RICHARD WEITZ
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.
The Central Asia-Caucasus Institute for more