SCO summit in Dushanbe: Will SCO Challenge NATO?

- In this fast moving world, US monopoly is under severe stress and serious strains. In the new world configuration, the US-led West must accept the hard truth that it will no longer achieve everything it wants and that it can no longer claim to speak on behalf of what it likes to call the "civilized world" or the "international community."

by Dr. Abdul Ruff Colachal

(September 11, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) In the background of brief Caucasian war between Russia and Georgia, leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) gathered in the Tajik capital of Dushanbe on 28 August for a summit that focused on security, economic and cultural cooperation among the member states Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Leaders attending the summit exchanged views on current major international and regional issues and discussed how to resolutely fight the three forces of “terrorism, extremism and separatism” through intensive coordination. Russian and Chinese Presidents Dimtry Medvedev and Hu Jintao and others debated the multilateral ties among the member-states and signed a political document on SCO members' common position on a series of major international and regional issues and the regulations on dialogue partner status.

At the meeting, the leaders discussed the ways to promote the integrity of SCO and stability in the region and also to expand the organization's influence and deepen practical cooperation in various fields through free trade and facilitated investment They issued a joint communiqué on the achievements of the summit highlighting cooperation in areas of security and economy. It has involved a series of meetings among SCO members and observer states as well as special guests, like Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who later met with Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who voiced criticism at the summit of NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Tajik President Imomali Rahmon, the summit host.

Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev suggested the SCO expand its cooperation with "European structures, including the EU. He said: “Today, we have a duty of further expanding the position of the SCO on the international scene, establishing contacts and expanding cooperation with European structures, including the EU and the OSCE, which have recently shown increasing interest in our region." Uzbek President Islam Karimov said the most important issue now is stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan, which has a strong impact on the entire region. Russia, the USA, NATO and Afghanistan’s neighbors could play a key role in bringing peace to Afghanistan and fighting extremism and drug trafficking in the country.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is dependent upon the West, but it was clear from his statements at the Dushanbe summit that he is disappointed with U.S. actions and is interested in receiving greater support from the SCO. Considering the terrific scenario in Afghanistan, Iran and Kashmir, the talks of “democracy” “regime change” are no more sacred concepts and catchy phrases. In this fast moving world, US monopoly is under severe stress and serious strains. In the new world configuration, the US-led West must accept the hard truth that it will no longer achieve everything it wants and that it can no longer claim to speak on behalf of what it likes to call the "civilized world" or the "international community."

True, the SCO countries did not openly support Russia’s position on Georgia and recognition of Abkhazia's and South Ossetia's independence, but it is understood that the organization stands by Moscow. And Moscow had little hope of China supporting Moscow , knowing that most of those countries are “obsessed” and contending with their own domestic “separatist” movements. Although China does not support Russia’s decision to recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, it will look favorably upon Russia’s attempts to stop further NATO expansion.

Amid condemnation from the United States and European Union, Moscow has recognized the two Georgian separatist regions' independence. An increasing number of Russia’s neighbors, including SCO members, understand very well that a good relationship with Russia is the best guarantor of their security and territorial integrity. The role of the SCO will increase in importance as Russia and China combine their common interests. The increasing confrontation between the East and West and other regional reasons would encourage Pakistan to enter the SCO as a full member. This is something that Iran wants as well.

Declaration

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who is facing condemnation from the West over his country's recent military action in Georgia, turned to his Asian allies for support, saying, "the united position of SCO members will have international resonance" and sends a serious signal to the West. Defending the Russian retaliatory attack, Medvedev condemned Georgia’s “criminal and irresponsible” aggression against South Ossetia and implied that Western states were trying to turn black into white and justify this aggression.

In their final statement, dubbed the "Dushanbe Declaration," the heads of the member states expressed their concern about "recent tension over the South Ossetian issue" and called on all parties to solve the "existing problems" through dialogue and negotiation. The member states expressed grave concern over tensions in Georgia, but they were cautious about not to offend the West with which every member is keen to forge economic ties. While they backed “Russia 's active role" in resolving the conflict in Georgia , the SCO member states stopped well short of recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia's independence.

Immediately following the signing of that declaration, the Western and Indian media began an intense and deliberate disinformation campaign to try to depict the position of SCO countries as not supporting Russia’s policy toward Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The key idea behind all this media hype to crate wedge among the SCO members and weaken the organization, but that failed to happen.

SCO: Strategic and Economic Significance

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is an intergovernmental mutual-security organization. The SCO member states cover an area of over 30 million square kilometers, or about three fifths of Eurasia, with a population of 1.5 billion, about a quarter of the world's total. In the past seven years, the SCO has made important contributions to strengthening mutual trust among its members, deepening pragmatic cooperation and safeguarding regional security and stability. Competition for Central Asian energy supplies has increased the level of interest in the organization. Uzbekistan signed a $600 million joint energy exploration deal with China in 2006. Both Russia and China are UNSC-5 veto members. The Russo-China military combine is real force the NATO is to reckon with.

Except for Uzbekistan, the other countries had been members of the Shanghai Five, as initially founded in 1996 to demilitarize the border between China and the former Soviet Union. Renamed as SCO in Shanghai on June 15, 2001 by the leaders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in 2004 and 2005, it accepted Mongolia, Iran, Pakistan, and India as observers. Afghanistan is a part of SCO contact group. Belarus had also sought observer status in the SCO group. Iran has unsuccessfully sought the full membership of the regional organization, which was originally founded as Shanghai Five group in 1996. The USA applied for observer status in the SCO, but was rejected in 2005.Worse, at the Astana summit in July 2005, with the U terror wars in Afghanistan and Iraq foreshadowing an indefinite presence of U.S. forces in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, the SCO urged the U.S. to set a timetable for withdrawing its troops from SCO member states. Shortly afterwards, Uzbekistan asked the U.S. to leave the K-2 air base.

The SCO operation is primarily centered on its member nations' Central Asian security-related concerns, often describing the main threats it confronts as being “terrorism, separatism and extremism”. However evidence is growing that its activities in the area of social and economic development of its member states is increasing fast. In 1996, the members, except Uzbekistan, signed their first joint agreement aimed at easing tensions along the former Sino-Soviet border by withdrawing large forces and equipment from the border area. The agreement suited all the parties as Russia and the Central Asian states were suffering economically, which meant cutting military funding. And China wanted to move troops freed up from the northern and western borders to eastern coastal areas opposite Taiwan. In July 2001, Russia and the PRC, the organization’s two leading nations, signed the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation.

Era of “terrorism” added separatism Problems. Some SCO members face their own problems with “separatism” and analysts say they would not want to embrace the precedent set by Russia in recognizing the independence of the two Georgian regions. Russia has problems like “Chechnya”, while China, for example, faces separatism in both Xinjiang Province and Tibet, and has always been very anti-separatist. An antiterrorism center was opened in Shanghai in 2003. Russia and China held their first joint military exercises, Peace Mission 2005, in August 2005. The group held joint military exercises in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in 2006 and in Russia in 2007.

According to the Charter of the SCO, summits of the Council of Heads of State shall be held annually at alternating venues. The locations of these summits follow the alphabetical order of the member state's name in Russian. The Council of Heads of State is the top decision-making body in the SCO. This council meets at the SCO summits, which are held each year in one of the member states' capital cities and members discuss issues of multilateral cooperation. The council also approves the organization's budget. The council of Foreign Ministers also holds regular meetings, where they discuss the current international situation and the SCO's interaction with other international organizations. The Secretariat of the SCO, the primary executive body of the organization, is located in Beijing. The current SCO Secretary-General is Bolat Nurgaliyev of Kazakhstan.

Cohesiveness of SCO reveals an alarming feature of the SCO. Each member –state is looking forward to Western cooperation and assistance, guidance and trade links. Russia, even while is preoccupied with angry rhetoric wit the US -led western powers, it still conducts business with them quite profitably. One of the crucial issues remains its memberships with western bodies like WTO. There is still, at the root, a fundamental mistrust among the members of the cooperation group and that mistrust about the intentions of Russia -- of China particularly -- amongst the smaller members of the group is really the key flaw in this organization. "The Economist" says that close cooperation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization "is not really building deeper trust between the countries involved."

USA has created a firm global network to misinform and weaken its enemies as far as it as possible and beneficial to its interests in the region. Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations were a serious threat to US interests in the world. Now the SCO is seen as block threat to US interests in Asia Pacific. Lack of cohesiveness is being exploited by the US-led NATO to its advantage. Recently the SCO has made no direct comments against the U.S. or its military presence in the region. However, several indirect statements at the past summits, including the 2007 summit in Bishkek, have been viewed as "thinly veiled” swipes at Washington.

SCO- A military alliance to counter NATO?

Some Western security analysts have called the SCO the "NATO of the East" or even the new Warsaw Pact. But those comparisons don't hold up -- in fact, the SCO is not much of a military threat at all. It provides a forum for member and observer states to boost bilateral and multilateral relations in a number of spheres, including military cooperation. On paper, an SCO military alliance is formidable. Its members' combined air, naval, and ground forces would be daunting to any foe. And Russia and China also have nuclear weapons. But cohesion in the SCO is questionable. The reason the group was originally formed had nothing to do with military matters -- quite the opposite, in fact.

They claimed in April 2006 that the SCO has no plans to become a military bloc; nonetheless he argued that the increased threats of "terrorism, extremism and separatism" make necessary a full-scale involvement of armed forces. A Framework Agreement to enhance economic cooperation was signed by the SCO member states on 23 September 2003. On 26 October 2005, the Moscow Summit of the SCO, the Secretary General of the Organization said that the SCO will prioritize joint energy projects; such will include the oil and gas sector, the exploration of new hydrocarbon reserves, and joint use of water resources. The creation of an Inter-bank SCO Council was also agreed upon at that summit in order to fund future joint projects. The first meeting of the SCO Inter-bank Association was held in Beijing on 21-22 February 2006. Cultural cooperation also occurs in the SCO framework.

Most likely the SCO has not yet become one, in spite of the military agreements among the members. The original military agreements between the countries were based on counterterrorism and counter-separatism, helping member states involved in a localized conflict -- presumably with a stateless opponent. Over the last five years, the member states have also held bilateral military exercises, which have seen Chinese troops on Central Asian soil and multilateral exercises like the "Peace Mission 2007" exercises held on Russian and Chinese territory in advance of last year's SCO summit.

At times it appeared SCO is showcasing itself to be a virtual military alliance, though it has so far not claimed as being that. Russia has the biggest energy resources in the world and China, with 1 billion people more than Russia, is on its way to becoming the world's biggest energy consumer. Russia has involved China in Central Asian trade networks, probably to outsmart the US interests in the region. As a virtual military alliance, SCO members are required to inform the other members before they host any foreign troops on their soil. Not helping to build trust is the fact that SCO agreements seem not to include informing other members about impending military action. If Russia did consult with other SCO members prior to or during its recent military action in the Caucasus, that information was not well publicized.

Apart from economic relations, Russia has developed strong military tie with SCO members especially with its former ideological opponent China. When the original agreement on trust along the Sino-CIS border was signed, the Russian Army was in a state of decay. Under then-President Vladimir Putin there was a new emphasis on regaining Russia’s past military might. His successor seems determined to continue on that path, and a resurgent Russian military may reconsider troop deployments. But it is mistrust between Russia and China that may one day be the undoing of the SCO.

In effect, SCO is an economic and security organization. The security aspect of the organization came later. When Russia was involved in the second Chechen conflict, in the late 1990s, China was seeing a surge in problems in its western Xinjiang Province, home to the Turkic Muslim Uyghurs, while Central Asia was fighting annual summer incursions by armed Islamic militants. NATO and the Warsaw Pact are and were, respectively, essentially European military blocs. Their forces came from different countries but mostly from the same continent -- except the United States and Canada, both of which have a strong European heritage, however. An SCO military force, by contrast, looks more ethnically and culturally problematic. Russia’s troops would be generally European and Christian, Central Asian forces would be mainly Turkic and Persian Muslims, all allied with Chinese communist forces.

Of course, as emerging international fashion of “joint military exercises” requires, there have been a number of SCO joint military exercises. The first of these was held in 2003, with the first phase taking place in Kazakhstan and the second in China. The joint military exercises in 2007 took place in Chelyabinsk Russia, near the Ural Mountains and close to Central Asia, as was agreed upon on April 2006 at a meeting of SCO Defense Ministers. More than 4,000 soldiers participated from China. In October 2007, the SCO signed an agreement with the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), in the Tajik capital Dushanbe, to broaden cooperation on issues such as security, crime, and drug trafficking. Joint action plans between the two organizations are planned to be signed by early 2008 in Beijing. Kazakhstan, however, did not give China permission to move its forces through Kazakh territory to reach the Russian site for the continuation of the drills. Uzbekistan did not send any troops to participate. The SCO vowed to hold such exercises regularly but did not do so in advance of this year's summit.

An Observation: Russia–West Cooperation?

Confrontation is the key feature in the relations between Russia and the Western powers since 1917. Confrontational cooperation has been the hallmark of Russo-Western relationship with regular ups and downs since the advent of Nikitin Khrushchev. In post-Soviet era, Yugoslavian crisis tested the newly emerging relationship and the relationship got badly strained during the pro-Western Russian president Boris Yeltsin and during Puitn’s period the status quo was maintained during the most part except occasional cold rhetoric and now under President Dimtry Medvedev, the ties have reached a breaking point because of Russo- Georgian war

Although the U.S.-European bloc remains the most influential in the world, the separate regional power centers in Russia, China and Iran are rivals to the West in their own rights. Many in the West think Russia should be expelled form elitist G8 as punishment for it war in Georgia. But many others argue just opposite saying that would prompt Russia either to extent and strengthen SCO further or to forge another similar forum with China, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Malaysia Nigeria and India etc. That would make Russia a virtual super power all over again.

Although the declaration on the establishment of the SCO contained a statement that it was not an alliance directed against other states and regions and it adheres to the principle of openness, many believe that one of the original purposes of the SCO was to serve as a counterbalance to NATO and the USA and in particular to avoid conflicts that would allow the United States to intervene in areas near both Russia and China. An alternative to the current model of confrontation could become a world in which power centers reach agreement on shared interests. Some US strategists think Russia, China and many European countries would be interested in such a cooperative world. But the current leadership in the United States and its allies are pushing the world toward increased confrontation.

Current disagreement between Russia and the USA over the Georgian conflict has strengthened interest in the SCO which is known for anti-American perceptions. One of most discussed aspects of the SDC summit in Dushanbe, therefore, was the third point of the summit declaration devoted to the situation in South. Although SCO members expressed "deep concern" over the tensions surrounding this issue, they also pledged to "support Russia’s active role in facilitating peace and cooperation in the region." President Dmitry Medvedev did not call for such a “bold” step during his official remarks in Dushanbe. Symbolically, even the (partial) withdrawal of Georgian and Russian forces showed they no longer wished to attack one another. That agreement worked so well that the group decided to change the focus to cooperation -- at first economic cooperation, the basis of their ties. Russia has finally agreed to withdraw the forces form Georgia.

In any case, it is expected SCO states will strive to provide security for Central Asia and the region, and it might even propose their own solution for stabilizing Afghanistan after what appears to be the impending failure of Western efforts there. Of course, there could be occasional joint military exercises. All the joint military exercises constitute modern strategic evils and are meant not only to threaten the opponents in the” field”, but also drive home the point that reliable security cannot be established if each region goes on conducting joint exercises regularly. Such misadventures only enhance the possibility of another world war. Similarly, SCO exercises don’t mean any thing “significantly” to NATO.

Russo-China combined military power formidable, though they don’t equal the Warsaw Pact nations that included Eastern Europe. However, it is virtually inconceivable that any NTO force would dare attack an SCO member, knowing that it might then have to face the SCO's combined forces. So, cooperation does provide an enormous security guarantee for the region. On the other hand, it is almost equally inconceivable that the SCO would band its military forces together to attack anyone outside its territory. The Russo-Georgian conflict provided a test to prove that SCO is not ready yet as a joint military organization to take on the all powerful NATO. SCO countries (full members and observers) comprise a hefty 25% of Earth's land area and NATO cannot overlook this fact as well as the nuclear reality that both Russia and China are veto wielding strong UNSC members with enormous strategic weapons systems.- Sri Lanka Guardian