Tag Archives: Georgia

Georgian capital hotel boom given another lift as Hilton prepares to open

TBILISI, NOV. 1 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — US-based hotel chain Hilton will finally open a new $31m four-star hotel in Tbilisi next year, its first in the Georgian capital, adding much-needed extra bedrooms in Georgia where both tourist and business visits are rising steadily.

The 14-storey Hilton Garden Inn hotel, which will open a few months behind schedule, will hold 165 rooms and be situated towards the western end of Tbilisi, an area which has become a hub for Georgia’s professional businesses and for many Western companies working in the country.

Hilton, which already owns a hotel in Georgia’s Black Sea coast of Batumi and in Baku and Yerevan, had announced in 2013 that it was to build the hotel which it had aimed to open by the end of 2016.

And the Hilton hotel is just the latest to be built in Tbilisi, which has been notoriously short of bedrooms for years but is experiencing something of a hotel building boom.

The National Agency for State Property this week also sold an ornate 100-year-old post office building in the centre of Tbilisi to Nevada, a local real estate company, for 5.7m lari ($2.4m). Nevada plans to convert the building into a 30-bedroom boutique hotel within 3-1/2 years.

Tourism in Georgia is on the rise. Georgia is positioning itself as an affordable summer and winter destination for people living in the former Soviet Union, and you are now as likely to see upwardly mobile young Kazakhs in Batumi as you are in any resort around the Black Sea. Improved ties with Russia have also triggered a rise in visitor numbers, as has relative stability in Iran and Iraq. Revenues from tourism grew to $2b last year, an 8.3% increase compared to 2014.

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(News report from Issue No. 303, published on Nov. 4 2016)

Georgian Dream secures massive election victory

TBILISI, OCT. 30 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — The Georgian Dream coalition won 48 of the 50 run-offs in majoritarian seats, securing a large enough majority to change Georgia’s constitution without needing support from other parties.

The run-off seats won by Georgian Dream were added to the 67 seats it won in the first round of voting on Oct. 8, giving it control of 115 seats in the 150-seat parliament, smashing their arch rivals the United National Movement party (UNM).

Georgia’s politics are notoriously fractious and while supporters of the Georgian Dream, led by billionaire and former PM Bidzina Ivanishvili, celebrated, election observers were wary of the powers they now wield over the constitution. Ignacio Sanchez Amor, head of the short- term OSCE observer mission, said a constitutional majority brought responsibility.

“The balance of power must be properly observed and rights of minorities must be at the centre of any discussion if there are constitutional changes,” media quoted him as saying.

Alongside the Georgian Dream, the Industrialists party and an independent candidate both won a seat. The UNM, the party of former President Mikheil Saakashvili, finished with the 27 seats, a disappointing result for the party which had talked up the chances of making a comeback and winning back control of parliament. It lost a 2012 parliamentary election to the Georgian Dream.

Dustin Gilbreath, a policy analyst at the Caucasus Research Resource Centre, said the UNM can still recover as a political power but it would be difficult.

“They can continue as a major opposition party, but they need to rebrand. I think they have the potential to stay in Georgian politics in the long run, but they first need to make things works internally”, he said.

Away from the celebrating Georgian Dream supporters, people in Tbilisi, people were worried about the lack of checks on its powers.

Levani, who runs a small grocery store in the city centre, said: “It’s just a disaster. The political stagnation that we witnessed in the last four years is bound to worsen now that no political actor has the power to compel them to act.”

Another Tbilisi resident, Ketino, agreed even though she had voted for the Georgian Dream. “I voted for them to avoid the return of UNM. Nothing good can come out from having too much power,” she said.

Georgian Dream, considered traditional and close to the Orthodox Church, has already said that it wants to change the constitution to enshrine marriage as a union only between a man and a woman.

The Orthodox Church is staunchly against gay rights and many of the Georgian Dreams’ supporters have been pushing to change Georgia’s constitution to reflect this attitude.

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(News report from Issue No. 303, published on Nov. 4 2016)

Georgian Dream’s election victory

NOV. 4 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — >> This has been a long election period in Georgia. Is it finally over?

>> I agree, it really has felt like a long process. This is partly because of the long campaign build up and partly because of Georgia’s complicated electoral system. There have been two main election rounds. The first on Oct. 8 was nationwide and included both a proportional representation element and a majoritarian element. At the end of this process, there were 50 seats which still had not elected a majoritarian MP. In these seats the top two candidates went head-to- head in a run-off on Oct. 31, giving the final tally.

>> Right. So to win a majoritarian seat you have to poll more than 50% of the votes. Is that right?

>> Yes, that’s right. A majoritarian seat, as the name suggests, is not a simple first-past-the-post system. The winner needs to poll more than half the votes, that’s why 50 seats needed a run-off.

>> So what is the final result? What is the breakdown?

>> Overall, the Georgian Dream won 115 seats out of the 150-seat parliament. This means they passed the 113-seat hurdle they needed to clear to allow them to change the constitution without relying on support from other parties. Georgian Dream won around 48% of the vote but the majoritarian system handed them a large majority. In 2012 the Georgian Dream won 85 seats, so this election represents a major success for them. By contrast the United National Movement party of Mikheil Saakashvili saw the number of seats it won collapse to 27 from 65. It was a disastrous election for them. Despite their fighting talk in the build up to the vote, voters essentially rejected the UNM and any possibility of a return to mainstream Georgian politics for Mikheil Saakashvili. He is currently the governor of the Odessa region in Ukraine. He’ll probably stay there for some time.

>> Is this it for the UNM, then?

>> That’s unclear but they need to have a major rebrand and to drop Saakashvili from their image. He comes with serious baggage, not least dire relations with Russia and allegations of torture in prisons during his time as president. The problem for the UNM is that he is such a dominating personality it might not be possible to just ditch him. To come back from that would represent quite a feat.

>> And, wasn’t there another party which did reasonably well?

>> Yes, the nationalistic and traditional Alliance of Patriots came up on the inside, unnoticed. It came third with just over 5% of the vote, giving it six seats in parliament. They are to the right of the Georgian Dream in their politics. The Industrialists party and an independent also won a seat each through the majoritarian system.

>> This gets complicated. So what does all this mean for Georgia?

>> Essentially this election confirms the Georgian Dream’s utter dominance. This is a crushing victory. On a policy level, the Georgian Dream has a constitutional majority to changes things as much as they want. They have already ripped up the form book in politics and they may want to do the same with society. They now have the power to do this and they have started already by promoting a change in the constitution that locks down marriage as an act only between man and woman. Georgian Dream has an agenda. They now have a four year window to impact how Georgian society operates. Expect some radical policies to come out of Georgia’s government in these four years.

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(News report from Issue No. 303, published on Nov. 4 2016)

Georgia’s GDP grows by 1.5%

NOV. 1 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Georgia’s GDP grew by 1.5% in September, according to the country’s Statistics Committee. Total growth in Q3 2016 amounted to 2.2%, mirroring last year’s pace. Still, the government predicts a 3% growth this year and a 4% increase in 2017. In 2015, Georgia recorded a 2.8% GDP increase, its weakest since 2009.

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(News report from Issue No. 303, published on Nov. 4 2016)

Japanese garden opens in Georgia

OCT. 24 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Tbilisi mayor Davit Narmania opened a new Japanese Garden in the city’s botanical gardens. The $85,000 project had been paid for by the Japanese government and was dedicated to celebrating Georgia-Japan relations.

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(News report from Issue No. 302, published on Oct. 28 2016)

Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz governments sponsor films to promote themselves

OCT. 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Governments of the South Caucasus and Central Asia are sponsoring films to promote their various causes.

This season’s new releases includes a big screen version of Nino and Ali, the classic story of a romance between a Muslim Azerbaijani man and a Christian Georgian woman, which premiered in Baku this month.

It was sponsored by the state linked Heydar Aliyev centre. Leyla Aliyeva, daughter of president Ilham Aliyev, is listed in the credits as an executive producer.

The killings of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in eastern Turkey during the end of the Ottoman Empire, described as a genocide by

Armenia but denied by Turkey, has also been turned into a Hollywood film starring Christian Bale called The Promise. The reviews, so far, have been mixed.

In previous years Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Georgia have all directly or indirectly sponsored films to promote their causes too.

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(News report from Issue No. 302, published on Oct. 28 2016)

Soviet-era films return to Georgian capital

TBILISI, OCT. 25 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — After years of negotiations, copies of almost all Georgian movies produced during the Soviet Union and stored in the Russian film archive Gosfilmofond will be sent to Georgia, a move that campaigners said will fill a gap in its cultural heritage.

Most of these movies had been dubbed into Russian. By bringing them back to their homeland, campaigners have said that it will be possible to unite them with their original Georgian audio tracks and reproduce them with modern technology.

Marina Kereselidze, the president of the Cinema Heritage Protection Association, said that current generations are not aware of the greatness of Georgian cinema as they had not had the chance to watch what she described as masterpieces.

“New generations do not know Georgian movies because they are simply not available. We had an excellent movie production that lies dead in Moscow,” she said.

Talks on bringing these movies back to Georgia started in 2004, an initiative headed by Eldar Shengelaia, a Georgian and Soviet film director. Since 2013 the Georgian Dream coalition government, which had been looking to improve ties with Russia after they dipped to a post-Soviet low in 2008, has endorsed the initiative and developed a programme to fund it.

Mr Shengelaia told The Conway Bulletin that these movies represent a significant part of Georgian cultural identity.

“When the movies are back in their homeland a missing part of our culture will be back”, he said.

Part of those movies were censored under Soviet rule and Lana Gogoberidze, a Georgian film director, said she was thrilled to be able to watch films produced by her mother, Nutsa Gogoberidze, once again. Gogoberidze’s films were denounced as political and banned during Josef Stalin’s repression in the 1930s. She was sent to a Gulag for 10 years and airbrushed from Soviet cultural history.

“I saw one of my mum’s work, Buba, only a couple of years ago. I hope I will be able to watch her second movie too, which nobody has seen yet,” she said.

The first four films are expected to be sent to Tbilisi next month. Georgia has to pay for each film reel and the entire repatriation process is expected to last 10 years.

The Georgian archive in Gosfilmofond holds 381 feature films, 200 animated films, and more than 100 scientific popular films.

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(News report from Issue No. 302, published on Oct. 28 2016)

Georgian C. Bank keeps rates steady

OCT. 26 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Georgia’s Central Bank kept its key interest rate at 6.5% but said that it would lower it to 6% by the end of Q1 2017. It said that inflation and both consumer and business demand had slowed but that it was too early to cut rates now as the economy was still dealing with a previous cut. Annualised inflation in September measured 0.1% compared to a target of 5%.

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(News report from Issue No. 302, published on Oct. 28 2016)

Georgian soldiers shoot man

OCT. 24 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Soldiers guarding a Georgian army base shot dead a man, named as Giorgi Shengelia, who they said had tried to break into the camp, media reported. Details of the incident at the Krtsanisi base near Tbilisi are thin. Media did not report whether the apparent attempted break-in was linked to crime or to Islamic extremism. The dead man’s family have accused the military of accidentally shooting Shengelia and then trying to cover it up.

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(News report from Issue No. 302, published on Oct. 28 2016)

Two workers die on construction sites in Georgia

OCT. 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Two construction workers died in two separate incidents on building sites in Tbilisi within a couple of days, highlighting the often poor levels of health and safety in Georgia. The first man to die fell from a building. The second died from a suspected heart attack. Georgia is going through something of a construction boom at the moment.

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(News report from Issue No. 302, published on Oct. 28 2016)