G

eorgia has announced its eagerness to strengthen diplomatic ties with Indonesia through various programs in education and trade, among other things. The country also intends to share knowledge on accelerating corruption eradication efforts, which have become a jewel in it'€™s crown.

Georgian Ambassador to Indonesia Zurab Aleksidze said recently that '€œIndonesia might be the main engine of ASEAN in the future'€.

Georgia has been recognized as a model country for graft eradication. Its government managed to strongly reduce its corruption problem in the aftermath of the Rose Revolution in 2003. In 2014, Transparency International ranked the country at 50 (of 175 countries) on the Corruption Perception Index, climbing 74 places in just 11 years.

However, critics say that anticorruption efforts have failed since there have been repeated accusations of top government officials'€™ involvement in corruption as reported by Transparency International in 2011.

Aleksidze also said he had witnessed the signing of an agreement between the University of Indonesia and Georgia State University. Through this agreement, he added, further educational networking should be on the horizon.

Another expected program would be mediating cooperation between both countries'€™ legislative bodies. The envoy said the Georgian parliament speaker had agreed to visit Indonesia by the end of the year.

As a young nation, Georgia declared its independence on April 9, 1991, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it took until 2003 for democratic and economic reforms to gain a foothold in the country. Since then Georgia has increasingly built up its international diplomatic network, with a strong focus on Asia.

In 2007, a delegation led by Emeria Wilujeng Amir Siregar, then director for East and Central European affairs, travelled to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, for a first round of bilateral political consultations between the foreign ministries of Indonesia and Georgia.

But given that Georgia is relatively unknown in Southeast Asia, the process to set up such relations appears to be happening rather slowly.

The first Embassy of Georgia in Southeast Asia was finally opened in Jakarta in December 2012, after having diplomatic relations for nearly 20 years, since 1993.

'€œThe official establishment of diplomatic relations takes time,'€ Aleksidze said during a photo exhibition that was held to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the Russia-Georgia August War.

The exhibition, titled '€œA Story of Internal Displacement Captured on Camera'€, pictured the atrocities that people who lived in war-torn areas had to face, with many of them fleeing the conflict.

'€œWe want to say to the international community that those internally displaced people have a dignified right to go back to their houses.'€