Word: partly
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...successful painter with a reputation as a social and cultural liberal, Hosni has spent a good part of his time since the protest movement began explaining and apologizing for his comments. On his blog, he argues that the book burning statement was intended as a hyperbolic retort expressing exasperation with his accusers. Still, he acknowledges such public statements are hard to rationalize. "I clearly regret the words said and which I could have justified as being uttered under the tension and provocation of the discussion at the time," Hosni writes. "However, I will not take that as an excuse. They...
...Turkey, for its part, has suspended its insistence that a solution to the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh - over which Armenia and Azerbaijan are in dispute - precede any deal. Turks and Azeris are ethnic kin and Azeri gas and oil travels to the West via Turkey. Azerbaijan scuppered negotiations between Turkey and Armenia earlier this year by threatening to limit gas supplies if Ankara didn't demand a settlement on Nagorno-Karabakh. This time, Turkey's opposition parties are up in arms over what they say is a unilateral concession...
...Russians invaded Chechnya in 1994 to try to keep it part of Russia. They failed. In 1999, three years after the end of the first Chechen war, they went back, at the prodding of then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In a move reminiscent of Tolstoy's hundred-year-old Hadji Murad - which was also set in a strife-ridden Caucasus - the chief separatist, Akhmad Kadyrov, like the title character in the prescient short novel, switched sides at the beginning of the second Chechen war and crushed the rebellion. Assassinated in May 2004, Kadyrov was replaced by his son. (From TIME...
Doku Umarov, a separatist leader, declared in April that Riyad-us Salihin, or Guardians of the Righteous, a band of suicide bombers organized in the earlier part of the 2000s by now deceased radical separatist Shamil Basayev, had been revived after several years of lying dormant. In late June, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the President of Ingushetia, was severely wounded when his motorcade was bombed. In mid-August, Islamic extremists in Buynaksk, in Dagestan, attacked police at a sauna that also served as a brothel, killing four officers and seven prostitutes. Three days later, in Nazran, in Ingushetia, a suicide bomber...
Alexey Malashenko, a North Caucasus specialist at the Carnegie Moscow Center, portrayed the violence in the region as part of a nearly 20-year intermittent struggle inaugurated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Malashenko and Gregory Shvedov, the editor-in-chief of Caucasian Knot, an Internet news site that has drawn unwanted attention from authorities, attributed the bloodshed to Islamic extremism and corrupt government officials in Grozny, the Chechen capital; Makhachkala, the Dagestani capital; and Magas, the Ingushetian capital. "There is no access to any freedoms, political and civil freedoms, including religious freedoms, which is fueling the situation," Shvedov...