Bemused by events in Georgia? Help is at hand – head over to Global Dashboard’s netvibe page where you’ll find a digest of news, blogs, tweets, images and video about Georgia.
It’s been fairly quickly put together – so there’s some extraneous stuff in there, but I’ll attempt to clean up over the next day or so. Also, please add suggestions for sources to the comment below. Not mainstream news sources, really. What would be more interesting is accounts from within the country or more detailed analysis.
Finally, if you want to import all our Netvibes feeds, including those from Georgia, into your RSS reader, download the file here.
As Jules’s post on the sudden descent into a shooting war in Georgia implies, one of the West’s principal reasons for being interested in Georgia is that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline flows through it, bringing oil from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil field in the Caspian to the Mediterranean coast in Turkey – handily avoiding Russian pipelines in the process.
Interestingly, the conflict in the Caucausus has kicked off at the same time as an explosion on the Turkish section of the pipeline has closed it down for the next 21 days. Kurdish rebels have claimed responsibility for the attack, but the cause of the explosion can’t be ascertained for sure until the fire (which is currently still burning) has been put out.
Ordinarily, say BP, one of the alternatives would be to shift oil from Azerbaijan via rail links through Georgia. Unfortunate, then, that according to energy analysts the conflict in South Ossetia makes that option look rather less attractive.
Suspension of the pipeline’s operation won’t have a massive effect on world markets, as it supplies a small proportion of total world supply. But its political importance – as a statement of intent towards diversified supplies and pipeline routes to the west – is much greater. With Kurdish rebels reportedly threatening more attacks, it’ll be interesting to see how things pan out from here…
Pretty amazing pictures from Georgia, where the Russian tanks are on the roll again, prompting dark memories of Afghanistan, Prague, Berlin…
This all for a separatist province with a population of….60,000. That’s about the same as Guildford.
I was wondering, if Russia invades South Ossetia, as it has, if that is technically an act of war – it’s a separatist province, after all, that denies it is part of Georgian territory, so it’s debatable whether this is an infringement of Georgian territory. But then Putin helpfully clarified matters. ‘War has started’, he said. Good, glad we got that cleared up.
The president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, has been on CNN begging for American assistance. “It’s not about Georgia anymore. It’s about America, its values,” he said. John McCain would no doubt agree, but I’m not sure the American people are that keen to leap to Georgia’s defence, though no doubt the headline ‘Russia invades Georgia’ will alarm some of the hicks down south… ‘Git mah gun, John Boy, the Russkies will be headin’ for Alabama next!’.
Meanwhile George Bush is busy watching the Olympics in Beijing, and is only likely to get really agitated if the Russian tanks roll down the main motorway in Tblisi, which is named after him. Russian tanks on George Bush highway, that would be something.
It’s notable that Saakashvili didn’t even mention the EU. This is, after all, the first war on European soil since the Yugoslav War of the 1990s. A decade on, and the EU is still nowhere near being able to police its own backyard.
For those who, like me, find their attention wandering somewhere between the coxless fours and the javelin, there’s some good news. John Fox, one of ECFR’s cadre of China-watchers, has just launched an Olympian blog, which will give a daily political spin on the games. Unless he is transfixed by the dressage events.
There are many things to say about the story that David Miliband and Alan Milburn, the former Health Secretary, would consider teaming up to run the Labour government once Gordon Brown has been ousted.
Personally, I’m torn between believing the story of a Mil-Mil alliance; and believing it to be Brownite spin to discredit a Miliband putsch. But what I find most interesting is not the did-he-or-did-he-not part. For the venom with which the idea has been greeted is, I think, the real story and what says most about the state of the Labour party today.
Even the mere suggestion that the former Health Secretary could return to government seems to discredit Miliband’s prime ministerial bid in the eyes of many Labour MPs.
But what did Milburn do to deserve the opprobrium? Was he sacked for failing to control his department? No that was Charles Clarke, a man still respected in the Labour Party. Did he lead an unpopular war? No that was Geoff Hoon. Was he born to privilege? No. He was raised by a single mother, cut his political teeth fighting for shipbuilding and steel jobs on Tyneside and worked in a Marxist bookshop called Days of Hope.
Milburn’s horrendous crime is to be known as a Blairite. With former Cabinet colleague Stephen Byers, he could always be counted on to defend Tony Blair and was often linked with criticism of Gordon Brown. He handled Labour’s 2005 election campaign, which led to tensions with Brown. But perhaps worse for the Old Labour stalwarts, Milburn has continued to champion of “the modernising, centrist approach” that Blair personified:
Taxes should be cut, especially for the low-paid. We should sharpen the drive to get many more people off benefit and dramatically improve help for first-time buyers to get onto the housing ladder.
The astonishing fact that these ideas – and the person who champions them – are seen by some in the Labour party as undermining of David Miliband’s ambitions tells many voters that despite Brown’s words and work, the Labour party itself is making a dash away from the centre and the Blair legacy.
