ASTANA - Leaders of a six-nation security bloc led by Beijing and Moscow called for a deadline to be set for the withdrawal of US forces from bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, at a summit here Tuesday.
The presidents of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which comprises Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and China, signed a declaration calling for deadlines to be set on the closure of airbases used by US forces in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
"Considering that the active phase of the military anti-terrorist operation in Afghanistan has finished, member states... consider it essential that the relevant participants in the anti-terrorist coalition set deadlines on the temporary use" of bases in the SCO area, the declaration read.
The declaration also included a call for "non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states," seemingly a swipe at growing Western influence in Central Asia, which Moscow has long considered its sphere of influence.
"This declaration calls for templates and standards not to be imposed by force, or by the threat of force," Russian President Vladimir Putin said.
"There should be no place for interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states," Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev told the summit.
The SCO summit marks the first such gathering since popular protests toppled Askar Akayev's regime in Kyrgyzstan in March and a military crackdown in Uzbekistan in May in which hundreds of people are feared to have died.
The leaders' declaration reflects repeated complaints by leaders such as Uzbek President Islam Karimov who have suggested that the West was behind uprisings in three former Soviet republics in the last two years -- Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.
Karimov on Tuesday thanked the leaders of Russia and China for recent support, while saying that outside forces were threatening to "hijack stability and impose their model of development" on Central Asia.
The demand for deadlines on the closure of the bases comes despite a recent assurance made by Kyrgyz interim President Kurmanbek Bakiyev that his country would honor existing agreements on maintaining foreign bases in the country.
It reflects ongoing rivalry between Washington and Moscow over their countries' respective roles in the former Soviet Union, as the United States has been pressuring Russia to withdraw leftover bases from Georgia.
With no word on Russian military bases located in both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, Tuesday's meeting confirmed the impression of close ties between Putin and the Kyrgyz interim leader Bakiyev, who is tipped to win a presidential poll on Sunday.
"I hope the outcome of the election results in a normalization of the situation," Putin said, referring to recent unrest in Kyrgyzstan. "We are ready to maintain a special friendly relationship with the Kyrgyz people."
Tuesday's declaration was also notable for a commitment by the SCO members not to harbor persons sought by each other's security forces.
This appeared to fly in the face of recent Western criticism of Kyrgyzstan for handing back to Uzbek authorities four people who fled the violence in eastern Uzbekistan in May.
Human rights groups have accused the Shanghai group of using the perceived threat of extremism as an excuse to crack down on the political opposition and other dissenters.
Criticism has mounted since the events in Uzbekistan in May, in which human rights groups have said Uzbek troops killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in the eastern city of Andijan.
Uzbek authorities have cut back flights in and out of the US airbase in southern Uzbekistan following calls by Washington for an independent inquiry into the Andijan violence.
The two main coalition bases, one at Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan, the other at Manas in Kyrgyzstan, have each been used to support US-led operations in Afghanistan since 2001.
Germany also has a few hundred military personnel, most of them engineering and medical staff, at a separate base in Uzbekistan, Termez, while a few hundred French forces work from Tajikistan's main airport in Dushanbe.
07/05/2005 16:35 GMT