Word: georgian
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...Foreigner is the story of a small Georgian community which is suddenly electrified by the arrival of a "foreigner." The audience meets Betty Meeks (Jeanne Simpson), proprietor of the fishing lodge in which the action takes place; the Reverend David Lee (Richard Claflin) and his fiance Catherine Simms (Bina Martin); Catherine's exuberant but uneducated brother, Ellard (Ian Lithgow); Ku Klux Klan member Owen Musser (Glenn Kessler); and military man Forggy Leseur (J.C Wolfgang Murad), who brings the painfully shy Charlie Baker (Tom Hughes) to Tilghman County and suggests that in order to avoid conversation he pretend...
...hard to believe that Gamsakhurdia could have dug such a hole for himself in a mere four months. When he engineered Georgia's declaration of independence while serving as chairman of the Georgian supreme soviet last & April, he was hailed as a patriot. In May, when he took 87% of the vote, becoming the republic's first democratically elected president, he was regarded as a modern-day St. George who had defeated the dragon of Soviet imperialism. Given Gamsakhurdia's reputation as a distinguished literary scholar and his activism on behalf of human rights, comparisons with Czechoslovakia's President Vaclav...
These days the comparisons are far less flattering. At rallies, protesters chant "Ceausescu, Ceausescu!" Gamsakhurdia apparently takes seriously the reference to Romania's toppled, and summarily executed, dictator. For the past three weeks he has barricaded himself inside the Georgian parliament, where he is guarded by hundreds of National Guardsmen. When he ventures out, it is in one of two bulletproof Mercedes, for which Gamsakhurdia spent $460,000. But he bristles at being compared with the Romanian. "These people do not know what a dictator really is," he fumes, his dark eyes smoldering. "Could you really imagine such actions...
...Gamsakhurdia is doing a mighty credible imitation. He has closed opposition newspapers, capriciously fired government officials and seized control of most ministries. To quiet the republic's balking minorities -- Armenians, Abkhasians and Kurds, as well as the increasingly restless Ossetians and Adzharis -- he has suggested that qualification for Georgian citizenship should be based on family lines that trace back to 1801, the year Georgia became part of czarist Russia. He has even stated that mixed marriages threaten the purity of the Georgian race...
Then there is the matter of Gamsakhurdia's behavior during the tense days surrounding the Aug. 19 coup attempt. On Aug. 20 Interfax, an independent Soviet news service, reported that Gamsakhurdia had agreed to comply with Emergency Committee orders to disarm the Georgian National Guard. Gamsakhurdia dismisses the charge as the work of "common liars who want to slander me." But the fact remains that soon after the coup was set in motion, he ordered the National Guard into the countryside, supposedly on a training exercise. A large portion of the 15,000-strong guard ignored the order and holed...