Medvedev to Travel to Ashgabat; Turkmen Dissidents Denied Entry to OSCE Meeting
After meeting with the leaders of France and Germany, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is heading to Ashgabat October 22 to meet with Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. His trip will come right after a state visit from Uzbek President Islam Karimov scheduled for October 20-21, whose travel to Turkmenistan was postponed some weeks ago despite preparations for a friendship festival. According to a report from Russia's Nezavisimaya gazeta, Medvedev, Berdymukhamedov and Karimov are supposed to meet on October 23 to discuss the Turkmen leader's plan for a Central Asian and Caspian basin security summit.
Medvedev is likely going to attempt once again to try to fix the price of gas in an agreement that has lagged since the pipe explosion on a Turkmen pipeline last April , followed by mutual recriminations and ultimately a reduction in purchases from a one-time high of more than 50 billion cubic meters to only 10 bcm so far this year -- even less than Iran. A "competent" source of Nezavisimaya gazeta says no agreement will be signed, but the Russian president's visit is still about trying to preserve influence over energy policy in Turkmenistan. The agenda is still being coordinated, but the leaders are also likely to talk about the shipping routes from Turkmenbashi to Astrakhan and Mkhachkala.
But the Russian leader has more fish to fry as the three Eurasian leaders will be talking about some kind of new or different security arrangement. Turkmenistan, which prides itself on its neutrality, has been trying to get international support for its concept of a "mechanism" for pipeline security. This started out as a very general UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolution, but has evolved into a proposal for a permanent body under UN auspices that would address threats to pipelines.
Before UNGA in September, Turkmenistan organized a meeting of stakeholders, which included the major oil companies, EU and US. Most immediately the proposal seems to relate to the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) line, where Pakistan and India have now talked openly about the need to build the pipeline underground, and pay local "communities" (read: warlords) to keep it safe. Also in the background of these discussions is Turkmenistan's need to "diversify" its options, a reference to needing -- like the EU -- to escape from Russian dominion of its routes to foreign markets.
Now the Kremlin may be wanting in on these discussions and it will be interesting to see what results. There's a lot of brand confusion with security organizations these days in the Eurasian space -- particularly when it comes to human security. Western powers have tried to some extent to follow the original Helsinki principles of integrating state security progress with human rights compliance, but have confronted both Eurasian recalitrance and regression and the exigencies of their own geopolitical interests.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is struggling on all fronts. In recent years, with Kazakhstan's help, Russia has steadily undermined the human rights and conflict monitoring aspects of the organization and complained about a lack of attention to "hard" security, its borders and internal order. Turkmenistan has defied OSCE by boycotting the human rights Review Conference, and is now grandstanding further, telling Kazakhstan, the current OSCE chair-in-office, that if it permits Turkmen dissidents to attend meetings, Ashgabat will not take part in the OSCE summit December 1-2 in Astana.
Meanwhile, despite Western diplomatic protest at the first part of the review conference in Warsaw, today the OSCE secretariat did not register Farid Tuhbatullin, the head of the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights and another staff person, Lamija Muzurovic at this week's OSCE meeting in Vienna. The U.S. and other delegations reportedly planned to protest. Nurmuhammet Hanamov, founder of the Republican Party, an exile group, was also not admitted on the grounds that he allegedly advocated or planned violence. Both Tuhbatullin and Hanamov have been granted political asylum in Austria, and Turkmenistan's claims appear invalid.
As diplomats become preoccupied with registration modalities, the larger OSCE issues loom. The elephant in the room in Vienna, not mentioned in a welter of single-issue agenda items, is the inability of OSCE to deploy its Police Advisory Group in southern Kyrgyzstan, and the delay in an international fact-finding mission endorsed by the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly -- despite not only the backing of Western capitals but Tashkent as well. The 52 unarmed advisors would not be authorized to disarm combatants, but the theory is that their presence might compel the inactive Kyrgyz police to function, instead of idly standing by while angry mobs have harmed lawyers and defendants in court trials related to the June violence.
The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) did not respond to the call of interim Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbayeva in June to help quell pogroms in southern Kyrgyzstan. The Russian-led CSTO said it was not mandated to engage in crowd control in domestic situations. At a recent CSTO summit in Yerevan in which peace-keeping was discussed, this concept seemed to be undergoing revision, but so far the CSTO's stabilizing affordances haven't been visible in Osh. To be sure, recently the CSTO moved 40 soldiers from the north to the south of Kyrgyzstan, and Russia continues to complain about narcotics flows in the region.
The Chinese-led SCO, which used to be mainly involved in providing large development loans to Central Asians is now aspiring to a greater security role as witnessed with joint military excersizes with Kazakhstan.
So many security organizations with so many acronyms -- and yet no peace for the people of Osh -- or for that matter people in other conflict zones where OSCE has still failed to score successes. There's also insecurity for some people, like the exiled activists of Turkmenistan, from their own state. A test for the sincerity of the Kazakh chair of the OSCE summit in Astana will be whether such dissidents will be given visas and allowed to participate in parallel events, and also whether the security agenda includes people as well as states.
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