AARE, Sweden - NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer on Wednesday called on the international community to increase pressure on Uzbek President Islam Karimov to accept an international probe into the country's deadly clashes on May 13.
"We'll have to put up the pressure now" on the authorities in Tashkent, de Hoop Scheffer told reporters at a Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council Security Forum meeting in the central Swedish town of Aare.
"The government in Uzbekistan, President Karimov really should accept the international inquiry (...) They owe that to the international community," he added, criticizing Tashkent for not sending any representatives to the Aare meeting.
Uzbekistan is a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace, which was created in 1994 to among other things enable defense cooperation with former Soviet republics.
"Unfortunately, the Uzbek government decided not to be here today," de Hoop Scheffer said, adding that establishing any contact with Tashkent had proved a challenge.
He said that NATO would postpone two seminars it had planned in the Uzbek capital, but did not reveal how the organization would react if Uzbekistan continued to block an international investigation into the violence.
NATO on Tuesday harshly criticized "the reported use of excessive and disproportionate force by the Uzbek security forces" against demonstrators in eastern Uzbekistan on May 13, supporting a United Nations call for an international probe.
Witnesses, human rights groups and opposition activists claim a military crackdown resulted in the deaths of as many as 1,000 people in Andijan and neighboring towns.
The United Nations said Friday that Karimov, who claims force was used as an emergency response to an attempt to overthrow the government, had rejected the calls for an independent investigation in a telephone conversation with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Moscow meanwhile said it did not support the calls for a probe into the Uzbek violence.
"We believe that to put forward in the form of an ultimatum a demand for an international independent investigation is incorrect and unjust," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Chizhov told news agency ITAR-TASS on the sidelines of the Aare conference.
"Partnership suggests trust between partners (and) if one partner says it will fully investigate an event on its own, one must respect that choice," he added.
Hundreds of delegates from NATO's 26 member countries and the alliance's 21 partner countries in the Partnership for Peace programme gathered for the conference in Aare on Tuesday evening and talks were scheduled to wrap up late Wednesday.
Although no decisions were to be made at the conference, ministers, diplomats, parliamentarians and representatives from non-governmental organizations sat down together to discuss NATO's relations with other organisations and its role in the Balkans and other regions.
"It is obvious to me that the breadth and diversity of these challenges can only be addressed properly if we use a broad concept of security, a concept that includes political, military, economical and social elements," de Hoop Scheffer said.
"That is why we need to connect NATO and the EU in entirely new ways. We need a truly strategic partnership" so that the two organizations would not end up competing against each other, he added.
NATO's relationship to the EU became the subject of a heated exchange between US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns and the French president of NATO's Parliamentary Assembly Pierre Lellouche, who has called for more balanced transatlantic relations.
"Let's get it straight: NATO does the heavy military operations, the EU does" peacekeeping tasks, Burns said, insisting that if the EU is "seeking a competitive relationship, you're going to find it and you're not going to be happy."
"The US and the EU should agree on that division of labor," he added, reviving an old quarrel with Paris which Washington accuses of wanting to strengthen the EU at NATO's expense.
05/25/2005 15:53 GMT