De Facto President Proposes Renaming Republic Of South Ossetia

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty REF/RL ^ | December 30, 2015 | Liz Fuller

[WhiskeyX]

T wo months after announcing plans to hold a referendum on the incorporation of Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia into the Russian Federation, the de facto president of the largely unrecognized Republic of South Ossetia, has set a tentative timeframe for doing so. He told journalists on December 28 that the referendum should take place "long before" the presidential ballot due in April 2017.

Tibilov simultaneously proposed renaming the region the Republic of South Ossetia -- Alania, by analogy with the contiguous Republic of North Ossetia -- Alania, which is a Russian Federation subject. The Ossetians, an Indo-European people, consider themselves the direct descendants of the Alans. Approximately 65 percent of North Ossetia's population of 713,000 are Ossetians.

Changing the region's name, Tibilov argued, would underscore the predicament of an ethnic group divided between two polities, and thus pave the way for the eventual unification of the two Ossetian states within the Russian Federation, which Russian media quoted him as referring to as "the eternal dream of our entire people."

[vladimir998]

All part of Russia’s plan.

[Does so]

Playing chess, not checkers...

[Krosan]

>Europeans had better start “overstaying their visas” in the USA. ==8-O

Saw your tagline and now I want to share my funny story. I’m an European and first visited the USA in 2002. They stapled some paper into my passport when I arrived. When I left 5 days later they didn’t take it out, so at home I took it out myself and threw it away.

Then I came to visit two years later. The border officers got really agitated and said their database shows I came two years ago and never left. Higher ups were called to the floor for this occasion and I started to get worried. Luckily for me they eventually believed that I only visited for 5 days and the officers at that time just forgot to check me out.

[Does so]

The border officers got really agitated and said their database shows I came two years ago and never left.

If the case was, "you'd never left", what would the border officers have done about it?

[Krosan]

I don’t really know. That time I guess they figured that 2002 was straight after 9/11 and the security was in disarray that year. I have visited 4 times since and only in 2002 did they staple something into my passport, so probably was a temporary thing that they stopped doing later.