Deinstitutionalisation, Kutaisi, Georgia
Photographs © Onnik James Krikorian 2007.
ARTICLES ABOUT DEINSTITUTIONALISATION
SUFFER THE CHILDREN
A mother waits patiently to enroll her son at an Auxiliary Boarding School for children with learning disabilities somewhere in the heart of the Armenian capital. It doesn’t seem to matter to the staff that the twelve-year old isn’t disabled, all the school requires, the Director says, is a medical certificate.
First published 2003
CHILDREN OF THE SOUTH CAUCASUS
At just eight months of age, Tiesa and her two sisters were abandoned by a roadside. They survived by eating roadkill — frogs, in fact — and drinking water from puddles before being discovered. The children, two of them with learning disabilities, were placed in Tbilisi’s Infant House, an orphanage by any other name.
First published 2014
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Following February’s Expert Workshop on Regional Co-operation and Effective Responses to the Phenomenon of Foreign Terrorist Fighters organised by the OSCE Office in Tajikistan I’ve been at a few other related meetings. In June I participated in the OSCE-wide Counter-Terrorism Expert Conference on Countering the Incitement and Recruitment of Foreign Terrorist Fighters in Vienna, and from 7-8 October spoke on a panel at an expert workshop in Bucharest on Media Freedom and Responsibilities in the Context of Counter-Terrorism Policies organised by the OSCE Transnational Threat Department and OSCE Representative of the Freedom of the Media.
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As tensions escalate on the Line of Contact (LoC) separating Armenian and Azerbaijani forces still locked in deadlock over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh, the BBC’s Azerbaijan Service last month published my interview with the U.S. Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, Ambassador James B. Warlick.
Jazz Without Borders
Cross-border projects in a conflict-riven region come in many forms, but perhaps the most overlooked has arguably been those in the area of culture. There have been some notable exceptions such as the CIS Youth Symphony Orchestra that performed in Yerevan and Baku as well as elsewhere, but otherwise most cultural events featuring both Armenian and Azerbaijani musicians perform in neighbouring Georgia.