Officials in Azerbaijan want to make the act of spreading “misinformation” a “cyber-crime.” Some Azerbaijani civil rights activists worry that the initiative is driven by a desire to restrict Azerbaijani web users’ access to online information.
The stage is just a couple of large dining tables covered with white cotton sheets pushed together at one end of the room. The “commandant,” played by a young woman, has an elfin face and shy smile behind oversized dark glasses.
Like any kind of improvisation, meykhana, a musical style akin to rap, has its detractors and its devotees in Azerbaijan. Literally translated as “the place of wine,” meykhana is the poetry of the country’s poorer neighborhoods, occasionally performed at weddings, capable of inducing a chuckle and a raised eyebrow.
As a senior Uzbek government official touches down in Berlin on May 24, he is heading into a storm of controversy over Uzbekistan’s human rights record. The release of an Uzbek dissident ahead of the trip has not tempered the row, with revelations of his ill treatment behind bars further stoking the ire of activists.
Officials in Tajikistan have resorted to price controls in an effort to halt a drastic increase in food costs. But inflation’s upward spiral shows no sign of slowing in the Central Asian nation.
In a jab at Moscow, Georgia on May 20 became the first country to recognize as genocide Tsarist Russia’s massive slaughter of ethnic Circassians in the mid-19th century. The decision constitutes part of Tbilisi’s ongoing argument that the Caucasus is a region where Russia comes as an outsider, not as a native with the right to rule.
Two weeks after a surprise pro-hijab protest by scores of Muslim believers outside Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Education, authorities are still trying to figure out who organized the show of defiance.
In Armenia, it is routine for the annual Eurovision contest to provoke heated debate about the relative merits of the performers. But this year, post-contest discussion in Yerevan is also laden with political and diplomatic significance.
When authorities in Kyrgyzstan announce that a terrorism suspect has been detained, the public is rarely given a name or convincing background story. So it came as a surprise that the National Security Committee identified a Turkish citizen detained on suspicion of membership in a terrorist organization bent on overthrowing the Turkish Republic.
