TURKEY ANNOUNCES START DATE FOR BAKU-TBILISI-KARS RAILWAY CONSTRUCTION
M. Alkhazashvili
The Messenger
July 9 2008
Georgia
The inauguration ceremony of construction on the Turkish section of
the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway will be held on July 24.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul invited both his Georgian and
Azerbaijani counterparts, Mikheil Saakashvili and Ilham Aliyev,
to the ceremony when they met in Astana last week., the news agency
Regnum reports.
The Turkish section, which will be around 70 kilometers in length,
will connect Kars in northeastern Turkey to the Georgian border.
The project was hailed by Saakashvili as a "geopolitical
revolution" last year at the inauguration ceremony of the Georgian
section. However, it is not backed by the US and EU who are concerned
at the project’s exclusion of Armenia.