Only a few weeks ago, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was in the vanguard of those calling for political change in Egypt. These days, Erdogan’s government in Ankara is taking a very different approach toward the uprising in Libya.
The casual visitor could not be blamed for believing Iran’s influence is ascendant in Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe. Iranian pop music blasts from many of the city’s cafés. Iranian-made yellow taxis ferry a bevy of fashionable Iranian businessmen around downtown. Market stalls are stacked with Iranian cookies and cakes.
Latin America may seem an unlikely diplomatic priority for Abkhazia, thousands of miles away from the tiny, breakaway territory on the Black Sea. But Abkhazia's de facto foreign minister, Maxim Gvindjia, on his fifth trip to the region, says Latin America is a key to the territory’s efforts to build diplomatic and trade ties around the world.
Robert Blake, the US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, is scheduled to be in Uzbekistan on February 17-18 for the second Annual Bilateral Consultations between the United States and Uzbekistan.
It has been a whirlwind 18 months for Turkey's international reputation. Just a year ago, as Turkish-Israeli relations cooled and Turkish-Iranian relations warmed, Western media portrayed Turkey as a country shifting on its axis toward the Muslim Middle East.
Amid ongoing protests in Egypt, a US State Department warning about a terrorist threat “against American interests” in Azerbaijan has placed the government in Baku in an awkward situation. Senior members of the governing Yeni Azerbaijan Party have criticized the US action, while law enforcement agencies have questioned the basis for the alert.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on February 1 joined a growing chorus of critics taking aim at embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Given Turkey’s rising influence in the Muslim world, Erdogan’s words seemed set to catalyze Egyptian protesters. His comments also underscored a looming democratization dilemma for Ankara.
New guest workers are coming to the cotton and rice fields of southern Tajikistan, and they are already sowing seeds of discontent.
Locals are outraged at the prospect of Chinese farmers arriving to work Tajik land, following Dushanbe's decision this week to lease out 2,000 hectares of land to the Uyghur Autonomous Region in western China.
BRUSSELS -- Top NATO and European Union officials met Uzbek President Islam Karimov in Brussels amid strong condemnation from nongovernmental organizations, who bemoan Tashkent’s woeful human rights record.
The Brussels visit is the first in years for the authoritarian leader and has dismayed rights groups, who say it marks his rehabilitation in the West.
MOSCOW -- The presidents of Afghanistan and Russia have taken steps to resurrect economic and political ties that have been almost nonexistent since the fall of the Soviet Union.
