liberty Square to let it turn into a theater for political activism again. Riot police rounded up 15 ANC activists and several reporters and herded them into police vans on May 31. Most have since been released, reportedly.
After years of jostling among the regional giants, the United States and Russia, officials in Georgia seem intent on recruiting a new player for the regional geopolitical game -- Iran.
The South Caucasus can heave a collective sigh of relief. Singing talents from Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia all have made it to the final of Eurovision, Europe’s annual pop-glitz fest.
The three countries' singing beauties and their saccharine-heavy songs breezed through the semi-final of this pop music Super Bowl, where voting for participants tends to reflect the continent’s geopolitical fault lines.
British bookmakers predict that Azerbaijan’s Safura will win the contest with her "Drip Drop" song, while Google’s I-Predictor gadget gave Georgia’s Sofo Nizharadze with "Shine" a respectable fifth-place finish.
Last year, Georgia was disqualified for taking a swipe at Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in its contestants' "We Don’t Wanna Put In" disco song.
There is a hackneyed Georgian phrase that represents some of the older generation’s nostalgia for the USSR: "I could fly to Moscow for 37 rubles then!" Translation: Russia's cosmopolitan capital was easy to access before the walls of nationalism arose all over the former Soviet Union, and the Soviet-Georgian marriage ended in a bitter divorce.
For those Georgians who still want to catch that 37-ruble flight to the past, President Mikheil Saakashvili has got some news.
Some older Georgians apparently already embrace that message.
One middle-aged patriot recently spotted driving his red, Russian-made Lada down a Tbilisi road had emblazoned the back of his car (in English) with a single, simple message: "I don’t need Russian women!"
What is democracy? For Ethiopia, it's "fair play"; for Poland, it's "like a keyboard." (?) And for Azerbaijan, it's "possible."
An Azerbaijani entry was the only contestant from the former Soviet Union among the 18 finalists in the "Democracy Is . . . " video contest sponsored by a collection of American universities, film and recording associations and the US Department of State, among others. Online voting will decide a winner by roughly June 18.
But the makers of the Azerbaijani video most likely know a thing or two about why democracy matters. The video links to a website of Azerbaijan’s youth movement Ol! The founder of the movement, blogger Adnan Hajizade, is serving a two-year prison term on what are widely believed to be trumped-up charges of hooliganism.
The breakaway region of Nagorno Karabakh has voted, but, so far as most of the outside world is concerned, it voted in vain. The mediating trio of France, Russia and US reiterated that the territory's May 23 parliamentary election will not be regarded as legitimate. But if anyone nevertheless wants to know how things are shaping up, de facto Prime Minister Ara Harutyunian’s Free Homeland party leads with 46 percent of the vote and is trailed by de facto Parliamentary Speaker Ashot Ghulian’s Democratic Party of Artsakh with 29 percent of voters. Next comes Dashnaktsutiun with 20 percent, while the Communist Party has failed to clear the four-percent threshold, according to preliminary results.
Only Armenia, which protected Nagorno-Karabakh through thick and thin, has hailed the election, calling it a "demonstration of a resolve to live independently."
Seventy-six-year-old Otar Ioseliani may have long ago turned into a genteel Parisian film director, but his inner Georgian comes out even at the Cannes Film Festival. Interviewed by The New York Times about his new out-of-competition film at Cannes, Chantrapas, the arthouse author put down his cigarette to launch into a Russia-bashing tirade.
“The Russians never behaved in the civilized fashion – never,” Ioseliani said. “Look how the English left India, but the Russians won’t leave. They are, well, something else, the whole lot: Putin, Medvedev, and before, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, and Stalin and, the rotter of the lot, Lenin. Before, there was that idiot Czar Nicolas.”
Russians are the neighbors from hell, he summed up. “We don’t hate them, we just hold them in contempt.”
Tired of the Soviet regime’s constant censorship of the films he made in Georgia, Ioseliani immigrated to France in the 1970s to become an acclaimed director of absurdist, cinema-literate films.
While Tbilisi relies on unobtrusive European monitors for its border security, Russia has opted for some tried-and-true Cossacks.
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)'s Border Patrol Service will use the renegade paramilitaries, who first manned Russia's southern borders in the 18th century, to help police its recently reopened Upper Lars border checkpoint with Georgia and newly recognized border with South Ossetia. The Cossacks, working in 12-hour shifts of 20 men per border post, will receive a 500-ruble (around $16) per diem for their work.
Not much, but then maybe the Kremlin hopes that Cossack pride about being back on the job, defending Russia's borders, will make up for the pay.
The dominant Democracy Party of Artsakh led by de facto parliamentary speaker Ashot Ghulian, calls for boosting Karabakh’s international profile, Prime Minister Arayik Harutyunyan’s Free Homeland Party runs on a reforms platform, while the nationalist Dashnaktsutiun champions homeland defense and the Communist Party, predictably, calls for the nationalization of strategic industries.
No country has recognized Karabakh's independence, but Azerbaijan, still smarting from the recent Turkish-Armenian rapprochement campaign, nonethless placed on the record that no country should consider the election to be legitimate.
