BBC Azeri yesterday published some of my photos documenting the environmental protest in Tbilisi’s Vake Park and so I paid a return visit the night before to check if there were any new developments. Basically, there are none although legal action has not been rejected by the courts. Instead, more information needs to be provided before any case against the construction can proceed.
Braving the recent snowfall and plummeting temperatures, environmentalists have managed to prevent construction from continuing in Tbilisi’s central Vake Park — for now at least. Blockading the road leading to the site where a new hotel is being built, activists from Guerrilla Gardening Tbilisi are now camped out adjacent to the construction site.
Earlier this month, Tbilisi celebrated Tbilisoba, the city’s annual harvest festival. Over the years it has changed significantly and seems smaller than before. I first covered the event in 2011 but the best so far remains 2014 when there was more representation of traditional Georgian folk dance and music as well as by ethnic minorities such as the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities. This year, that was held relatively far away from Tbilisi’s Old Town and Rike Park with very little publicity or in some media any at all. Nonetheless, those that attended appeared to enjoy themselves sufficiently and I managed to photo stories.
As this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Baku draws closer, negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan appear to be drifting further apart. Despite hopes that the opposite would be true, a lack of clarity and confusion instead continues to reign. Does the draft Agreement on Peace and Establishment of Interstate Relations contain 17 points or 16? Initially, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had announced that consensus had been reached on 13 points while 3 were partially agreed and there was no agreement at all on a fourth.
Last month, Armenia arrested several individuals accused of recruiting others to stage a coup in the country. The group has a history of recruiting Armenian citizens as foreign fighters in Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The Armenian government faces a potential vulnerability from militant groups as progress occurs in the normalization process with Azerbaijan following the 2020 44-day war and recent conflict in Karabakh, fueling discontent among many Armenians.