Archeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered the ancient grave of a young woman who has acquired the nickname “Princess of the Scythians.”
The elaborate tomb was found in Urdzhar district in eastern Kazakhstan during road repairs, Tengri News reports, quoting expedition leader Timur Smagulov. A team of lecturers and students was called in to investigate, and the group unearthed a stone sarcophagus containing the body of a young girl.
The “Princess of the Scythians” was clearly a prominent figure, judging by the treasures buried with her, most notably a gold headdress decorated with figures of animals and topped with arrowheads. It is similar to the one worn by Kazakhstan’s most famous archeological find, the Golden Man – a Scythian warrior prince interred wearing some 4,000 gold ornaments.
This type of headdress was part of the ceremonial clothing that the leaders of the Scythians – who inhabited the Eurasian steppe in ancient times – used to parade in, Smagulov said. “It is quite possible that the buried woman was the daughter of a king of the Saka Tigrakhuda tribe.”
The grave – which also contained ceramics and the bones of a sacrificed sheep – is believed to date from the 4th or 3rd century BC, the same period as the Golden Man’s burial site.
Amazing archeological finds are nothing new for Kazakhstan. Back in 2010 archeologists discovered the tomb of a gold-clad ancient Scythian warrior, nicknamed “The Sun Lord,” whose torso was entirely covered with gold.
He may have retired from the American airwaves, but within the ex-USSR, former CNN star Larry King remains a hot commodity. King's decision to sign on with Russia Today, the Kremlin’s English-language TV mouthpiece, has caused jaws to drop, but the coverage mostly misses one side to the story that adds to the irony.
Russia Today is not Larry's first post-CNN gig in the post-Soviet world -- there also was a short stint on the advisory board of a TV station in Georgia, Russia's longtime foe.
Last year, TV9, owned by Ekaterine Khvedelidze, the wife of billionaire Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, placed King on its advisory board essentially as a credibility booster and shield against attacks by President Mikheil Saakashvili’s then government.
King could not be reached for comment, but, according to one TV9 statement, his passion about freedom of media motivated his Georgia move. “I hope to lend my voice to the cause of media freedom in Georgia,” King was quoted as saying.
Authorities in Kyrgyzstan have declared a state of emergency and curfew after police clashed with protestors who have forced the country’s largest enterprise, the Kumtor gold mine, to shut down.
Since Tuesday, hundreds of protestors have blocked the road to the high-altitude mine (or thousands, depending on the source). They are demanding Kumtor pay for new schools, hospitals and roads in the region, and calling on the government to tear up the existing operating agreement. On May 30, protestors seized an electrical substation and cut power to the mine.
Officials said 92 people had been arrested and 55 wounded, including security forces, in the May 31 clashes around Barskoon on the southern shore of Lake Issyk-Kul. Police used stun grenades and rubber bullets, according to Kloop.kg. Some local news sites reported that protestors took the head of the district hostage, later exchanging him for detained protestors.
In an open letter to the prime minister, Kumtor outlined how it has fulfilled many of the protestors’ demands through the tens of millions of dollars it pays into a development fund for Issyk-Kul province and other contributions.
The U.S. State Department released its annual "Country Reports on Terrorism," which purports to summarize and analyze the "terrorist" threats around the world. Here is the report's summary of Central Asia in 2012:
Despite the absence of major terrorist incidents on their territory, governments in the five Central Asian states were concerned about the possibility of a growing threat connected to changes in the international force presence in Afghanistan in 2014. While some sought to reduce their countries’ vulnerability to the perceived terrorist threat, the effectiveness of their efforts was in some cases undercut by failure to distinguish clearly between terrorism on one hand and political opposition, or non-traditional religious practices, on the other.
On the occasion of last year's report, Myles Smith wrote on EurasiaNet that "For the most part, the report simply lists what authorities describe as terrorist attacks and as anti-terrorist operations, but uses qualifying terms – 'reportedly'; 'potentially' – that make it clear State is as in the dark on the nature of the events as the rest of us." A year later, there's really nothing to add to that analysis. But it's worth noting that, if the U.S. is spending increasing amounts of money, and making counter-terror assistance an increasingly large part of U.S. activity in the area, it might behoove Washington to be a little clearer about what exactly it is that this money and diplomatic effort are being directed at.
Looking at the individual country listings is instructive. Here is Tajikistan's summary:
In his EurasiaNet article today, my colleague Dorian Jones argues convincingly that while Turkey has enjoyed enviable economic success over the last decade, this success has also been accompanied by an alarming growth in economic inequality and a severe limiting of workers' rights.
An interesting companion to Jones's piece is a recently-released survey conducted by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a body that brings together some of the world's wealthier countries, including Turkey. Taking a look at various quality-of-life indicators in 36 countries, the survey found Turkey near the bottom of the heap in most cases. Reports the Wall Street Journal:
The list, which ranks member countries on 11 factors including income, safety, life satisfaction and health, appears to show Turks are downright miserable in comparison with their OECD peers. Just 68% of people said they have more positive experiences in an average day than negative ones, much lower than the average of 80%.
Analysts say a lack of education, unemployment, poverty and rapid migration are the main drivers of Turks’ dissatisfaction.
The road to the Kumtor mine, which sits at 4,000 meters in the Tien Shan mountains.
For the last three days, several hundred protestors have again blocked the road to Kyrgyzstan’s largest and most lucrative enterprise: the Kumtor gold mine. Late on May 30, demonstrators seized an electricity substation and cut the power supply to the mine, the company announced on Twitter.
The protestors – mostly angry young men, judging from photos – have demanded environmental safeguards and more investment into local infrastructure. Specifically, they want hospitals, schools and gymnasia. Some also wish to tear up the government’s 2009 operating agreement with the company operating the mine.
“It’s like first slaughtering a cow and then asking her for milk,” one Bishkek analyst said of the demands.
Kumtor – which produces about half of Kyrgyzstan’s exports and, in a good year, 12 percent of GDP – is a frequent target. Environmental concerns have plagued the operation since it began in the mid-1990s, heightened by a sodium cyanide spill into a river in 1998. But few believe environmental concerns alone are behind the regular unrest.
In a country with widespread unemployment and few opportunities, young men like those blocking the road this week are easily whipped into a fury. Many observers believe they are paid. And the timing of this particular roadblock, which began on May 28, is curious.
When it comes to a long-distance relationship, it's always good to know what attracts the other side. And, as shown at a shindig in Baku this week to mark 21 years of official ties with the US, Azerbaijan has its attractions for Washington down pat.
They number four: a supply corridor for NATO's military campaign in Afghanistan; a foothold for American interests in regional stability (Iran is just next-door) and fighting terrorism; and, finally, oil and gas for Europe.
Hearing Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev cover the lot, US diplomats, congresspeople and officials attending the May 28-29 "Vision for the Future" convention nodded approvingly. “Azerbaijan is an undoubted friend, business partner and military ally of the United States,” commented Richard Lugar, the former chairperson of the US Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, Trend news service reported.
This is no co-dependent relationship, however. Aliyev made clear that, as a return for its attractions, Azerbaijan expects Washington to support its efforts to reclaim breakaway Nagorno Karabakh from Armenian and separatist control. Armenia's American Diaspora runs a well-organized lobbying operation across the US to make sure that many US politicians view Armenia's problems as their own.
In a recent blog post, I suggested Turkey is turning into a "constructocracy," with an economy driven by the construction sector and ruled by a government that never met a large infrastructure or building project it didn't like, no matter how destructive to the environment or unnecessary it was.
The construction continues apace, with today's groundbreaking ceremony for a new $3 billion bridge across the Bosphorus, which separates Europe and Asia. Hurriyet Daily News provides some background on the bridge, which will be the third span to cross the body of water and which will be the world's widest when completed:
The construction of Istanbul’s third bridge on the Bosporus was tendered for last year as part of the north Marmara motorway project’s Odayeri-Paşaköy section. The tender was then awarded to a consortium consisting of the Turkish IC İçtaş and the Italian Astaldi that submitted the bid with the shortest term of construction and operation, 10 years two months and 20 days.
The bridge is to be constructed under a build-operate-transfer model, in which private companies build the bridge and will have the right to collect tolls from vehicles using the bridge for a period of time before handing the bridge over to the state.
The consortium is expected to complete the construction of the bridge in 36 months, at a total cost of about $4.5 billion, after the contract is signed. “The bridge should be ready for use by the end of 2015,” Turkish Transportation Minister Binali Yıldırım had said earlier.
Another foreign telecoms firm appears to have been paying millions of dollars to various charities in Uzbekistan, some of them linked to Gulnara Karimova, strongman Islam Karimov’s flamboyant daughter. The revelations come in the wake of reports that Nordic telecoms giant TeliaSonera paid Karimova’s charities to stop harassment from Uzbek officials.
To make sure that everyone takes seriously the Georgia-ends-here line it drew after the two countries’ 2008 war, Russia is doing what other countries have done to reinforce a porous border – it’s building a fence.
But this one is reportedly being built a few hundred meters within Georgian-controlled territory itself.
Like other walls before it, the fence serves a supposed security purpose – in this case, defending the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which Moscow views as an independent country, from the perilous threat of Georgian farmers and their cows.
Country folk in these parts do not let wars or separatism or Russian border guards distract them from the real job of gathering crops and firewood, and feeding the livestock, be it in breakaway South Ossetia or their own Georgian-controlled region of Shida Kartli.
But now they could be compelled to cross a border in their own backyards. One octogenarian farmer, whose house ended up falling behind the fence, told RFE/RL that his ailing wife, in need of medical assistance, had to crawl under the barbed wire to get picked up by a Georgian ambulance crew.
Moscow has offered no explanation for its fence-building activities, which have been widely interpreted in Tbilisi as the same-old, same-old – the Kremlin trying to pull a fast one.
The Russian fence, though, threatens to become a major foreign policy challenge for Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili’s government, which has promised voters that it will mend fences with Moscow.
It now needs to react without disrupting the fragile dialogue with the Kremlin that, so far, has led to the return of Georgian wines and mineral water to the Russian market. Yet there seems to be a lack of political consensus over the best course of action.
