My last visit to Daghestan was in 1995, after which the neighbouring Chechen situation became more of a threat to Daghestan and I was told by my local friends that the authorities genuinely felt that ‘they were unable to guarantee my security’.
“The Georgians have built a funfair in the neighbouring village, I can see the ferris wheel from my balcony”, says 20 year old Alik Gassiev.
“What’s this I asked myself, sitting up on my bunk. A mirage or the island of Tahiti? Or the heavenly lands of Samoa? That was Konstantin Paustovsky´s first impression when he first saw Abkhazia.
“Oh, I cannot take you to Darra,” the Afghan fellow insisted. He ran a clothing shop in our hotel during the evenings, and specialized in shepherding around random tourists during the daytime; though, at this juncture, tourists were few in Peshawar.
The war in Chechnya has the dubious distinction of being Europe’s longest running conflict. In August I travelled to the war torn republics of both Chechnya and Ingushetia with the Danish Refugee council (DRC) to photograph internally displaced people (IDPs), who have fled the conflict; and to see how the security situation in the region [...]
An irate Saakashvili looks towards the lost land on the other side of the river from a big mural. This is the Georgian checkpoint, even if Georgia doesn’t recognise any border here. Nor does anyone else.
When Claudius Bombarnac, Jules Verne´s imaginary hero in The Adventures of a Special Correspondent, arrives at the Apsheron peninsula on the shores of the Caspian he is appalled by the pollution, but thrilled at the same time by the naphtha that seeped out of the ground.
