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Rakhmonov: "Shanghai Five" Vital for Regional Stability, Security
Tajik President Emomali Rakhmonov said Monday that the "Shanghai Five" is a most significant regional organization for maintaining the stability and security in the Asia-Pacific area.
"I'm satisfied with the content and development of the ' Shanghai Five' process, which is very important for strengthening trust in the military field, stability and security not only in the region, but also in the whole world," Rakhmonov told major Chinese mass media, ahead of the sixth "Shanghai Five" summit to be held in Shanghai on Thursday and Friday.
"This process is coming back to Shanghai with all the prerequisites for transformation into an organization for cooperation, which reflects the changing content of the activity of this regional structure," he said.
To prove his point, Rakhmonov noted an important feature of the "Shanghai Five" forum -- the common position of the member-states on the maintenance of strategic stability and global balance in the multi-polar world, their readiness to create a zone free of nuclear weapons in Central Asia.
The "Shanghai Five" is not limited only to border and trans- border cooperation, but also covers "the fight against such security threats as international terrorism, extremism, national separatism, organized crime and drug trafficking," the president said.
Rakhmonov emphasized that "multilateral economic cooperation is becoming increasingly important" in the organization.
The creation of a Shanghai Five organization for cooperation, which is "open to other states," will make it possible to "enter a qualitatively new level of relations inside the group," he predicted.
The "Shanghai Five" forum, uniting China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, was founded in April 1996 in Shanghai.
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