On July 9 the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s (SCO) Ministers of Foreign Affairs convened in Bishkek to discuss the agenda for the upcoming summit. The summit will collect the presidents of nine Eurasian countries in Bishkek and mark an unprecedented geopolitical development in the Central Asian region. Today, the SCO is quickly gaining international weight, aiming to eventually become an Asian alternative to NATO. In a two-year period it has risen from a five member state organization into an international institution that provides a platform for additional countries including Iran, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. It is therefore turning into a more unfamiliar and unpredictable organization for the West.

BACKGROUND: At the July 9 meeting, the foreign ministers of the SCO’s member states – China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – agreed to further strengthen cooperation within the organization and focus on security and energy cooperation. As they have unanimously agreed, the SCO must develop its own energy strategy. While Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Endan Karabayev assessed the July 9 meeting as a successful step towards strengthening the SCO, his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov expressed confidence in the upcoming summit.

In total, the following countries will be represented at the summit in Bishkek either by presidents or foreign ministers: Afghanistan, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Turkmen president Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov will attend the summit on the observer and distinguished guest status, respectively. Considering Ashgabat’s strengthening relations with Moscow, Turkmenistan is the next probable member of the SCO. Especially Russia might be interested in having Turkmenistan under the SCO’s wing to incorporate it in the organization’s energy strategy. Last year, the SCO announced a moratorium on further expansion, arguably to withhold the joining of Iran and to avoid open confrontation with the U.S. Nevertheless, Turkmenistan is likely to be welcomed by both the SCO’s weaker and stronger actors. For the SCO, this would be a crucial stage in its evolution as it is taking a large step forward in increasing its geopolitical weight.

Currently the SCO is spending the bulk of its funds on security, especially on organizing joint military exercises. This August the SCO will stage military exercises in Russia’s Povolzhsk-Uralsk military district that will involve more than 6,300 troops, mostly Chinese and Russian.

Two months before the summit, U.S., Russian and Chinese top government officials all traveled to Kyrgyzstan. In early June, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Assistant Secretary of State for Central and South Asia Richard Boucher visited Bishkek to secure the status of the U.S. military base. Russian officials, including Lavrov, paid their visits as well.

Since the early 2000s, China has been actively developing bilateral energy agreements with Kazakhstan, Russia and Tajikistan. Chinese bilateral agreements have often been presented as multilateral in nature as they were achieved within the SCO framework. The SCO fostered the resolution of contested border areas between China on the one hand and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan on the other. The organization also allowed for increasing transparency of border control regimes. However, Kazakhstan’s border demarcation with Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Russia remain incomplete. This shows that the SCO was useful primarily for solving border issues between China and its immediate members, and not between all member states. Indeed, the SCO’s weaker members, such as Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, are interested in stronger multilateralism to avoid political pressure from the SCO’s most powerful members.

IMPLICATIONS: For the Kyrgyz government, the summit constitutes a show of serious support from its powerful neighbors. The successful organization of the SCO summit is an imperative for the current Kyrgyz leadership. President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s popularity at home is at rock bottom, and he will need external support before the next presidential election. Indeed, shortly after being elected president, he resorted to an explicitly pro-Russian foreign policy. Since the transfer of power in March 2005, Kyrgyzstan has become a convenient arena for international competition between its northern, eastern and western partners. Upon taking over the chairmanship of the SCO a year ago, the Kyrgyz government has made a series of moves to curb the presence of the U.S. military on its territory. In the past year, the president and government have shown the SCO members that Kyrgyzstan is currently unhappy with the U.S. military presence on its territory. The summit represents an opportunity for SCO participants to collectively voice anti-American attitudes. But Kyrgyzstan in fact appears more interested in increasing its cooperation with the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) ahead of the SCO. This year, Kyrgyzstan will take up the CSTO chairmanship and seems set to continue its steadfast pro-Russian foreign policy.

Today, Kyrgyzstan is perhaps the weakest member of both the SCO and CSTO. Within the SCO, for instance, Kyrgyzstan enjoys only minute benefits, lacking long-term visions about its role and surplus from membership. As one civil servant in Bishkek told this author, Kyrgyzstan’s current political leadership, similar to its predecessor, is experiencing a considerable lack of domestic legitimacy and therefore is unable to succinctly formulate a set of national interests to be presented within the SCO framework. Even Tajikistan, having made considerable progress among other in developing its hydro-electricity sector in the past two years, is able to better promote its national interests within the organization than Kyrgyzstan is – although Tajikistan is only emerging from the devastation of its civil war in the 1990s. “The vertical structure of state power in Tajikistan allows greater efficiency of public and economic institutions”, says one Kyrgyz expert. Kyrgyzstan, in contrast, has been struggling with reforming its energy sector in the past decade and no visible improvement was made either under former president Askar Akayev or under Bakiyev’s rule.

Many Bishkek residents see the summit as a positive development that considerably increases the country’s geopolitical importance. As one public employee comments from Bishkek, “The summit is important both for the organization itself and Kyrgyzstan”. The entire government apparatus is mobilized for the summit’s preparations. A month ahead of the summit, central Bishkek is transforming into a city with better roads, new hotels and fountains. Local residents are urged to repaint their fences and plant trees. By enhancing the city’s appearance before the distinguished guests, the Kyrgyz government is trying to parade its loyalty to the organization. Early this year the Kyrgyz government was unsure if it was in fact able to bear all the financial costs of organizing the summit. But China came to its rescue with $2 million for the summit’s organization. The Kyrgyz government is also seeking all available funding through increasing various taxes and creating special SCO summit funds. According to one Bishkek entrepreneur, even the Bishkek road police is now collecting additional fines in order to gather funds for the summit.

CONCLUSIONS: The August SCO summit is likely to be a mostly symbolic event that will boast the organization’s international importance by collecting leaders of Eurasia’s nine states. The organization’s key agreements on security, energy, and political issues have been discussed among its member states during weeks preceding the summit. As it stands today, it is the biggest Eurasian organization that seeks to increase its leverage through military exchange and energy cooperation. Turkmenistan and Iran’s participation at as summit instantly increase the SCO’s potential membership pool. The agreement to create an energy strategy points at the SCO members’ wish to consolidate in the economic and political areas. The summit, as well as Kyrgyzstan’s future chairmanship of the CSTO, will allow China and Russia further avenues to restrain the West’s role in the country as well as in Central Asia as a whole. 

AUTHOR’S BIO: Dr. Erica Marat is a Research Fellow with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program (www.silkroadstudies.org).