CIS leaders hope commonwealth reforms will yield good results
By Viktoria Sokolova

ITAR-TASS News Agency
September 16, 2004 Thursday

ASTANA, September 16 — CIS leaders said Thursday they were expecting
the proposed commonwealth reforms to be effective, ensuring, among
other things, implementation of the decisions made.

Commenting at the news conference on the program of reforms, proposed
by the Kazakh president, Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko noted
that “the CIS lags behind in its dynamics of the basic indicators
of activity.”

“The commonwealth leaders should decide within a year on the main
thing: what they want the CIS to be. Having answered this question,
it is necessary to begin reforms,” Lukashenko said.

He expressed the hope that “the overhauled CIS will be an organization
where decisions on the key issues will be made and where they will
be implemented.”

Armenian President Robert Kocharyan thinks that the main objective of
the reform is to preserve the bodies, which work, and make the rest
redundant. “I don’t doubt that the CIS has a potential,” Kocharyan
said.

“The main thing is that all the decisions we make be implemented,”
Ukrainian leader Leonid Kuchma stated.

Nursultan Nazarbayev said the CIS leaders had instructed the foreign
ministries to consider and make a final decision on the proposed
reforms within a year. The reforms then will be discussed by the
CIS leaders.

The reforms envision the setting up of the CIS Security Council
comprising the foreign ministers, the defense ministers, and the
heads of the border services and law-enforcement agencies.

The Council of foreign ministers will be preserved. It will control
the Security Council’s work.

The Security Council, to be chaired on rotational basis, will be
directly subordinate to the Council of CIS leaders.

Following CIS bodies will be dissolved: the Council of CIS defense
ministers, its secretariat, the headquarters for coordinating
military cooperation and the respective councils. In addition, the
reform proposes to eliminate the Economic Court and the Inter-State
Statistics Committee.

The CIS executive committee will cut its staff from 220 to 140. The
chairman will have two deputies, while the number of the Committee’s
departments will be reduced from nine to five.

The commonwealth will set up a council of representative under the
Security and Economic Councils at the level of ambassadors who are to
be appointed by the heads of states. It will abolish the institute
of envoys under the Economic Council and the Commission on Economic
Issues in Moscow, as well as a number of other CIS councils and bodies.

“I’d like to note,” Nazarbayev said, “that the heads of states showed
little respect for the bodies that had been set up, normally sending
to work there pensioners or people who needed to land a job. This
approach did not ensure effective work of our CIS secretariat.”

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress