Tweet
ARMENIA INVITES KAZAKHSTAN ON OVER FOR A CHAT
EurasiaNet.org
Oct 24 2013
October 24, 2013 - 10:31am, by Giorgi Lomsadze
Armenia and Kazakhstan do not have much in common other than their
Soviet Union past and Eurasian-Union future. So, if Kazakh President
Nursultan Nazarbayev accepts a recent invite to visit Armenia, the two
countries are likely to talk about their new, Moscow-led customs club.
Granted, when Armenia's new ambassador to Kazakhstan, Ara Saakian,
conveyed Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan's invitation, he put it
in terms of relying on Kazakhstan, as a member of the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), to take a balanced
position in the OSCE-led attempts to resolve the Armenian-Azerbaijani
conflict over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Yet Kazakhstan, like anyone else in the post-Soviet world, is unlikely
to take any dramatic step on the dispute, lest it angers one of its
across-the-Caspian Sea neighbors. Nazarbayev's visit, therefore,
is not expected to mark any changes in the Karabakh status quo.
But what needs some discussion is the membership rules in the Eurasian
Union that Moscow hopes will be a new and better USSR. Nazarbayev has
long been a Eurasian Union enthusiast and is pushing for his views
about formation of a supranational body to govern the alliance. The
current bureaucracy of the Eurasian Union is led by Russian officials,
which some Kazakh experts believe shows who will be calling the shots
in the Union.
The club is still hiring, but so far has just five committed members:
Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Belarus. The five have yet to
fine-tune the rules of engagement and make sure that their interests
are reflected to some degree in the final decision-making mechanism.
For many in Armenia, where grassroots opposition to the Union runs
strong, that may ultimately prove key.
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/67674
From: A. Papazian
EurasiaNet.org
Oct 24 2013
October 24, 2013 - 10:31am, by Giorgi Lomsadze
Armenia and Kazakhstan do not have much in common other than their
Soviet Union past and Eurasian-Union future. So, if Kazakh President
Nursultan Nazarbayev accepts a recent invite to visit Armenia, the two
countries are likely to talk about their new, Moscow-led customs club.
Granted, when Armenia's new ambassador to Kazakhstan, Ara Saakian,
conveyed Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan's invitation, he put it
in terms of relying on Kazakhstan, as a member of the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), to take a balanced
position in the OSCE-led attempts to resolve the Armenian-Azerbaijani
conflict over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Yet Kazakhstan, like anyone else in the post-Soviet world, is unlikely
to take any dramatic step on the dispute, lest it angers one of its
across-the-Caspian Sea neighbors. Nazarbayev's visit, therefore,
is not expected to mark any changes in the Karabakh status quo.
But what needs some discussion is the membership rules in the Eurasian
Union that Moscow hopes will be a new and better USSR. Nazarbayev has
long been a Eurasian Union enthusiast and is pushing for his views
about formation of a supranational body to govern the alliance. The
current bureaucracy of the Eurasian Union is led by Russian officials,
which some Kazakh experts believe shows who will be calling the shots
in the Union.
The club is still hiring, but so far has just five committed members:
Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Belarus. The five have yet to
fine-tune the rules of engagement and make sure that their interests
are reflected to some degree in the final decision-making mechanism.
For many in Armenia, where grassroots opposition to the Union runs
strong, that may ultimately prove key.
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/67674
From: A. Papazian