In a press statement today, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton congratulated Kosovo on its 3rd National Day since becoming independent, saying “the United States is committed to your future and we are honored to be your friends and your partners.”

I am actually very surprised that this message was not at least tempered or did not include the ongoing references to the investigation and criminal proceedings against Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci and others over accusations of war crimes and ongoing mafia activity during the 1998-1999 Kosovo War.

(For full Three Kings coverage of Kosovo, click here.)

KLA fighters turn in their weapons to U.S. marines in 1999.

Actually, I shouldn’t be. Over the weekend, the head of the investigation, Dick Marty said in an interview with a Slovenian newspaper that Western countries knew all along about the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)’s activities, which included killing prisoners-of-war and civilians for organs, which they later trafficked on the black market. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first part in my series for The Faster Times, chronicling my most recent trip to Abkhazia — last week. This time I was heading in to report on Turkish trade and investment in the partially recognized republic, and the state of the political opposition there.

Although I didn’t make it very far on my first day, I had too many observations in that short experience to just gloss over it.

On each of my three visits to Abkhazia over the last 18 months, I’ve seen an incredible amount of change.

The first thing along the journey that was radically different was the Tbilisi train station. The first time I took the night train to Zugdidi, the Georgian town closest to the de facto border with Abkhazia, the place looked abandoned. I approached the unlit train tracks and asked the figures standing around in the dark where I could buy tickets. They pointed to the dark shell of a structure surrounded by wooden and concrete barriers. All of the doors I could find were blocked. It looked like the kind of ghostly place that high school kids dare each other to break into with tales of a murderous caretaker. Once inside, the only occupied room in the massive building was a small waiting room with only one ticket counter open.

Now the old Soviet station has been renovated into a clean glitzy shopping mall with a train terminal at its center, and I immediately didn’t like it. I admit that like many Westerners living and traveling through the former Soviet Union I have a strange fetish for the old palaces of the proletariat — train stations, metro stations, etc.. The proud structures of a bygone era continue maintain a charming mixture of socialist realist murals and general dilapidation. This new station seemed almost offensively out of place.

In one of Tbilisi’s poorer neighborhoods, the big white building sits next to the city’s largest open-air market where merchants push everything from vegetables to panty hose and bathroom fixtures. On both sides of the train station, masses of marshrtukas – a type of panel van converted to squeeze in 20-or-so travelers – wobble around and rumble off, carrying commuters around the city and country. Stepping into the train station is like being transported to a different reality.

To continue reading, click here.

In part of what I hope will be a long and fruitful collaborative relationship, Three Kings and Evolutsia teamed up again commenting on what Georgia observers should be thinking as they watch the unfolding popular uprisings in the Middle East. Although everyone pointed out the necessary differences between the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and the 2011 Tahrir Square movement, it seems everyone feels that the comparison reflects fairly poorly on the current Georgian leadership.

Have a look at what people had to say:

When Egyptian strongman President Hosni Mubarak resigned February 11, it sent a shock through the world. That a non-violent and eclectic protest movement could bring down the dictator of the most powerful Arab state seemed to throw all the geo-political math out the window. Everyone for the past two weeks have been asking who’s next, and some have questioned whether the wave could be headed towards the Caucasus again.

The eventual outcome of Tunisia’s ‘Jasmine revolution,’ Egypt protests, and its effect on worldwide democratization remains an open question. However, the people power rallies that have made Al Jazeera watchers out of many of us do compel us to consider what this second Arab spring might do for Georgia’s own Rose Revolution legacy. Does it validate Georgia’s experiences? Or does it, as Ghia Nodia argues, provide a contrast to an increasingly autocratic political environment in Georgia? To get some thoughts, EVOLUTSIA.NET has brought together a roundtable of informed voices to give their thoughts.

Inge Snip, Evolutsia.Net and Uppsala University

With a ‘wave’ of protests flooding North Africa, the wish to draw a parallel between these calls for regime change and the color revolutions that took place between 2003 and 2005 in the post-communist area is understandably attractive. However, are the so-called revolutions really comparable? Why did the US treat the Egypt protest in a completely different manner than the color revolutions? And what will the outcome be? Moreover, not only should one wonder what the color revolutions have brought, but if one argues that they have brought democracy in some form, will this even be the case in North Africa? And why or why not? Do these calls for democracy validate the Georgian case? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a huge fan of sanctions.

In fact, I tend to fully agree with London Times’ Simon Jenkins when he wrote in 2008 “Sanctions are a war waged by cowards.” Typically sanctions are ineffective, target the wrong people and sometimes can be directly counter productive.

If you want to topple an autocratic power, you don’t do so by disempowering its people by crashing the national economy. But that is exactly the logic of economic sanctions. The theory goes that by making it illegal for governments and businesses to invest or trade with the country, the regime will grow weaker, and the people will blame their new hardship on their leaders and take them down. As nice as that sounds, autocratic and bad-behaving regimes always find money for themselves and their military (by stealing more from the people), which in fact leaves them even more powerful vis-a-vis the people.

Aside from South Africa, name one country on this list where economic sanctions brought about the end to a misbehaving regime: Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Zimbabwe, Burma, Afghanistan, Serbia, North Korea. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming to a breakaway territory near you!

In the February issue of the Washington Diplomat, managing editor Anna Gawel and I, chimed in on what has been and is likely to be one of the defining issues in East-West relations for years to come — missile/air defense.

In the article we talk about how defensive systems have been the source of both tension and rapprochement in recent years from Poland, to Abkhazia, to Azerbaijan and Iran.

Throughout the Cold War, the deployment of offensive missile systems on air, land and sea by NATO and the Soviet Union was a constant point of contention — one that nearly sparked cataclysmic war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Now, in the post-Cold War era, the focus has shifted to defensive missile systems, which have had their own contentious, complicated history over the last decade alone. And while their deployment continues to inflame regional politics in many parts of the globe, from Eurasia to the United States, the potential for finding common ground on missile defense may conversely quell tensions between former Cold War adversaries.

At a summit in Lisbon last November, NATO leaders agreed to implement President Barack Obama’s revamped missile defense strategy for Europe that would phase in sea- and land-based components over the next decade. Most notably, however, Russia pledged to cooperate with NATO on the U.S.-planned missile network in Europe in what was seen as a major foreign policy breakthrough for Obama — and a dramatic turnaround from the Bush administration’s previous missile defense plans that sparked angry objections from Moscow that Washington was needlessly ratcheting up Cold War-era tensions.

In stark contrast, the Lisbon accord “symbolized a conclusion by the United States and its main European allies that Russia is not a threat to be protected from but a potential ally in girding the continent against possible ballistic missile attacks from Iran or elsewhere,” wrote Edward Cody in the Washington Post.

Over the next year, the NATO strategy calls for the deployment of sea-based weapons system off Europe, with additional mobile radar and interceptor assets in the Black Sea, as well as integrating the missile defense networks of NATO states. By 2020, the $20 billion program would deploy advanced defenses against medium, intermediate and intercontinental ballistic missiles on both land and air in Europe. To continue reading, click here.

Georgian IDPs speaking with police who had arrived that night telling them to vacate the premises by 7 a.m.

As part of my ongoing look into the Georgian government’s recent evictions of more than 1400 people from the capital, Tbilisi, I wrote a first person account for The Faster Times of my experience on the first day of the evictions with a group of refugees unaware of their fate.

Give it a read and keep your eye out for more from me on the hundreds of thousands of people now forced from their homes by all sides over the past two decades.

Between Jan. 20 and 22nd, more than 1,400 people — refugees from Georgia’s politico-ethnic conflicts of the last two decades — were evicted from the capital, Tbilisi. This time, however, they were not forced from their homes by a rebel uprising or a rolling Russian army, but by the the police of their own government.

I approached the former student dormitory of the Medical Institute at 25 Kazbegi St. at about 1 p.m. on January 20. Although I used to live in the district, I didn’t know the building, and with the haphazard nature of signage in in the city, I wasn’t sure I would find it.

But, as soon as I was in the area it was clear which one I was looking for. The eight-story building had the usual Georgian DIY architectural mystique with laundry lines dangling from balconies and an assortment of non-matching window frames, but its dereliction was a step above Tbilisi norms. Half the windows, it seemed, had long been broken, some replaced by tarps and plywood and another 20 percent of the building had been gutted down to a concrete shell. The T-shirts flapping in the wind were the only sign of inhabitance. To keep reading, click here.

Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci

More evidence continues to emerge showing that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was involved in the traffic of weapons, drugs and human organs during and after the 1998-1999 Kosovo War. On Monday, Western intelligence reports leaked to the Guardian identify current Kosovar Prime Minister Hashim Thaci as one of the “biggest fish” in local organized crime.

(For more Three Kings coverage on Kosovo, click here)

The NATO documents purport to show that Western governments had for years known that high-level members of the KLA, who won independence and were swept to power in Kosovo on the heels of a NATO military intervention in Serbia, were overseeing mafia activities, which included the killing of prisoners-of-war and civilians to harvest and traffic their organs.

Thaci, who continues to enjoy Western support and was reelected last month, is described in the reports as exerting “violent control” over regional heroin trade.

In the documents, Thaçi is identified as one of a triumvirate of “biggest fish” in organised criminal circles. So too is Xhavit Haliti, a former head of logistics for the KLA who is now a close ally of the prime minister and a senior parliamentarian in his ruling PDK party. Haliti is expected to be among Kosovo’s official delegation to Strasbourg tomorrow and has played a leading role in seeking to undermine the Marty report in public.

However, the Nato intelligence reports suggest that behind his role as a prominent politician, Haliti is also a senior organised criminal who carries a Czech 9mm pistol and holds considerable sway over the prime minister. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey everyone, so after a busy week, I’m getting myself back into the blogging biz with a few things you may have missed.

Tans take time.

• Mr. Saakashvili goes to Washington: Arriving Jan. 15 to participate in a memorial service for the late Richard Holbrooke, the Georgian president met with U.S. President Barack Obama for “more than 25 miutes” according to Saakashvili’s office. He also met with various other American legislators including  House Majority Leader John Boehner, which was quite an honor considering he has turned down multiple meetings with the U.S. President, and most recently declined to meet Chinese Premier Hu Jintao.

• Russia’s North Caucasus Problems: Our friends at Evolutsia.net had a great piece on the two primary developments in North Caucasus: a tragic reminder of the struggle’s costs, and uncertain potential in the Kremlin’s new strategy. First, an suicide bomber at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, likely linked to North Caucasus militants, killed at least 35 people Jan. 24 and injured 168, reminding Russia and the world of the seriousness of its problems in the desolate North Caucasus. On the other hand, the Kremlin’s new envoy to the region, Aleksandr Khloponin, is beginning to get settled in. His ambitious plan to 400 billion rubles ($13.4 billion) to develop the devastated and underdeveloped region seems to have Russia headed on the right track, but Evolutsia and other Eurasia analysts worry that parallel — but not conjoined — economic and military efforts will still fail to address the problem. All the same, very few holistic approaches to impoverished regions beset by insurgencies have worked either (see Afghanistan).
• Armenia and Azerbaijan shake hands again: The region’s two worst neighbors came back to the negotiating table yesterday (hopefully avoiding the Moscow airport) to discuss their ongoing dispute over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Hopefully, at least a symbolic agreement can be made that will cool down tensions that flared last summer, costing several lives and worrying the international community that all-out war might follow.
• Three Kings and its partners are getting real: Last week we put out a survey to readers of English-language media on Georgia and the South Caucasus in preparation for a new media project of our own. If you haven’t gotten three minutes to fill it out yet, stop reading this and do so now at this link!
• Even more important stuff: I’ll have more later today on the 13th casualty of Georgia’s participation in America’s wars and on the eviction of another 1500 Georgian IDP’s from the capital, Tbilisi.

Hey Three Kings fans, in case you missed it and facebook and twitter, some associates and I are building some research towards putting out a Tbilisi-based English-language blog collective/ magazine and we need your help!

Please take our quick three minute survey if you are interested in South Caucasus news so that we will be able to better serve you in the future!

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dEwwRnJ0am84cmNJQTNibHd0ZFN0M1E6MQ

We will be reviewing the results Monday, so please fill it out before the weekend!

As I eluded to in a post earlier this week, Russia is preparing to spend massive amounts of money modernizing and expanding its effective military over the next decade. The only problem is that no one, including the Russian president and the Defense Ministry, seem to think it will all actually happen.

Free nut shot

As reported by the Eurasia Daily Monitor, December has become a time for Russia to discuss progress and setbacks in the ambitious reform of its conventional forces. In each of the last three years, however, the case that has been made has been less convincing and the messages of the military brass more confusing.

First, on Dec. 24 last year, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev gave a less than convincing appraisal of Defense Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov, through whom the reforms are in theory being implemented, saying the ministry is “hard working” but it “makes mistakes” and it had carried out the president’s policy “on the whole.” Read the rest of this entry »