September 21st - - Russia Profile - The First Five Years

 

Five years into its existence the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), led by Russia and China, is gaining importance as a counterbalance to America’s perceived dominance.

 

The five-year jubilee summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in its founding city this June was somewhat overshadowed in Russia by the preparations for the G8 summit, which was held in St. Petersburg just a month later. But while many have accused the G8 of being a talking shop incapable of real action, 2006 was the year when the SCO gained more importance and relevance as an international alliance.

 

The organization dates from 1996, when it was established as the “Shanghai Five,” a loose coalition between Russia, China, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. When Uzbekistan joined in 2001, the group was renamed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The declaration signed at the Shanghai summit in June reiterated the organization’s commitment to fighting the “three evil forces of terrorism, separatism, and extremism.” Linking separatism to terrorism and extremism makes sense for all the countries involved, given Russia’s problems in the North Caucasus, China’s restive regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, and the complicated borders between the Central Asian states, which do not always run along ethnic lines.

 

With India, Pakistan, Mongolia and Iran now attending meetings as observers, the alliance encompasses almost half of the world’s population and a good deal of its energy reserves. While the SCO’s charter states that it only deals with issues affecting Eurasia and not with those of the whole world, it has set up an Afghanistan working group, and has established official ties with the UN, ASEAN and the CIS.

 

There have been attempts to characterize the alliance as analogous to previous international groupings an “Eastern NATO” or “gas OPEC.” Both are misnomers, but also contain some grain of truth. The SCO differs from OPEC in that, with China on board, it features not only major energy producers, but also one of the world’s leading consumers. Nevertheless, the SCO countries contain one-fifth of the world’s oil reserves, and the members and observers together account for over half of the world’s gas.

 

The anti-U.S. agenda of the SCO is fairly clear, although rarely explicitly stated the leaders prefer to make thinly veiled statements about preventing a “unipolar world.” Broadly speaking, the SCO is part of both China and Russia’s strategy to promote the idea of a multi-polar order and to counter what is seen as the growing threat of U.S. hegemony, both in the Eurasian region and globally. The United States has asked for observer status in the SCO and was denied. “We never expected the SCO to develop so much,” said President Vladimir Putin at September’s Valdai meeting with Russia experts, stating that it was originally created “as a mechanism to solve the border issues between the People’s Republic of China and neighboring states.”

 

However, as the United States moved into Central Asia in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the SCO gained more impetus as Russia and China’s means to counter U.S. influence in the region. “To a certain extent, the SCO was born out of the worry that both Russia and China felt after Central Asia was included in the list of territories where the United States had ‘vital interests,’” said Alexander Shlyndov, senior research fellow at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences. “In order to strengthen stability, security and trust in Central Asia, Moscow and Beijing developed a new system of cooperation among the countries of the region.”

 

While the Bush Doctrine has advocated the spread of democracy across the world, the Americans seemed to turn more of a blind eye to lack of reform in Central Asia. Recently, praise has been heaped on Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, and the United States only questioned the actions of the iron-fisted regime of Uzbek President Islam Karimov after the events in Andijan last year.

 

Shlyndov has a cynical view of U.S aims in the region, saying the United States is only interested in “keeping their military presence there, hampering the development of the Russo-Chinese cooperation, stopping integration of new members into the SCO and limiting the SCO’s influence.” Andijan has at least pushed Uzbekistan back firmly into Russia’s orbit, and Putin offered strong support for Karimov’s claim that the massacre of civilians at Andijan was in fact the quelling of an armed terrorist uprising. Indeed, the SCO’s Regional Antiterror Structure is based in Tashkent.

 

China also sees the SCO as a forum to legitimize its policy in its western regions, and help develop them economically through trade with Russia and Central Asia. “The SCO gives China a platform in Central Asia to exert an important role. The organization is not only significant to ensure peace in the northwest of China, and implement the strategy of ‘Developing the West Region,’ but is also a platform for China to push new security and development concepts,” wrote Wang Haiyun, an analyst with the Chinese Institute for International Studies in a recent article on Sino-Russian relations. China’s far-Western Xinjiang region has borders with three of the four Central Asian countries in the SCO, and faces separatism problems from its large, Turkic-speaking Uighur population.

 

 

Iran has expressed a desire to become a permanent member of the group, and some Russian experts concerned about growing U.S. influence in Eurasia see the accession of Iran to the SCO as a logical next step. “The SCO in this format would become a serious obstacle to the eastward expansion of NATO,” said Radzhab Safarov, head of the Center for the Study of Contemporary Iran, at a press conference. “It would also put a stop to the process of the United States acquiring new regions, including the Caspian region, Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East.”

 

The crisis around the Iranian nuclear program perhaps more than anything else has propelled the SCO into the headlines over recent months, given the Islamic state’s status as an SCO observer. At the Shanghai summit in June, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attended, and held bilateral meetings with both Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao, one of the few occasions on which he has conducted top-level talks with major world leaders.

 

“We want this organization to develop into a powerful body, influential in regional and international politics, economics and trade, serving to block threats and unlawful strong-arm interference from various countries,” said Ahmadinejad at the summit. It was not too difficult to figure out which countries he had in mind.

Over the last year, the Iranian issue has raised concerns about the SCO in Western capitals. “It strikes me as strange that one would want to bring into an organization that says it’s against terrorism... one of the leading terrorist nations in the world,” said U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Singapore on the eve of the summit.

 

While Iran’s desire to become a full-fledged member of the organization is unlikely to be realized soon, both Russia and China have systematically taken a less rigid view of the Iranian nuclear program, preferring to engage rather than to threaten. Both countries have extensive economic links with Iran, and China is especially dependent on the Persian state for energy imports. “China, as the main consumer of Iranian energy resources, is very interested in keeping stability in Iran, and will use the SCO as much as possible to ensure that Iran remains stable in future,” said Safarov. Ahead of the summit, the SCO Secretary General Zhang Deguang denied that Iran sponsored terrorism, stating: “If we have indisputable evidence that a country supports terrorism, we wouldn’t agree to let it be an observer.”

 

However, it is clear that recent Iranian intransigence has tested patience in Moscow, and it seems that full Iranian membership of the organization is unlikely in the near future. At the Valdai meeting, Putin stated that any future expansion of the SCO would need to be undertaken “with great caution.”

 

While the SCO is primarily concerned with geopolitical issues, there is much joint work aimed at sharing experience in domestic policies between the member countries. This is seen both in Russian and Chinese attempts to learn from each other, and in the two powers’ joint efforts to stamp their own marks on the development of the Central Asian polities, preventing the United States from attaining hegemony in the region. “These countries need Russia and China, because alone they can’t fend off the attacks of international terrorism, separatism and extremism,” said Shlyndov.

 

In its first five years, the SCO has grown in importance, from a loose grouping to a more solid alliance, improving Sino-Russian relations and giving these two countries influence in Central Asia. Where it goes in the next five years remains to be seen a gas OPEC, an Eastern NATO with military guarantees, or simply a convenient forum for the member countries to share experience in fighting what they see as the evils of terrorism and separatism, keeping in mind that SCO members’ view of these evils may differ from the position taken in the West.