러시아ㆍ유라시아

※ 출처 : Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, the biweekly journal of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center

The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) has thus far played a surprisingly small role in the Kyrgyz crisis despite Kyrgyzstan’s being one of the core members of that institution. The CSTO has done little more than issue alarming warnings about developments in Kyrgyzstan, allowing the OSCE to play a lead role in mediating the power struggle. Yet, while circumstances in Kyrgyzstan did not allow the CSTO to make use of its recently formed Collective Operational Reaction Force, it would be incorrect to presume that the organization could not assume a more prominent role if a crisis erupt in another member state.

BACKGROUND: The crisis in Kyrgyzstan was one of the most acute in the CSTO’s recent history. Although the large-scale riots on April 6-7 were not protracted, looting and ethnic tensions followed in their aftermath. The CSTO member governments and the rest of the community were especially eager to see a resolution of the power struggle between the new Kyrgyz provisional administration and deposed President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who returned to his power base in Jalalabad in southern Kyrgyzstan soon after the riots. On April 9, CSTO Secretary General Nikolay Bordyuzha told the press that CSTO members were very concerned over the situation in Kyrgyzstan. “All CSTO participants are extremely worried about the events in Bishkek”, he remarked, “and believe in common sense of all parties of the conflict” to settle the dispute without further bloodshed. 

Since its formation in 2003, Russian officials have used the CSTO to legitimize their dominant military presence in Central Asia. For example, former Defense Minister Sergey Ivanov justified Russia’s establishment of an airbase in the city of Kant, Kyrgyzstan, which is offered rent-free by the Kyrgyz government, on the grounds that it provided air support for the CSTO region. Bordyuzha has acknowledged that the organization itself has no military bases, affirming they all belong to Russia or the other member governments.

At the organization’s October 2007 summit in Dushanbe, the member governments, following years of Russian prompting, agreed to establish a joint CSTO peacekeeping force. Bordyuzha said that CSTO peacekeepers could in theory deploy anywhere in the world, provided they received appropriate authorization by the United Nations. In practice, most CSTO governments want a force suitable primarily for deployment within the territory of an existing member state. According to CSTO agreements, such a scenario would not require the approval of the UN Security Council, where the U.S. and China have the right of veto. The CSTO secretariat must simply inform UN headquarters about its plans. At least some of the member governments might want CSTO soldiers to protect them against domestic challengers. They would presumably label their internal opponents as foreign-backed terrorists to legitimize the intervention of the CSTO, whose current mandate formally focuses on defense against external threats.

At a heads-of-state meeting in Moscow in June 2009, the attending presidents signed several documents that enlarged the size and legally authorized missions of the newly renamed Collective Operational Reaction Force (CORF). At a post-summit news conference, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that the CORF could be used to combat terrorists, counter narcotics trafficking and other cross-border crime, and “possibly” perform other missions such as settling regional conflicts. Although the CORF consists overwhelmingly of Russian military personnel, the presence of troops from several of the other CSTO militaries enhances the legitimacy of Russian military operations by giving them a multinational gloss. The large number of Russian units in the CORF also guarantees that the CSTO cannot conduct a collective military operation without Moscow’s active support.

IMPLICATIONS: During the acute phase of the crisis, when Kyrgyzstan looked like it might descend into civil war, the CSTO’s most visible response was to send a representative to Bishkek. In his capacity as chair of the CSTO Collective Security Council, Medvedev sent Deputy CSTO Secretary General Valery Semerikov on a week-long fact-finding mission to Kyrgyzstan following the April 6-7 riots. Semerikov became simply one more special envoy among the crowd of representatives from the various multinational institutions active in Kyrgyzstan. Upon their return to Moscow on April 16, Semerikov and his team merely submitted a report to Medvedev on what they found, with no visible follow-up.

In Kyrgyzstan, Semerikov joined Jan Kubis of the United Nations, Pierre Morel of the European Union, Adil Akhmetov of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and Zhanybek Karibzhanov, Special Envoy of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Kazakh Foreign Minister Kanat Saudabayev. Karibzhanov appears to have played the most important role in resolving the crisis through his on-site mediation efforts. After a tense week, Saudabayev announced on April 15 that Bakiyev was resigning from office and leaving Kyrgyzstan.

Alarmed at the collapse of a fellow autocrat and disparaging of the weakness of the CSTO response, Alexander Lukashenko, president of member Belarus, subsequently threatened to skip the upcoming May 8 informal CSTO heads-of-state summit in Moscow. He expressed exacerbation at Russia’s alleged failure to pay rent for its military bases in CSTO members like Belarus and Kyrgyzstan as well as at the institution’s failure to intervene in Kyrgyzstan to defend one of its member governments. “What sort of organization is this, if there is bloodshed in one of our member states and an anti-constitutional coup d'état takes place, and this body keeps silent?” In the end, Lukashenko attended the May 8 informal summit that occurred at Medvedev’s presidential residence in Gorki, a city near Moscow. The other participants were Medvedev, Bordyuzha, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rakhmon, and Uzbekistan’s Prime Minister Shavkat Mirzieyev. Russian presidential aide Sergei Prikhodko said Kyrgyzstan could not participate since it had yet to form a constitutional government.

In his opening address to the CSTO summit, Medvedev confirmed the impact of the events in Kyrgyzstan on the organization: “We had originally planned to have our meeting on a different date, but in light of certain requests by my colleagues, as well as a number of major events – I mean the events in Kyrgyzstan – we changed the schedule, the agenda, and naturally we will discuss this question too”. Medvedev noted that, while the CSTO members had considered the crisis in their bilateral talks, “Today we have the opportunity to discuss it at the presidential level and for the Organization to make a consolidated statement which outlines possible cooperation prospects in light of what is happening in Kyrgyzstan.”

In a statement distributed after the summit, the CSTO leaders called the regime change in Kyrgyzstan unconstitutional and urged the new Kyrgyz administration to restore constitutional legality to the country: “We address the people of Kyrgyzstan and state the necessity of the earliest peaceful return to the legal framework of socio-political life of the country, its normalization, non-admission of violence, restoration of the legal order, ensuring human rights and freedoms, as well as legitimization of power institutions.” The CSTO did promise to render Kyrgyzstan collective humanitarian assistance and promote "constructive cooperation with other countries and international organizations along these lines.” Bordyuzha singled out Kazakhstan’s assistance to its stricken neighbor: “Kazakhstan has undertaken specific efforts in the OSCE area as the chairman in this organization and in the CSTO area to provide stability in Kyrgyzstan”. A week later, Bordyuzha told a Moscow news conference that the CSTO did not consider it necessary to send peacekeepers to Kyrgyzstan and would leave it to the Kyrgyz government to handle the crisis.

CONCLUSIONS: The official reason for the CSTO’s limited role in the Kyrgyz crisis was that the situation involved an internal political crisis in a member country rather than an act of foreign aggression requiring a collective response. Bordyuzha said that “our stance is that the current situation is purely a domestic affair of Kyrgyzstan”. Yet, there is no guarantee that the organization might not respond more vigorously in a future domestic upheaval in a neighboring country. Bakiyev’s removal was not unwelcome in Moscow, and Russian policy makers were happy to let its ally Kazakhstan, also a CSTO member and fortuitously the current chairman of the OSCE, take the lead role in resolving the immediate crisis. Bordyuzha has since stated that the organization can in principle use its CORF in any CSTO member state “with or without a UN mandate, at any time”. In the Kyrgyz case, the Moscow-led CSTO did not behave as a modern version of the Warsaw Pact and send Russian tanks into Bishkek under its auspices in the same way as the Moscow-led Warsaw Treaty Organization legitimized the Soviet military interventions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. But it is not too difficult imagining the CSTO might do so in the future under different circumstances.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Richard Weitz is Director of Hudson Institute’s Center for Political-Military Analysis and the author, among other works, of Kazakhstan and the New International Politics of Eurasia (Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, 2008).