Tajik President Emomali Rahmon has left for the Russian city of St. Petersburg for participation in a summit meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) that is taking place there today.
According to the Tajik president’s official website, Presidential Adviser for International Ties Azamsho Sharifi and a number of other high-ranking Tajik state officials are accompany the president on his trip to St. Petersburg.
The CSTO Secretariat says that the leaders of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russian and Tajikistan will discuss their cooperation within the organization and important spheres of its activities.
The participants are expected to exchange views on key issues on the global and regional agenda namely combating terrorism and threats of extremism as well as illegal drugs and weapons trafficking.
Meanwhile, CSTO Secretary General Nikolai Bordyuzha considers that the world's hot spots, illegal drugs, terrorism, and confrontation between the West and Russia will affect the security of the CSTO member states in 2017.
"I see three categories of the issue, which we will face. The first is hot spots of either unresolved conflicts, like in Afghanistan, Karabakh, Donbass, Transnistria, and Syria. The second category includes traditional problems: illegal drugs, terrorism, emergency situations of technogenic character," the CSTO secretary-general was cited as saying by Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.
The third category, according to Bordyuzha, is the confrontation between the West and Russia and the lack of cooperation in the fight against terrorism.
The regional security organization was initially formed in 1992 for a five-year period by the members of the CIS Collective Security Treaty (CST) — Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, which were joined by Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Belarus the following year. A 1994 treaty reaffirmed the desire of all participating states to abstain from the use or threat of force, and prevented signatories from joining any “other military alliances or other groups of states” directed against members states. The CST was then extended for another five-year term in April 1999, and was signed by the presidents of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. In October 2002, the group was renamed as the CSTO. Uzbekistan that suspended its membership in 1999 returned to the CSTO again in 2006 after it came under international criticism for its brutal crackdown of antigovernment demonstrations in the eastern city of Andijon in May 2005. On June 28, 2012, Uzbekistan announced that it has suspended its membership of the CSTO, saying the organization ignores Uzbekistan and does not consider its views. The CSTO is currently an observer organization at the United Nations General Assembly.
