As every one knows, summer is a good time for war.
And so this summer in Georgia's two renegate republics Abkhazia and South Ossetia started off like all the previous summers with mystery bombs going off and shoot-outs here and there that were not claimed by anyone in particular. In Tbilisi, the muggy city under grey oppressive skies, life flowed on quietly in the heat; pop-songs with jokes about the incompetence of Kokoyty, the president of South Ossetia, may have made it onto the radio, but not too many people seemed to be seriously worried about the prospect of fighting breaking loose -the news of growing tensions just seemed summer business as usual.

But then, war erupted, full-blown.

Western Adam Averages started hastily reading up on the topic in those three days that Tskhinvali was burning, focusing on going back dissecting time-lines trying to find out who cast the first stone, Russia or Georgia. I certainly will leave the hair-splitting argumenting over who cast the first stone to the journalists of renowned newspapers not only because I am rather disqualified for the job, but also because I think that the endeavour is entirely beside the point. And in a way the articles delving into such details are just pawns in the game of trying to blur the traces that both Russia and Georgia are engaging in.

To me it seemed clear all along that a letting the two renegade republics peacefully simmer out of focus was definetely neither Russia's nor...

'I heap little cubes of sugar into the dark red tea in my tulip shaped glass and I feel right back at home in Turkey. I am chatting with an old acquaintance from Ankara in the Mesopotamian Cultural Centre near Taksim Square in Istanbul. The fact that the Kurdish Cultural Centre is named so equivocatingly is significant in and of itself because the owners are still not allowed to use the word 'Kurd' in official titles.

The centre's large windows face onto Istanbul's largest shop-lined high street, Istiklal avenue, which right now, although as packed as ever with pedestrians, is obstructed by police cars. Our window faces directly onto a narrow alleyway between two large, beautiful residential houses at the end of which the entrance to the office building of the TV station Ulusal Kana[JC1] l is seen. The police are raiding the TV channel's headquarters because of the so-called ‘Ergeneko[JC2] n' scandal which is right now shaking up the Turkish political landscape.



Ergekon is the name of a shady underground organisation whose sinister plans for a 2009 coup d'etat have just been thwarted. Apart from being assumed of being intimately interwoven with the almost mythical Turkish 'deep state' forces, it is also linked to the military and state bureaucracy. And so some assume that the recent lawsuit filed against the AKP by the Constitutional Court is simply an effort in obstructing investigations in the Ergenekon case.


This law suit is also much talked about right now....