Eurasia News Week in Review - February 14, 2014

02/14/14
Daniel Resnick
Central Eurasia
U.S. Policy, Military, U.N. Peacekeeping, Security, Human Rights

This week a State Department spokesperson welcomed the renewal of a waiver permitting security assistance to Uzbekistan, while Georgia’s Defense Minister announced the U.S. intends to fund Georgia’s participation in the NATO Response Force. Below is a roundup of these stories and some of the other top articles and news highlights from around Central Eurasia over the last week:

Top stories from Central Asia and the South Caucasus:

  • NATO’s Military Committee, the alliance’s main military source of advice to its civilian decision makers, made its first visit to Georgia this week. The Military Committee met with many of Georgia’s top civilian and military officials, and during the visit Georgian Defense Minister Irakli Alasania made a number of noteworthy statements. On Monday, Alasania stated Georgia would likely receive tools for closer cooperation with NATO at the next NATO summit in September, even if these tools do not include the Membership Action Plan Georgia desires. And on Wednesday, Trend News Agency reported that Alasania said the United States would fund Georgia’s participation in NATO’s Response Force starting in 2015, though no additional details were available regarding this plan. More information about the visit and the importance of NATO to Georgia can be found on Civil.ge, Trend, and the Bug Pit.
  • Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Dumont met with officials from Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Defense on Monday as part of the five-year military cooperation plan between the countries. A number of developments were announced following the meetings, including Kazakhstan’s goal to participate in a United Nations peacekeeping mission in the near future and its intentions to send four officers to study at U.S. military academies this year. While Kazakh officials thanked the U.S. for its assistance in improving Kazakhstan’s peacekeeping capabilities, some analysts have noted numerous delays with the formation of Kazakhstan’s peacekeeping brigade.
  • A U.S. State Department spokesperson emphasized the importance of a recently reauthorized security assistance waiver to Uzbekistan in a statement to blogger and analyst Joshua Kucera. The spokesperson said:

This waiver will allow the United States to provide assistance to the central government of Uzbekistan, including equipment to enhance Uzbekistan's ability to combat transnational and terrorist threats. . . . Enhancing Uzbekistan's defensive capacity improves the security of the U.S. supply transit system to Afghanistan and our ability to support our troops there.

Kucera noted, however, that Uzbekistan’s role in facilitating the transit of coalition equipment and troops out of Afghanistan has diminished recently, while the country’s human rights record remains “abysmal.”

 

Quick hits from Central Asia and the South Caucasus:

  • Commander of the U.S. Army Central Command (ARCENT), Lieutenant General James Terry, met with U.S. and Tajik officials in Tajikistan on Tuesday. The officials discussed military cooperation between the countries, and more specifically, ARCENT’s relationship with Tajikistan’s Ministry of Defense. This was the second visit to Tajikistan by a senior U.S. military official in the past month.
  • Joshua Kucera reported that different functions of the Manas Transit Center in Kyrgyzstan continue to be shut down, as the U.S. works to close the base by the summer.
  • The mayor of Almaty became the latest Kazakh official to criticize the Central Reference Laboratory (CRL) being built in the city with U.S. Defense Department funding, saying it should have been constructed elsewhere in the country. Others have feared the CRL would be used to develop biological weapons, a claim the director of Kazakhstan’s scientific center has staunchly denied. Similar conspiracy claims have surrounded other Pentagon-financed CRLs in Eurasia.
  • The UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, traveled to Tajikistan this week to discuss Tajikistan’s adherence to international conventions on torture and human rights. Mendez said Tajikistan “still needed to ‘bridge the gap between policies and reality’ when it comes to eliminating torture in the country.”
  • Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili met with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev on Wednesday, and each side expressed support for the other’s territorial integrity struggles. During the visit officials also worked on demarcating the border between the two countries.
  • Armenia’s First Deputy Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan discussed Armenia’s peacekeeping capabilities in an interview with Mediamax, explaining Armenia’s upcoming peacekeeping roles in Afghanistan and Lebanon.