By empty (6/22/2005 issue of the CACI Analyst)

“The Russian peacekeeping forces should stay in Abkhazia until the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict is completely settled,” Sergei Bagapsh, the head of the unrecognised republic of Abkhazia, told a news conference in Sukhumi on Wednesday. Even though the peacekeepers are formally called ”the Collective peacekeeping forces of the CIS”, it is Russia alone that has been bearing the burden of the peacekeeping operation all these eleven years, Bagapsh said. He declared against the replacement of the Russian peacekeepers with any other forces.

By empty (6/22/2005 issue of the CACI Analyst)

The Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development (KFAED) will provide a $21 million loan to electrify the 115-kilometer railway linking Tashkent and Angren. The agreement was signed during a visit to Uzbekistan by Hisham Al-Waqayan, KFAED\'s deputy director for operations and distribution. In the course of his visit, Al-Waqayan met with Uzbek Finance Minister Saidahmad Rahimov and Uzbek railways head Ochilboy Ramatov.

By empty (6/21/2005 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian told journalists in Yerevan on 20 June that his talks three days earlier in Paris with his Azerbaijani counterpart Elmar Mammadyarov on approaches to resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict were \"positive\" and \"constructive,\" RFE/RL\'s Armenian Service reported. At the same time, Oskanian admitted that he and Mammadyarov failed to build on the \"small step forward\" achieved one month earlier in Warsaw by the two countries\' presidents. Oskanian told journalists last week that he hoped it would prove possible in Paris to formalize in a written text the agreements reached in Warsaw.