Domestic Politics Archive

Public unrest in Tbilisi earlier this month has disturbed the friends of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. Since Saakashvili’s ascent to power during the peaceful Rose Revolution in November 2003, Western nations have touted his government as a beacon of democracy in the South Caucasus. Indeed, over the last four years, Saakashvili’s cabinet has reined in corruption, improved tax collection and reportedly increased tax revenue six-fold. Undemocratic Actions Yet, these breakthroughs notwithstanding, Saakashvili’s popularity is on decline. Public discontent with his governing practices erupted after the Sept. 27 arrest and alleged torture of the former defense minister, Irakli Okruashvili. Saakashsvili dismissed […]

MITROVICA, Kosovo — At first glance, Mitrovica looks like an unremarkable post-industrial mining town. A cloud of smoke hovers over a sprawl of dusty roads dotted with Yugoslav-era apartment blocks and an unattractive monument to local zinc miners, both Serb and Albanian, who battled against the Nazis during World War II. Today, the city is divided by a river and a bridge, symbols of the ethnic strife that exploded in violence in 1999 and again in 2004, driving Mitrovica’s Albanians to the south, and Serbs to the north, of the Ibar River. The final scheduled talks between Kosovo and Serbia […]

The German parliament recently renewed the “mandates” authorizing the German Bundeswehr to continue military operations in Afghanistan. On Oct. 12, the legislators voted to approve Germany’s continued military participation in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF). On Nov. 15, the Bundestag extended by one-year the authorization permitting Germany’s elite special forces unit, the Kommando Spezialkräfte, to participate in the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan, which also involves German naval patrols off the Horn of Africa. The OEF deployment, which focuses on counterterrorism, has proven more controversial among Germans than supporting the ISAF, which is often […]

A new Russian epic film that tells the story of the emergence of the Romanov czarist dynasty is widely seen as the latest move in the campaign to keep President Vladimir Putin in power after his second and final allowable term ends in May 2008. “1612,” which is said to have been produced by a friend of Putin, recounts how the Russians “drafted” Mikhail Romanov to save the country during a dark period of its history, thus paving the way for imperial Russia. The film’s director is quite open about its contemporary message. “I’m convinced . . . that Russians […]

NAIROBI, Kenya — Somalia’s embattled transitional President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was slated on Wednesday to nominate a successor to interim Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi, who quit last month during a spike in insurgent violence in the capital of Mogadishu that claimed hundreds of lives. The new prime minister faces a daunting task — holding together a fragile and unpopular government (based for security reasons in the northern town of Baidoa) while organizing security forces to fight alongside Ethiopian troops that have occupied Mogadishu since routing the hard line Islamic Courts regime last December. Local press reports indicate that former […]

“Is the Romanian bogeyman destined to become Italians’ new nightmare?” This was the question raised by Maria Luisa Agnese in a Nov. 1 column in the Italian daily the Corriere della Sera, suggestively titled “The Specter of the ‘Monsters’ from Europe.” Two days earlier, on Oct. 30, Giovanna Reggiani, the 47-year-old wife of a navy officer, was found half-naked and barely alive in a ditch near the Tor di Quinto train station on the outskirts of Rome. Reggiani had been robbed and savagely beaten. Taken in a coma to the Sant’Andrea hospital, she would subsequently die there of her injuries. […]

After emerging victorious from a Nov. 11 runoff against Christian democrat first-round winner Alojz Peterle — prime minister when the country declared independence in 1991, and the favorite of the center-right government of Janez Jansa — left-leaning Danilo Turk will become Slovenia’s next president. Despite coming second in the first round on Oct. 21, Turk garnered two-thirds of the vote in the runoff, largely thanks to votes transferred from Central Bank governor Mitja Gaspari, a fellow left winger he narrowly beat. In the first ballot, Peterle won overall with 28.7 percent, while Turk had 24.5 percent and Gaspari 24.1 percent. […]

As the temperature rises ever more perilously under the cauldron of Pakistan’s political crisis, a nuclear-armed Muslim nation bordering Afghanistan and Iran, the West is urgently pondering what ingredients it might stir in to keep the dangerous pot from boiling over. After all, Pakistan’s combustible mix could leave third-degree burns far, far beyond its borders. Now that Pakistan’s dictator, its president and military chief, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has declared a state of emergency there, this new crisis could easily spread. It does not take a prophet of doom to envision truly disastrous consequences. The choices for Washington and its allies […]

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan — Bolstered by a European Union decision to lift travel restrictions on senior officials, the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan is moving towards elections set for December amid concerns that the reelection of President Islam Karimov would be an inexorable setback for democracy in the country. Though he is technically ineligible to stand as a candidate in the polls set for Dec. 23, the Liberal Democratic Party announced this month that Karimov, in power since the Soviet era, would stand for another seven-year term in order to “secure stability, peace and prosperity” for the nation. The announcement came […]