CIS leaders realize need to reform to resist terrorism

RTR Russia TV, Moscow
16 Sep 04

[Presenter] CIS leaders met in the Kazakh capital of Astana today. The
central theme was one that both politicians and ordinary citizens
now talk about, namely the fight against terrorism.

They decided to pool their efforts: a CIS security council is being
set up to coordinate the fight against the common threat.

Our special correspondent Andrey Kondrashov reports from Astana:

[Correspondent] In the Kazakh capital of Astana, formerly Tselinograd,
where virgin lands are now ploughed to build palaces, today was the
day of CIS reform. The first item on the agenda was the main one:
joint resistance against terrorism. It turned out that everyone
feels solidarity with Russia – the only problem is that the CIS as a
structure hardly offers efficient help. Major reform now looms large
for the commonwealth.

The heads of state had agreed a week in advance of the summit that
the fight against terrorism and nothing else would be the central
issue. At their meeting without aides, the statement on the Beslan
tragedy was not even discussed. Everyone was in agreement, so the
chairman, [Ukrainian President Leonid] Kuchma, went on to read it
out in the presence of ministers and the press. [Passage omitted.]

[Kazakh President Nursultan] Nazarbayev said the current summit
was being held against a backdrop of advances made by international
terrorism. We need to respond together, the summit’s host went on,
and the first step is a drastic reform of the CIS. It turned out that
this step came as no surprise to the presidents. Everyone is sick of
the cumbersome bureaucratic structure, only a handful of the hundreds
of documents signed are working and officials who have been pensioned
off eat away at the common funds on foreign trips.

[Nazarbayev, in Russian] The total of our countries’ contributions
to the single budget of CIS bodies is 7m dollars. Large sums are
spent on holding summits, council meetings and sending experts to
various conferences. In January-August this year alone, over 30 expert
conference were held, many of them yielding practically no results.

[Correspondent] It has been proposed that virtually all CIS structures
should be reorganized and that a real security council should be set
up in their place so that the joint fight against terrorism is no
longer just talk, as they put it.

All the documents signed today were clearly antiterrorist in
nature. After that, Leonid Kuchma stepped down from his post and was
awarded the top CIS decoration for his good work. Taking over from
him as chairman of the council was not [Robert] Kocharyan [Armenian
president], [Ilham] Aliyev [Azerbaijan’s president] or [Alyaksandr]
Lukashenka [Belarusian president, as dictated by the alphabet, but
Putin – presumably as dictated by the situation. This meant that
everyone had the same understanding of what terrorism was. [Passage
omitted.]

It is impossible to fight terrorism efficiently as long as there are
conflicts in the CIS, including frozen one, the [final] news conference
was told. From that moment, each participant started believing that
his conflict was the most important.

[Georgian President] Mikheil Saakashvili said everything turned out
fine in Georgia once he had come, and the only outstanding issue
was Abkhazia. [Passage omitted] Robert Kocharyan then spoke about
[Nagornyy] Karabakh, but not for long: the Georgians once again
recalled Abkhazia, which they regard as the most frozen conflict.

At the end of the news conference, the Uzbek president could no
longer contain himself. He said it was not proper to use the CIS
platform for self-promotion. Mikheil Saakashvili, who obviously had
not received all the answers, was invited to a separate meeting with
Vladimir Putin. They did not talk long. [Passage omitted.]