The most difficult thing to countenance when one is an analyst-watcher-critic of Afghan politics and society is the nearly weekly news that some child or innocent woman has been killed in NATO airstrikes or nightly door to door counter-terrorist operations. This, any time of the year, any year at all. But this is a different […]
It was not easy being Sergei Bagapsh – the late, gregarious and moderate Abkhazian leader trapped between Georgia’s gun-sights and Russia’s self-serving, smothering embrace: even his last name suggests an exhalation of frustration. But it will be even harder to find a successor able enough to lead the tiny, mostly unrecognised country towards territorial security […]
Reports out of Tbilisi indicate that at least two people were killed early today (26 May) during a police crackdown on demonstrators outside the Parliament building on Rustavelli Avenue. Police moved in shortly after the midnight, when the permit for the opposition rally expired, intent on clearing the area for today’s Independence Day parade, which […]
Azeri journalist Eynullah Fatullayev, who has been serving a variety of prison sentences since April of 2007, was given his freedom today in one of President Aliyev’s amnesties. As readers of this blog are aware, the charges against Fatullayev had ranged from libel to inciting terror to tax evasion – and more recently, to drug […]
Protest rallies in Georgia, begun over the weekend in Tbilisi and Batumi, seem to be headed for violent confrontation today (Wednesday afternoon in the US, early Thursday morning in Tbilisi) after apparently failing to achieve the goals of their organizers or to attract widespread public support. It’s not that the latest opposition movement (called the […]
He might have had no problems embracing iPad and Twitter, but the tech-savvy Medvedev seems to be a late adopter when it comes to good old fashioned press freedom. A Russian journalist who claims to have been barred from covering his recent news conference is suing the presidential press service and protection unit, reports Radio […]
President Barack Obama today defended what he wants the young men on the street in far-flung countries to view as a new stripe of diplomacy, one that is informed by the value of self-determination and respect for those young millions hungry for it. One that does not contrast American interests from American values. Time will […]
President Medvedev’s much anticipated news conference delivered nothing of substance (Putin’s random interview with a US nature magazine contained more meat), but that may have been exactly the point: to obscure the real news happening behind the scenes. On the day Medvedev demurred from announcing his candidature in the next elections, St Petersburg’s duma recalled Federation Council Speaker […]
This is Russia’s timeless, quintessential paradox: the country has no problem building a state of the art stadium in Chechnya and bringing over international football legends Maradona, Figo and Steve McManaman all the way to Grozny for the inaugural exhibition match, but can’t manage the simple task of delivering an Amazon shipment to ordinary people trying […]
While the tiger-hunting, jet flying, oligarch-jailing judo blackbelt may already comfortably be the most powerful man in Russia, Vladimir Putin has never been one to take chances. And it must frustrate the PM that, despite having unlimited resources and virtually no opposition, his approval ratings hover at around 50% while those of his behemoth United […]
Azeri youth activist Jabbar Savalan was convicted last week (4 May) on charges of marijuana possession and sentenced to two and a half years in prison. As readers of this blog may recall, Jabbar was arrested in February after calling for protest actions on Facebook and attending a youth conference in the city of Sumgayit. […]
I have recently written about TAPI, the 1,680 km (1,000 mile) $7.6 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India proposed pipeline scheduled for completion in 2016 with a capacity to transfer 90 million cubic meters of gas per day to energy starved South Asia. According to the TAPI agreement, Turkmenistan will supply 38 mmcmd each going to Pakistan and India, […]
Plagiarism is not something Russians worry about – hell, even Putin lifted his phD thesis, verbatim, out of a US textbook – while his country has occupied the US’s piracy list – home of the world’s largest copyright violators – for twice as many years as China. Not that there’s anything wrong with copying per se: it […]
On May 3, 2011, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry or the Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Commission (KIC) released its final report on the interethnic violence and clashes between the country’s ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities last year. The KIC was formed based on an initiative from the Nordic countries for an independent international inquiry and was […]
The documentary program “Frontline” aired a comprehensive set of documentaries on the occasion of Osama bin Laden’s capture and death. It is an excellent collection, a much better resource for this throbbing, restless time than most newspapers and broadcast journalism outlets. (Though the broadcast is not yet available in its entirety, please find an excerpt […]