Every time Russia comes to play war in the Caucasus, a sense of alert spreads in the neighborhood. And it does not help if the Russians are running around with guns for two separate war games at the same time.
Azerbaijan is keeping a wary eye on its sworn enemy, Armenia, as it hosts drills for the Collective Security Treaty Organization (Moscow's response to NATO), while Georgia has its vision trained on the Caucasus-2012 training to the north.
Tbilisi is particularly uneasy to see Moscow mobilize 8,000 troops, 200 military vehicles, artillery and military vessels in the Black and Caspian Seas and Russia's southern Krasnodar region just as Georgia is approaching a critical parliamentary election on October 1.
“We all remember the consequences of the 2008 drills, which were much smaller in scale [than Caucasus 2012],” commented Georgian Foreign Minister Grigol Vashadze. He claimed that the operations threaten the sovereignty of the three Caucasus countries, and, at least in part, are meant to affect their domestic politics.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen must have contracted some of Georgia’s uneasiness during a recent visit to Tbilisi when he requested Russia to clarify the goals of the large-scale exercise.
Political candidates around the world routinely insert God into their election campaigns, but, in passionately Orthodox Christian Georgia, politicians appear to be experiencing a particularly pressing need for divine assistance ahead of the October 1 parliamentary vote.
The popularity of the Georgian Orthodox Church at times could make the entire country seem like one big, happy parish. The Church always tops approval charts for public institutions and no public figure can challenge the celebrity of Georgian Orthodox Church Patriarch Ilia II. In the streets, drivers and pedestrians often halt -- sometimes in hazardous traffic situations -- and make signs of the cross whenever they see a church, whether near or far.
So, perhaps it is only logical for politicians to try to identify themselves with the Church and turn parishioners into voters. President Mikheil Saakashvili, leader of the ruling United National Movement, was recently spotted hoisting a cross over the newly-rebuilt, 11th-century Cathedral of the Dormition in Georgia's second-largest city, Kutaisi. Meanwhile, in Tbilisi's outskirts, a flag for billionaire opposition leader Bidzina Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream coalition flies outside the St. Ilia Chavchavadze church.
Both the billionaire and the president are rumored to be closet religious skeptics, but keeping a distance is proving harder as the elections draw nearer.
Used to public shows of piety, some clerics don’t take kindly to reporters seeking an explanation for the occasionally blurred line between Church and campaign.
If there is any conclusion that can already be made about the September 13 bomb attack against separatist South Ossetia’s de-facto deputy defense minister, it is that it is always a good idea to own a large plasma TV.
It was such a television set that shielded Ibragim Gaseyev, his mother and daughter from shrapnel and detritus as an explosion ripped through the door to their apartment in Tskhinvali in the wee hours this morning, investigators told the Russian newspaper Izvestia. Gaseyev and his family survived the attack.
Other deductions made by South Ossetia investigators are both speculative and predictable. Separatist officials claim that the blast is either a product of domestic turf wars or a result of the work of a foreign country's secret services; a list, which, in Tskhinvali’s books, can mean only one place -- Tbilisi.
De-facto General Prosecutor Merab Chigoyev reasoned that Gaseyev is one of South Ossetia’s better military minds, so an enemy state might have tried to cripple the territory’s army. But formidable as those forces may be, it, arguably, was Russia’s involvement, rather than the South Ossetians' display of military know-how, that decided the outcome of the 2008 war with Georgia.
That said, logic does not always come first in the Caucasus.
South Ossetia's de-facto leader, Leonid Tibilov, echoed Chigoyev’s assumptions, but he didn’t rule out the attack being homegrown, either. In the past, violence has marked the competition for political and economic clout in the territory.
The return of ethnic Armenians from Syria to their ancestral homeland has born its fruit. RFE/RL has posted a video of a baby boy born in Yerevan late last month to one of the many Syrian-Armenian families who have escaped the fighting in Aleppo for refuge among their ethnic kin. In a symbolic gesture, the baby has been named "Christ" in recognition of Armenia's status as the first country in the world to adopt Christianity.
The baby Christ weighs 3.5 kilos, is 53 centimeters tall and is the first child to be born to a Syrian-Armenian family in Armenia after fleeing Syria.
There may not be three kings in Yerevan to greet and shower the baby with frankincense, gold and myrrh, but there is Diaspora Minister Hranush Hakobian. She visited the mother and child in the hospital, and promised state assistance should Christ decide to make Armenia his home.
But not all the Syrian-Armenian news is that heart-warming. In the hometown of Christ's parents, Aleppo, four Syrians of Armenian descent were killed and 11 were wounded on September 11 after returning from Yerevan. The rebel Free Syria Army reportedly shot at the group as they were looking for a safe way to head home from the airport, according to Armenpress.am.
Safarov, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in Hungary for the 2004 beheading of Armenian army Lieutenant Gurgen Margaryan at a NATO training program in Budapest, was extradited to and freed in Azerbaijan last month, causing shock and anger in Armenia.
Photos depicting Yerevan city buses bearing posters announcing an “Open Season for Safarov Hunting” are making the rounds online. The posters reportedly appear in various places throughout the city.
Yerevan certainly has upped the war rhetoric against Baku since Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev's August 31 pardon of Safarov, but no official has called publicly for taking Safarov out in a Mossad-style operation. It is unclear who is behind the “hunting” campaign, but any potential attempt to assassinate Safarov could, arguably, push the situation over the edge. (International expressions of concern, to date,appear to have had little visible effect.)
Some Armenian commentators say that the poster campaign is just a way for many citizens to vent their anger about the pardon, but, given the relentless propaganda campaigns on both sides, there can always be someone who opts to take the calls to exterminate the enemy literally. Safarov is walking proof of that.
In the eyes of many Georgians, the size of a crowd of supporters is often a better yardstick of political popularity than opinion polls or the feasibility of campaign promises. The splashy convention staged by Georgia's ruling United National Movement party on Saturday was the latest round in the ongoing game of trying to outnumber the opponent ahead of the country's October 1 parliamentary vote.
After watching scores of people wearing red-and-white UNM shirts stream into the Tbilisi Sports Palace, one swing voter predicted the party's certain victory -- even after making a similar prediction for billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream coalition when it gathered a huge throng of supporters in downtown Tbilisi this May.
And he is not the only Georgian voter for whom campaign talk is reduced to background noise and the visual impressions matter the most.
Along with chewing over the convention for news items, local wonks are also busy comparing how the count of red-and-white shirts compares with that of blue shirts for the Georgian Dream.
Depending where their loyalties lie, commentators speak of the UNM forcing public servants to show up at their events (the convention was headlined by ten UNM gatherings across Georgia) or of Ivanishvili allegedly bribing voters to attend his own rallies.
With a combined 43 percent of surveyed Georgians either undecided or refusing to speak of their political sympathies in a recent poll for the National Democratic Institute (NDI), crowd-gathering can arguably make a significant difference before the election hits 20 days from now.
To paraphrase a line from Rudyard Kipling, Iran is no place for spies. In particular, for Azerbaijani poets accused of being spies. After spending about four months in an Iranian prison and causing more tension in the less-than-harmonious ties between the two Shi'a Muslim neighbors, a pair of Azerbaijani poets finally marched home yesterday.
Azerbaijani television carried footage of friends and relatives embracing Shakhriyar Hajizade and Farrid Huseyn at the Azerbaijani-Iranian border. The two were paroled before a court in Tabriz was scheduled to land a verdict in their case on September 10.
The Iranian side said that the poets have “Islamic mercy” to thank for their release, though the poets themselves said they were indebted to the Azerbaijani government.
The release came as an apparent peace-offering to Baku and was timed with Iranian Vice-President for Cultural Affairs Hasan Mousavi's visit to Azerbaijan. The enemies may plot all they want, but “friendly and fraternal relations between Azerbaijan and Iran have always been strong and will be so in the future,” Mousavi said in Baku.
But, no doubt, Tehran is looking to Azerbaijan to release alleged Iranian spies/terrorists of its own to make this sonnet to friendship and brotherhood complete.
NATO boss Anders fogh Rasmussen has slapped Baku on the wrist for pardoning the murderer of an Armenian army officer (and glorifying him, to boot), but the gesture appears to have left Yerevan unimpressed.
In this tough-spoken part of the world, “deep concern” is widely seen as a Western diplomatic term for “This was bad, but we are not going to do anything about it.” And subsequent tweets expressing NATO's appreciation of Azerbaijan's role in the Afghanistan campaign and of Baku's partnership with the Alliance would particularly not correct that impression.
Many Armenians believe that the Alliance bears some responsibility for the 2004 axe murder since it happened at a NATO seminar in Budapest. Rasmussen does not.
Arguably, at a time like this, whatever he said on his Armenia-Azerbaijan tour, the general secretary would be left having to balance on an extremely high wire. But the question is to what extent his presence gave both sides pause amidst their rush of rage or simply directed their anger at another target -- the international community itself.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili may think that he’s got the upper hand in his political fight with arch-nemesis Bidzina Ivanishvili, but the billionaire suddenly has pulled out a surprise weapon -- American TV legend Larry King.
Amid the heated race for Georgia's October 1 parliamentary vote, the Ivanishvili-linked television channel, TV9, announced today that the 79-year-old retired CNN talk show host has joined the station's advisory board.
Apparently, despite having little or no known knowledge of Georgia, King is keeping a close eye on developments in the South Caucasus country and is ready to help the young station cope with the challenges it claims it faces from the Georgian government.
“I am proud to become a member of the TV9 advisory board,” King was quoted as saying in the station's statement.
King's press agent could not be reached to confirm the announcement.
By looping in King (if, in fact, he has), Ivanishvili must be hoping to lend both credibility and protection to his fiercely anti-government channel. Cable and satellite television carrier Global TV, partly owned by Ivanishvili’s brother, Alexander, recently saw hundreds of its satellite dishes expropriated by the state on voter-bribery charges.
The Georgian government and election officials might well be inclined to heave a small sigh of relief. A combined 60 percent of 2,038 Georgian respondents in a poll for the National Democratic Institute (NDI), to be released on September 7, predict a passably or "totally" clean vote in Georgia's October 1 parliamentary elections. By comparison, a combined 21 percent believe that there will be some form of funny business, in whole or in part.
But is Georgia a democracy to begin with? The poll implied that there is no easy answer to that question among many Georgians. Just over 40 percent of the respondents think they live in a democracy, while another 40 percent are convinced they do not. The remaining 20 percent included a tiny group of glazed-eyed enthusiasts who believe no further improvement is necessary and misanthropes who say that Georgia is not a democracy and never will be, either.
Arguably, Georgia is better off than repressive neighbors like Russia and Azerbaijan, but that does not make it Sweden. Nearly 10 years after the Rose Revolution, independently corroborated complaints persist about harassment of opposition parties and suppression of media liberties.
Critics charge that, for all its democratic reforms, Georgia is still not at a stage where it's imaginable that the ruling party would submit to losing in a fair election or where the opposition would be graceful in defeat.
Some time ago, that mix of traits prompted several academics, analysts and commentators with an interest in Georgia to brainstorm about the terms that accurately represent the country's current political system.
The winner? "Supra democracy" -- a reference to the traditional Georgian feast, or supra, emceed by a chosen toast-master-in-chief, or "tamada."
