Regional Pact Could Act on Future Kyrgyz Unrest

Last year’s unrest in Kyrgyzstan has forced the major regional security pact to rethink its mission.

The Collective Security Treaty Organisation, CSTO, is supposed to defend its members when they face major external security threats or terrorism.

But this meant it had no mandate to step in during the April 2010 domestic uprising that ended the rule of President Kurmanbek Bakiev. And when President Roza Otunbaeva asked the CSTO to send in troops to halt the ethnic violence that scarred the south of the country in June, the Moscow-led bloc turned her down.

In December, leaders of the CSTO states rewrote the bloc’s founding charter to allow the deployment of forces in the event of internal disturbances in a member state, not just external military threats.

Miroslav Niazov, formerly head of Kyrgyzstan’s national security council, opposes any change to the CSTO’s mandate. If a country cannot deal with its own domestic troubles and has to call in help from outside, he says, it loses its sovereignty.

Other experts are divided on whether a CSTO force deployment in southern Kyrgyzstan last summer would have prevented much of the bloodshed, or aggravated the situation. Nor is it clear whether the new mandate means the CSTO would actually intervene if Kyrgyzstan suffered further serious unrest. All member states have to agree unanimously that such a deployment is necessary.

The audio programme, in Russian and Kyrgyz, went out on national radio stations in Kyrgyzstan, as part of IWPR project work funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.