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Effective Communications and Crisis management Course- Georgia
The dense forest is a blur as our mini-bus hurtles into another hair-pin bend. More than a dozen Georgian women are singing folk songs inside the bus, a lament about love, death and war.
Our bus shudders to a halt as cows cross the road. A brief hush descends, the bus driver crunches through the gears, we pick up speed and the singing resumes. The Georgian parliament’s PR department is on the move.
We’re heading back to Georgia’s capital Tbilisi after a three-day Thomson Reuters Foundation media and crisis communications course in a lakeside hotel near the city of Telavi organised by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) in late May.
A riot of vines clings to the balconies of ancient stone farmhouses in Georgia’s eastern province of Kakheti. We’re on the long and winding road back to the capital Tbilisi.
Georgia’s parliament is on the move in more ways than one.
Georgia, which fought a five-day war with Russia in 2008 over the break-away region of South Ossetia, is shifting its parliament from Tbilisi to the industrial town of Kutaisi some 230kilometres to the north-west.
President Mikheil Saakashvili stressed at the inauguration of the new parliament on Georgia’s Independence Day on May 26 that he sees the new parliament as a symbol of the future. MPs and parliamentary staff are getting ready to move to their new home after October's parliamentary elections.
The government says the move will help to decentralise power in Georgia and boost the economy of its regions. Government critics say the move to Kutaisi will side-line opposition activists, who have a tradition of protesting outside the parliament in Tbilisi.
Our bus – packed with parliamentary officials -- picks up speed as it heads out of the mountains and into the plains below towards Tbilisi. Far to the west of the capital, the glass-eyed dome of a new parliament in transition awaits down along and winding road.
