Politics

Pulitzer Center Staff

Thomas Goltz, special to the Pulitzer Center

That Mikhail Saakashvili's Georgia would eventually come into direct conflict with its huge neighbor to the north, the Russian Federation, was long a given.

I am a syndicated columnist, and with the Pulitzer Center's help I am reporting from Thailand, Cambodia and Laos this month. In Thailand I am writing primarily about human trafficking -- Thai mothers who sell their children into sexual slavery. In Cambodia, where I covered the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, I am writing about what life is like today. My first column from the region, for the McClatchy-Tribune News Service, covers President Bush's visit to Thailand and the Burmese exile movement.

Freelance video journalist Jason Maloney, who was filming in Georgia for the Pulitzer Center at the time of the fighting, describes the tensions that preceded the clashes and the impacts on the region. (MP3)

Listen to Jason's dispatch at Newshour.

Pulitzer Center Staff

Freelance video journalist Jason Maloney, who was filming in Georgia for the Pulitzer Center at the time of the fighting, describes the tensions that preceded the clashes and the impacts on the region. (MP3)

Listen to Jason's dispatch on Newshour.com

The last contact I had with the Georgian member of our reporting team, a man named Sergo, had been a text message I received a week ago with the name and number of a reliable taxi driver who would be able to take me out of Georgia and across the border into Armenia. Sergo had been with us in Tbilisi during the first days of fighting, but as the war was intensifying all around us, he'd managed to find a way to get to Batumi, Georgia's coastal resort town, where his wife, mother and mother-in-law were all at a relative's house.

The parliament, national security council, ministry of foreign affairs -- all these institutions in the Abkhazian capital of Sukhumi occupy one block of buildings located directly on the Black Sea coast. For Sukhumi, unlike Pitsunda and Gagra, has never been considered only a holiday resort. It was and it is an administrative center, the capital of the region.

Yemen's Ministry of Information is tucked away in the streets behind Liberation Square. The Arabic word for information is elam. It looks simple enough, but there's an 'ayn' letter squeezed in there and I just can't get the pronunciation right – which leads to some frustrating and surreal moments with taxi drivers. It seems I've been asking to go to the Ministry of Dreams (ahlam) instead.

Sitting here in a hotel room in the Armenian capital Yerevan, waiting for my flight to Moscow tomorrow, I've been thinking of all the places I've been in the last two weeks and the people I met along the way. We'd been reporting on the situation in Abkhazia, one of the two breakaway regions of Georgia that have been at the center of the last week of fighting between Georgia and Russia. I've traveled widely in this time, all the way from Sukhumi, the Abkhaz capital, to Yerevan, overland.

If there was any lingering concern as to whether or not I should leave Georgia yesterday in a US Embassy convoy, it was erased by the huge, booming explosion that woke me from a sound sleep at 430am - followed shortly thereafter by a series of smaller blasts. I learned hours later that it had been the Russian bombing of a radar installation on a hill over Tbilisi. It sounded like it had been just next door.

A while ago, when I first came to Yemen, there was a TV adv run by a cell phone manufacturer on the Arab satellite channels. It started with a close-up shot of an Arab woman's face. She seemed to be writhing with pleasure, but the camera pulled back to show her wriggling into a pair of skin-tight jeans. The new slim-line handset was thin enough to fit into the tightest pocket – that was the message.

Pulitzer Center Executive director discusses Georgia-Russia war with anchor Shihab Rattansi of Al Jazeera English's Washington Broadcast Center. Sawyer reported from Georgia and the southern Caucasus in 2006 for the Pulitzer Center.