NATO cooperation with CIS security body a long way off – Russian expert
Interfax-AVN military news agency web site
13 Jul 05
Moscow, 13 July: NATO is unlikely to adopt a decision on cooperation
with the Collective Security Treaty Organization in the near future,
Aleksandr Nikitin, the director of the Centre for Political and
International studies in Russia, told Interfax-AVN on Wednesday.
“There continues to be a vague disregard in NATO for the CSTO as an
organization and, one year after the CSTO secretary-general made a
proposal on cooperation to the NATO leadership, the situation has not
changed,” Nikitin said.
Nonetheless, he said, the fact that NATO is not trying to demonstrate
its distance from the CSTO blatantly can be regarded as positive. “The
alliance’s agreement to send to Moscow 100 senior officers from 26
countries to attend a CSTO presentation briefing in June, is
confirmation of this,” Nikitin said.
He said that during the one-and-a-half-hour exchange, ” it was
noticeable that, on the whole, the senior NATO officers simply did not
know about the CSTO and were confused on basic issues such as the
division of functions between the CSTO and the CIS”.
“But even if Brussels has still not decided in favour of `befriending’
the CSTO, the policy of inviting the alliance to take part in joint
practical projects with the CSTO – attending exercises, coordinating
border issues on the Tajik-Afghan border, where the areas of
responsibility of both organizations meet, and other projects – is the
right policy,” the director of the centre said.
Earlier, the secretary-general of the CSTO, Nikolay Bordyuzha, told
journalists that NATO had even ignored a proposal from the CSTO on
cooperation in combating Afghan drug trafficking.
The member states of the CSTO are Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.