Tag Archives: Georgia

Georgia’s government collapses

APRIL 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgian sports minister Levan Kipiani resigned after a row with a parliamentary committee, triggering a vote of confidence in PM Irakli Garibashvili’s government.

In-fighting has dogged Mr Garibashvili’s Georgian Dream coalition government since it was voted into power in October 2012 and his opponents now sense an opportunity to kill it off.

Nino Burjanadze, a former PM and now an opposition leader, said: “Early parliamentary elections and real changes in the government are the only option at the moment”

Georgia is grappling with a fiercely divided political scene and a worsening economy linked to a decline in Russia’s finances.

The governmental crisis makes stability even more precarious. Mr Kipiani was the seventh member of Mr Garibashvili’s 20-member cabinet to quit. Under the constitution if a third of ministers resign, a no confidence vote is triggered within seven days.

And the Georgian Dream majority in parliament is wafer thin.

A handful of defections means that it holds 75 seats out of the current 149 filled seats. One seat is empty.

This means there is no guarantee the government will survive the vote, and if it fails, new elections are likely.

It is the speed of the government’s collapse that has taken people by surprise. Mr Kipiani was the third member of the government to resign in quick succession, following environment minister Elguja Khokrishvili and regional development minister Davit Shavliashvili.

Will Dunbar, a Tbilisi-based analyst, said: “To lose one minister in a week looks bad, to lose three looks like care- lessness and carelessness is one thing this government does well.”

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 229, published on April 29 2015)

Georgian politicians visit Kiev

APRIL 20 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A Georgian parliamentary delegation visited Kiev in an overt show of support for Ukraine’s pro-West government. The Kiev government is battling rebels in the east of Ukraine.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)

Georgian soldier dies in Ukraine

APRIL 19 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Another Georgian national has been killed fighting for Ukrainian government forces against pro-Russia rebels in east Ukraine, Georgian media reported. It’s unclear exactly how many Georgians have been killed in Ukraine but some media say that it is probably as many as seven.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)

Interpol removed Georgian Prosecutors notice

APRIL 16 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – In a snub to the Georgian Prosecutor-General, Interpol removed a wanted notice on former justice minister Zurab Adeishvili. The EU and the US have said the Georgia legislation targets governing Georgian Dream coalition is using legal mechanisms to go after officials linked to former President Mikheil Saakashvili.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)

Georgia is heading for a close parliamentary election

APRIL 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The latest polling by the International Republican Institute (IRI), makes uneasy reading for the Georgian Dream coalition.

The poll, released in late March, shows support for Georgian Dream dropping to 35%. This is bad news for Georgian Dream, but so is the story told by the other numbers: 14% of likely voters say they support the United National Movement (UNM) of ex-president Saakashvili, 12% say they support nobody, and 11% refused to answer.

If these numbers look familiar to Georgian Dream politicians, it’s because they are disturbingly similar to a poll taken in summer 2012 by IRI’s sister organization, the National Democratic Institute (NDI). That poll, now infamous in Georgian political history, was the last taken before Georgian Dream swept to victory in November 2012, and everybody interpreted it all wrong.

In summer 2012, 37% said they’d vote for the incumbent UNM, while 12% responded Georgian Dream. When Georgian Dream went on to win almost 60% on the day pollsters were flummoxed, and many uncharitably said NDI were in cahoots with the UNM. In fact, that poll revealed much more about Georgian’s voting habits than anyone expected. 22% of respondents said they did not know who to vote for, and 21% refused to answer. Fear, embarrassment and a mistrust of polling organizations had led 43% of Georgians to keep their opinions to themselves. On the election day, this 43% gave their votes to Georgian Dream and surprised everyone by precipitating Georgia’s first peaceful transfer of power.

The same thing is happening in reverse in the latest IRI poll. The UNM scored over 20% in elections in 2013 and 2014, and today’s sluggish economy and devalued lari mean more people now miss the Saakashvili era.

If the 23% of respondents who refused to answer or said they support no one are really hidden UNM voters, it would take UNM support up to 37%, about the same as Georgian Dream.

There is a long way to go before the next parliamentary elections in 2016, but if the polls are to be believed, and if you know how to read them, it is shaping up tobea closer race than many would like to believe.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)

Georgia’s remittances fall

APRIL 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia received 24% less money from overseas in March 2015 compared to March 2014, the Central Bank said. The biggest source of overseas remittances is Russia. Sanctions over its involvement in Ukraine and a drop in oil prices have tipped the Russian economy into recession and triggered a knock-on effect.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)

Medicine exports increase in Georgia

APRIL 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s pharmaceuticals industry is growing fast, data from the statistics agency Geostat showed.

In 2014, Georgian pharmaceuticals companies exports to other CIS countries increased by nearly 50%, Geostat said.

A pharmaceuticals director at a local company said it was because domestic rules changed last year and meant that people needed prescriptions to buy more drugs. This in turn pushed pharmaceutical makers to find new markets for their drugs.

“The increase in exports was caused by the increased number of medication for export and if earlier the company sold 20 varieties of medicines abroad, today the list includes more than 50,” Boris Jijolava, export manager at Georgian pharmaceuticals maker GMP told the Caucasian Business Week website.

Geostat said the value of drugs exported by Georgian companies to the former Soviet Union increased to around $92m in 2014 from $52m in 2013.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)

New hotels planned in Georgia

APRIL 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – US hotel company Carlson Rezidor, owner of the Radisson and Park Inn brands, said it plans to open another two hotels in Georgia. One of the hotels will be built in Tbilisi and the other in the mountainous Svaneti region.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)

German man produces Georgian wine

ASURETI/Georgia, APRIL 5 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Manfred Tikhonov moved from Berlin to Georgia in the early 2000s and for the last 11 years he’s been making wine in Asureti, a former German village 40km south east of Tbilisi. (April 22).

Tikhonov, 67, spends his days slowly restoring his German-style timber Fachwerk house, built in the 1870s, and making wine the Georgian way, in clay vessels (kvevri) buried in the ground.

He has learnt everything about wine from his neighbours and produces up to 2,000 litres of wine a year. “It’s not enough to make profit,” he said. “But I get a pension from Germany.”

Asureti has long winemaking traditions. Formerly known as Elisabethal, it was founded in the early 19th century, when Russian Tsar Alexander I invited Germans from Swabia, a region in the southwest of Germnay, to settle. Tikhonov said Asureti Swabians were producing red wine for the high rank officials in Tsarist Russia and then the Soviet Union, until they were deported to Kazakhstan in 1941 when Soviet leader Josef Stalin worried that they may side with the advancing Nazi armies in World War II.

Barely any of them returned. The only reminders of the past are shabby Fachwerk houses, ruins of an Evangelical Church and overgrown gravestones engraved with old Swabian.

“Maybe one day I will also be buried here,” said Tikhonov, closing the graveyard gates.

Later, at home, Tikhonov poured a glass of his 2013 red. He apologised as this was not his best wine. There had been no running water and he had not been able to clean the clay vessels for the new grapes that year.

It has been hard to adapt to the local way of living. “Everything goes slower than I want,” he said. But he is not sorry to have exchanged buzzing Berlin to a quiet life in Asureti. “Free- range cows, chicken and dogs remind me of my childhood in the East Germany sixty years ago. Time stands still, and I love it.”

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)

Georgia legislation targets IS recruitment

APRIL 16 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – In a move designed to stop young Muslims heading off to Syria to fight for the radical group IS, Georgia plans to outlaw membership of any foreign group considered to be a terrorist organisation.

Current legislation does not deal with this issue and the authorities want more power to arrest both those people heading off to Syria to join IS and people who have returned to Georgia.

The focus in Georgia of IS recruitment is the Pankisi Gorge, on the border of Russia’s North Caucasus region.

Pankisi, which lies 2-1/2 hours drive from Tbilisi to the northeast, on the border with Chechnya, has a population of 10,000 and the majority of them are Kists, an Islamic ethnic group similar to Chechens.

Media reports have said that 20 to 80 men have headed out of the Pankisi Gorge to fight for IS in Syria.

Tbilisi rules with a light touch in the Pankisi Gorge which has a history of producing radical Muslim fighters dating back to the Chechen wars of the 1990s and the early 2000s.

Khaso Khangoshvili a member of the the Council of Elders, the 35-people body that de facto governs Pankisi, believes that the stricter laws will help.

“The new law will improve the situation, but the government should care more about the economy of our region,” he told the Bulletin.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 228, published on April 22 2015)