Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

[Haykakan]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Did what? Lose much of his countries territories? Destroy economy? Gave his country to turks? Made his country totally dependenton USA aid? That guy is in no shape or form a model for anything good.
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Saakashvili did it...and Georgia is void of resources as well.

[Hovo]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Zinuj (13.10.2012)
Zinuj (14.10.2012)

[davidoga]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Did what? Lose much of his countries territories? Destroy economy? Gave his country to turks? Made his country totally dependenton USA aid? That guy is in no shape or form a model for anything good.
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Those territories were lost anyway. Georgian economy actually strengthened under his term. He cleared out corruption. Almost completely. I was talking to my taxi driver last summer, he said that when he was trying to bribe a Georgian border guard at Georgian-Armenian border (for some reason I don't remember), he was slapped with a heavy fine.

Believe me, I am no fan of Georgia, but what he did was miraculous.

[Federate]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Those territories were lost anyway. Georgian economy actually strengthened under his term. He cleared out corruption. Almost completely. I was talking to my taxi driver last summer, he said that when he was trying to bribe a Georgian border guard at Georgian-Armenian border (for some reason I don't remember), he was slapped with a heavy fine.

Believe me, I am no fan of Georgia, but what he did was miraculous.

25% of Abkhazia before the war was under Georgian control. 40% of South Ossetia before the war was under Georgian control. The territories were not lost anyway. Saakashvili has not cleared out corruption, he has turned Georgia under US influence and the US now reports Georgia as corrupt-free . He has not aided the economy any more than Serge Sargsyan has aided Armenia's.

It's funny that taxi drivers in Georgia say Armenians live better and taxi drivers in Armenia say Georgians live better. I know a Georgian border story too from 6 months ago. A Georgian border guard tried to take a bribe from a Lebanese citizen who tried to cross the border from Armenia to Georgia. It should be visa free but border guard was saying it requires visa (he was obviously going to keep the money). It took 30 minutes of back and forth with soldier going away coming back for him to let him go with a bad attitude.

Did you see this video of Georgian corruption at its finest? This is under the reformist prison officials that were put in charge of making prisons better:

[Haykakan]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Chek your news sources david you may wanna look for some less bias sources.

[davidoga]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

One of the first things Saakashvilli did after coming to power was firing the entire police force due to corruption and reinstating a new one. More businesses opened in Georgia as a result. Last year, Gerogian authorities rewrote the tax code, and tax revenue increased dramatically. they are also not suffering a big emmigration problem like Armenia is. The only difference between their county in ours is corruption.

[Federate]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

One of the first things Saakashvilli did after coming to power was firing the entire police force due to corruption and reinstating a new one. More businesses opened in Georgia as a result. Last year, Gerogian authorities rewrote the tax code, and tax revenue increased dramatically. they are also not suffering a big emmigration problem like Armenia is. The only difference between their county in ours is corruption.

Georgia's net migration in 2012 is -3.96
Armenia's net migration in 2012 -3.35

Armenia's tax revenue has consistently grown every year due to reforms and clampdown on tax evasion. We still have major room for development but we are definitely better off than where we were in 2003. I don't know if you've been to Armenia recently but last year I was not asked a single bribe by the police. Many people are reporting the same thing. It has improved a lot.

[davidoga]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Georgia's net migration in 2012 is -3.96
Armenia's net migration in 2012 -3.35

Armenia's tax revenue has consistently grown every year due to reforms and clampdown on tax evasion. We still have major room for development but we are definitely better off than where we were in 2003. I don't know if you've been to Armenia recently but last year I was not asked a single bribe by the police. Many people are reporting the same thing. It has improved a lot.

Fair enough.

Somewhat offtopic but....Do you think that Armenia's emigration problem is a serious one? I know that Aliyev likes to give grand flowery speeches about how all the Armenians will be gone one day and "Azerbaijan will take Armenia as well as Karabakh." I realize that this is more BS in all likelihood, but at the rate that Armenians are leaving per year, this statement might hold some merit. I also heard that Armenia has instituted a new law (possibly due to demographic issue) saying that now anyone age 18-27 whose father was born in Armenia must serve in the army, regardless of birthplace or citizenship. It sounds like a huge deal, especially for ethnic Armenians such as myself who now cannot go to Armenia due to this law.

What do you think?

[Sarkis86]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Georgia's net migration in 2012 is -3.96
Armenia's net migration in 2012 -3.35

Armenia's tax revenue has consistently grown every year due to reforms and clampdown on tax evasion. We still have major room for development but we are definitely better off than where we were in 2003. I don't know if you've been to Armenia recently but last year I was not asked a single bribe by the police. Many people are reporting the same thing. It has improved a lot.

Excellent points made by Federate and Haykakan. It also has to be pointed out that even the biased western media is starting to report on how the saakashvili regime is increasingly authoritarian. For example when Bidzina Ivanishvilli made his first move into politics, saakashvilli's regime responded by stripping him of his georgian citizenship on a pretext about a conflict with georgia's dual-citizenship law.

Just four days later, the billionaire was stripped of his Georgian citizenship, on the basis that he had never informed officials that he was a citizen of France. (Georgian law permits dual citizenship only with special permission. Mr. Ivanishvili also had Russian citizenship, though he renounced it in December.) Two weeks later, the central bank seized millions of dollars as part of a money-laundering investigation of his bank. The governing party then introduced limits on corporate campaign financing, which would prevent his companies from bankrolling candidates.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/world/europe/jump-to-politics-turns-georgian-billionaire-into-public-enemy-no-1.html?_r=0

As for georgia's economic "miracle", it is mostly funded by the US taxpayer and then praised by the US media. Georgia has financed a bunch of extravagant and unproductive building projects by borrowing the money from international banks. The people of georgia can never, ever hope to pay back their debts and the country will eventually collapse under the weight of interest on the debt. Georgians will drown in debt just like the people of the US and Europe.

Lastly, there is some serious talk of losing Batumi and all Ajaria to the turks! saakashvilli, in his mad dash to "take back georgia from the Russians" has foolishly given the turks a free hand to slowly annex georgian territory. Georgians aren't stupid, they know the turks have wanted Batumi just as they wanted Cyprus after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They saw what happened in Cyprus, they see what is happening in Batumi. And this doesn't even touch saakashvilli's dream of populating Javakhk with imported Meshketian turks.

On the other hand, I found locals much less enthusiastic than I expected. Their complaints covered the spectrum from merely disappointed ("local people aren't getting jobs") to the fully paranoid and xenophobic ("the Turks are buying up the city," "Turkey is working with Saakashvili to recapture Batumi"). Batumi was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1878, and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk almost reconquered it in 1921.

Several buildings have become symbolic battlegrounds. The Georgian and Turkish governments jointly agreed to plans to reconstruct a mosque, built by the Ottomans in the mid-19th century and destroyed by the Soviet regime in the 1930s. But the project appears to have been halted after anti-Turkish protests supported by the Georgian Orthodox Church and local opposition activists, several of them members of Georgian Dream.


Like most of the current Georgian elite, Baramidze still looks improbably young. (He is in fact 44.) He speaks excellent English, having studied at Georgetown University. He ridiculed the local opposition as xenophobic and made a robust defense of the mosque and the Turkish presence in Batumi. "How can we isolate ourselves from our biggest neighbor after Russia?" he asked. On the mosque issue he said, "We internationally are not apologetic on this question." The current government can be faulted on many things but not on tolerance to foreigners and other faiths.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/26/georgia_holds_its_breath?page=full

[Etchmiadzin]

Re: Nagorno-Karabagh: Military Balance Between Armenia & Azerbaijan

Fair enough.

Somewhat offtopic but....Do you think that Armenia's emigration problem is a serious one? I know that Aliyev likes to give grand flowery speeches about how all the Armenians will be gone one day and "Azerbaijan will take Armenia as well as Karabakh." I realize that this is more BS in all likelihood, but at the rate that Armenians are leaving per year, this statement might hold some merit. I also heard that Armenia has instituted a new law (possibly due to demographic issue) saying that now anyone age 18-27 whose father was born in Armenia must serve in the army, regardless of birthplace or citizenship. It sounds like a huge deal, especially for ethnic Armenians such as myself who now cannot go to Armenia due to this law.

What do you think?

Where can I read about this law in more detail? because it seem kinda unrealistic forcing a citizen of another country to serve in the army.