Ferghana.news reports NATO is expected to close down its Liaison Office for Central Asia, which is located in the Uzbek capital Tashkent, next year.
The NATO Liaison Officer in Central Asia, Rosaria Puglisi, was quoted as saying that the office will be closed down in late March 2017.
This decision is the result of internal review of the budget and is not politically motivated, Ms. Puglisi was cited as saying. “There was not any pressure from Uzbekistan or any other nation working with our office,” the NATO Liaison Officer in Central Asia told Ferghana.news in an interview.
According to her, Central Asia has been and remains a strategic priority for NATO and partnership will continue, but starting from April, interaction will be managed directly from Brussels.
The NATO Liaison Officer in Central Asia has worked directly with Central Asian government authorities to maximize their use of NATO’s partnership instruments in support of the goals set out in their respective cooperation programs with the Alliance.
Supported by a small office, the Liaison Officer has also acted as NATO’s diplomatic focal point on the ground and facilitates NATO’s practical engagement with Central Asian partners in a variety of areas, including defense planning and review, support to NATO operations, defense education and training, civil emergency planning, cooperation on science and environmental issues, and public diplomacy.
Kazakhstan was the first Central Asian partner to host the NATO Liaison Officer. Since March 2013, the current NATO Liaison Officer has been based in Uzbekistan, where the office is accredited as a diplomatic mission.
NATO notes it continues to deepen cooperation with its partner countries in Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. It is part of NATO’s policy to reach out to strategically important regions whose security and stability are closely linked to wider Euro-Atlantic security. Each of the five countries has the potential to positively impact the future development of Afghanistan, where the Alliance remains deeply engaged.
All five Central Asian countries were early participants in the North Atlantic Cooperation Council – a forum for dialogue established by the Alliance in December 1991 as a first step in reaching out beyond the East-West divide to former Warsaw Pact members. This body was later replaced by the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council in 1997. Four out of the five countries quickly took advantage of the opportunities offered by the Partnership for Peace, joining this major program of practical bilateral cooperation shortly after its launch in 1994 (Tajikistan joined later, in 2002). At the Istanbul Summit of 2004, Allied leaders decided to make partnership with Central Asia, as well as the Caucasus, a priority for the Alliance.
